Into The Abyss
What is your book about?
Into the Abyss is the story of my journey through Siberia. I went and did a trek of 1,000 kilometers through the far eastern end of Siberia, it's called the Russian Far East, in fact. I had to train a dog team of ten dogs, who didn't really want to go with me, partly because they knew I wasn't a local. They knew I was from Shepherd's Bush. Well, they could sense, at least, that I didn't really belong out there. And it turned out to be the worst winter in living memory. So it became a story really of adaptation, of how I had to cope in this environment and set about my final objective, which was to cross the Bering Strait, a 50-mile bit of frozen sea at the end of a sort of training session. So it's on the one hand, a superficial story of a journey, one man's attempt to master a dog team and to cross the Bering Strait at the end of this long trek. But on the other hand, it's also my personal investigation into survival. How do any of us cope when up against it? I've always been fascinated by survival, because I've had a lot of near death-incidents, I've almost died I suppose about six times. So my life, I thought, ooh, I've had all these terrible times and I ought to look back and investigate further about what keeps people going, and nowhere is there a better place in the world than Siberia. Because if you're going to send someone to somewhere nasty on the planet, you think Siberia is the place. People are sentenced to Siberia, in the gulags and so on. So I thought it would be great to see how people who live naturally in this place, the Chukchis and the Inuit, how do they cope. So that was my personal motive, to understand about survival.
Where can I get it?
It's out now in all good book shops, "Into The Abyss" is in hardback and its also in paperback and yeah, it should be readily available, plus Amazon.
Why did you write your first book?
I think because I needed somewhere to put this extraordinary experience I'd had as a little boy who wanted to become an explorer. And finally, I set about doing it. I did a journey across the Amazon, up in the Northeast through the forest, including a 600 mile trek through virgin forest. So it's a big feat in a way, but it wasn't a feat that I pulled off by myself. I had a lot of support from just indigenous people, all sorts of local people. And I ended up struggling to survive towards the end. I was alone for weeks in the forest. So I don't know exactly how long. But it was very, very difficult. I had two sorts of malaria and barely got out of the forest alive. So it's very difficult to carry on a normal life, really. And I just thought I've got to just set this down. I decided to sit down and write the story of this journey. It became a pattern, I went out on these expeditions, always going alone and learning from local people. I'm finding myself with this sort of experience in my head that I've felt…it was quite cathartic to release. So I'd work through the experience on paper, then move on to the next adventure. But only once I got it down, once I got it out of my system. I suppose that also as time went by, I got older, I also wanted to share more and more, I became less selfish and my motive for going became more and more that I should record things on this all and share them.
How many books have you written?
I've written ten books, including one that was edited by me, it was an anthology of exploration. I kind of got more interested in it and wanted to know what everyone else was doing out there. So I compiled the Favorable Book of Exploration, which was a great, chunky thing. But it was a lovely thing to have written. It was cool, getting to edit it.
