May 16, 2008
My sophomore year in college I saw a show that changed my life. To this day, I consider it to be one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen. This show was Adventure Bound with Alby Mangels.
Alby was, and still is I suppose, an Australian with curly blonde hair and a penchant for wearing daisy duke shorts (the show was filmed during the 70s and 80s). The show was basically him and a friend filming themselves on various adventures around the world as they undertook what he called, ‘world safaris’. They started in the Aussie outback and then made it to South America and Africa. His adventures included being gored by a wild boar, flying a helicopter loaded with Rebels in the DRC who fired at enemy targets en route, sailing the high seas, canoeing up to African elephants, a bad car wreck in South America in which his friend suffered terrible injuries, and many other tales of interest. He was completely cavalier when it came to his travels and ended up partnering up with a sundry of locals and travelers of dubious character in friendships and even business deals. Only at the end of his adventures when he purchased a nice catamaran sail boat did he ever have a mode of transportation, be it a car, airplane, helicopter, or boat, that wasn’t inches away from collapsing. Even more impressive than his ability to pilot all those vehicles was his ability to jimmy-rig them every time they broke down. And through all his trials and tribulations he was always jovial and continued his brazen approach toward adventure undaunted. Of course, I was also impressed by how he was typically joined by various hot women on his journeys.
I could go on and on, but the point is I loved every minute of this show and it sort of inspired my own approach to world travel. I enjoyed the show so much that I ignored the instances of, shall we say, oddity. For instance, while he was careening out of control in his truck toward a cliff the camera cut to a shot of his feet slamming on the brakes, then cut back to the car coming to a stop mere feet from the precipice. Now how did this sequence occur? Did they actually almost go off a cliff and then splice in footage of him hitting the brakes afterwards? Or did they manufacture the whole thing? There are other times when a critic could question whether or not the show was merely leaning toward reality or sliding towards a fictionalization of realistic situations.
About a year ago I found a similar show called Man vs Wild, starring Bear Grylls. Basically Bear just drops into some harsh environment and then, followed by a camera crew, shows the viewer how to get out alive with only a flint, some water, and a knife. It’s highly entertaining and my special lady friend and I were always quick to flip to it when it was on. However, after the initially coolness of the show’s premise wore off the awe with which I looked at Bear began to fade. My special lady friend and I ended up openly questioned how legitimate the show was. ‘Does he really need to repel down that waterfall, it looks like he could go around?’
Then the truth came out. Bear admitted to eating five course meals with the crew at their base camp, the crew helped him fish and build shelters, he used local guides to point him the right direction, animals are left by locals or producers for him to give demonstrations with, and he even has slept indoors during filming. Horrifying right? A guy that I put on a pedestal due to his ability to do all the stuff I wish I knew how to do in the wild was faking it.
Ultimately I think this gets to the question: what is adventure? For me this is an important question because if you asked me to sum up in one word was I most wanted in my own life, that word would be ‘adventure.’
Bear Grylls ends up representing a sort of yuppie fascination or flirtation with adventure. Bear did a lot of cool stuff and it undeniably hardcore, but it strikes me as somehow false or unwarranted. To me, it feels like someone who has studied and worked out to be mentally and physically prepared for a wilderness challenge and then they go into the wilderness in order to test what they’ve learned. It is a lot like school in that respect. And just like school, once the person completes the test, they simply go back to their normal everyday lives. It’s advocating a sort of adventure tourism where you purposely create a tough situation and then try to get out of it using the prearranged skill set you’ve developed. That’s why I’d say this Bear Grylls approach to adventure is really just flirting with the idea of adventure.
Conversely, I think Alby fully commits himself to adventure. Alby didn’t plan to have his car break down or for a guy in a bar to challenge his friend to a bare knuckle boxing match; that stuff just happened. Alby didn’t just take an adventure vacation, he lived an adventure. While Bear, who it turns out is an Evangelical Christian which makes the fact that he lied about not getting any help during his trials all the more funny, seems to want to put across the message that each of us should take a break from the day to seek out an adventure, Alby puts across the message that adventure should be our lifestyle. You don’t have to try and hike across the Amazon Rainforest to find adventure, just pack some stuff in a car and start driving and you’re sure to have adventure find you.
This is how I try to look at my life, and when you adopt that mentality you realize that adventure waits around every corner and that you don’t have to be some yuppie with all the latest North Face gear to experience it. This is also why I don’t care if Alby finagled some of the facts about his stories of adventure whereas it does bother me that Bear was misrepresenting himself. Bear made adventure out to be a sort of test that you can put yourself through every once in a while, and not only do I dislike that test-like approach to adventure, but it turns out that he was cheating on the test. Alby, on the other hand, was living adventure so even if nothing ‘extreme’ happened to him, it was an adventure.
In conclusion, my idea of adventure, the idea which I try to live my life in accordance with, is that adventure just means meeting life and all the obstacles it presents head on. You throw caution to the wind constantly, you take your chances every chance you get, you do whatever the hell you want to do (while being respectful to other) however the hell you want to do it and live with the consequences. So if you fail or get stuck or your car breaks down or your boat sinks, you can still smile because that is simply your adventure. You didn’t take orders from others. You lived your own life. That is adventure and that is why Alby Mangels is far better than Bear Grylls.