Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [65]
“About 1987, Australia was becoming corrupt, more individual and selfish than it had been compared to the sixties and seventies. In Western Australia, where only a million people lived, we went ten billion dollars into the red. That’s ten thousand dollars for every man, woman and child. One day I was watching television and I saw this advert that showed a mass of people all horribly crammed together and one person climbing over them to the top—like that was supposed to be a good thing. And I thought, ‘I want out of this.’”
John had seen a brochure for London-based Encounter Overland, one of the first great adventure tour operators. The 1970s and ’80s were the glory days of adventure travel, when the Hippie Trail across Asia grew up from a rite of passage for hash-addled hitchhikers into a flourishing tourism business driven by the last wave of pre–Lonely Planet wanderers. (In the travel magazine business, this pennypinching personality was referred to, without affection, as the dirtbagger.) After initially showing skepticism at John’s application to work as a driver-cum-guide, Encounter offered him an apprenticeship. “I sold my car, had a great big booze-up, burned my bed. I had thirty or forty thousand dollars and put it all into investments that my tax man recommended. I flew out on Tuesday. Friday was Black Friday in the stock market. I lost half my money. I got the news in London, where I was sleeping on the oil-stained floor of an unheated workshop and earning thirteen pounds a week.”
John was assigned an early-1950s vintage Bedford, an open-backed truck with benches and a canvas top, and given charge of his clients for the next three to six months—more or less, since a driver never knew what contingencies might affect the schedule along the way. “One trip might have taken in Kathmandu, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zaire, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria, sometimes Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco. Then back through Europe to London. You never had enough hours to do everything. It was always pressure, pressure, pressure. Ninety percent of the job was hard work. Ah, but the other ten percent . . .
“In Peshawar, Pakistan, all the mujahedin with their AK-47s would come to the hotel and watch the six o’clock news to see how the war was going in Afghanistan. We got permission from the military to go to the black market, where they had Sony TVs, blocks of heroin and ganja. We fired rocket launchers in the arms market of Darra. In the Central African Republic, the thieves were so good, you could have two people watching the truck and in a tree above it there’d be a guy reeling in daypacks out of the back with a fishing pole. The scenery was incredible, of course. But you wouldn’t just see the gorillas and waterfalls. You’d live with the pygmies. Hunt with them. Sleep in their houses. In the middle of the night, dad would roll over onto mom, and do his business—hooga, hooga, hooga—and then go back to sleep. God, it was brilliant.”
Most people burned out as drivers after a year or two. John thrived. “When I first rolled into Cusco in 1991, I saw three foreigners in three days.” By the time he was named Encounter’s coordinator for South America in 1998, though, serious adventure travel’s moment had passed, replaced by a bragging-rights mentality. “Travel today is ticking things off: ‘Whew, I’ve done Machu Picchu, now I can get drunk.’
“It used to take three weeks to get people in the right frame of mind, to un-brainwash them. Now it would take three months just to get people’s heads straightened out. A lot