Category Personalities

Somewhere deep inside the Peruvian jungles of the mighty Amazon, Ed Stafford found a purpose to his life. Facing gun-toting tribes and predators, he became the first man to walk the 6,400 km length of the river.

A strong desire to discover his true self pushed Stafford towards the extreme adventure. Leaving behind a potentially lucrative career as a stockbroker in England, he delved deep into the darkness of the Amazon and emerged as one of the bravest explorers of the 21st century.

Here’s a brief account of his life and his hair-rising adventures:

Off the beaten track

When a young Stafford attended career counseling sessions at his school, he was told that a career as a logistics manager suited him best. And so, Stafford spent the rest of his life proving them wrong.

He liked the outdoors and joined the British Army. After retirement, he planned to become a stockbroker, like most of his colleagues.

On a whim, he joined an organization conducting expeditions and volunteering programmes for young people.

Thrilled with the experience, Stafford decided never to go back to work in London and instead, set out looking for more adventures.

He was eager to go on a kayaking expedition but everything seemed to have already been done. No one, however, had ever attempted to walk the length of the Amazon.

The Amazon rainforest

Along with his friend, Luke Collyer, Stafford began his expedition on April 2, 2008. The journey took 860 days, much of it hacking through the jungle with a machete and surviving on geckos, insects and fish. Stafford blogged and filmed his deadly journey.

Halfway through, his partner abandoned him and Stafford ran out of money (his sponsors pulled out due to recession). He appealed to his viewers to fund the rest of his expedition and help poured in.

Left on his own, Stafford stoically trod through the jungle without any maps or even a Global Positioning System (GPS) – he had carried a GPS device but it stopped working. Close encounters with jungle predators, flesh-eating maggots and poisonous snakes tested his survival skills. Once, he was arrested for alleged murder by the Shipebo tribe. They had mistaken him for someone else, and refused to consider his passport as an identity proof. They insisted that it was fake as it was not ‘personally signed by the Queen.’

The two-year-long journey, which finally came to an end in August 2010, helped Stafford find his passion.

A way of life

But Stafford’s thirst for adventure was not yet quenched. His subsequent adventures included surviving on an uninhabited Fijian island. For 60 days, he lived without food, water or survival equipment of any sort. The resulting series aired on Discovery Channel in 2013. Two follow-up series saw him marooned in a different location each episode – from the Gobi desert to the jungles of Borneo. In 2015, he explored the Danakali Desert in Ethiopia, the hottest place on Earth.

In 2019, Stafford went on another epic adventure, this time with his fellow adventurer and wife, Laura Bingham, and their two-year-old toddler in a remote island in Indonesia.

Recognition

His intrepid adventures earned Stafford the European Adventurer of the Year award in 2011 and the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in recognition of outstanding contributions to geographical knowledge through exploration. Following this, the Guinness World Records formally recognized Stafford’s achievement in walking the length of the Amazon. He appears in the 2012 Guinness Book of Records.

Wanting to encourage other explorers, Stafford is now a trustee of the Transglobe Expedition Trust, a body that gives grants to expedition leaders. He is also an ambassador for the Scouts and a patron of the British Exploring Society.

Oh Really?

• Stafford has written a book, Expeditions Unpacked, that reveals what great explorers such as Captain Scott and Roald Amundsen took with them on their journeys into the unknown.
• He meditates frequently. Even in a life-threatening situation. Stafford finds that closing his eyes for a few seconds and clearing his mind, helps him in responding to the emergency.

Picture Credit : Google

Writer Kavitha Mandana was born in Mysore (now Mysuru), and her schooling was part in Mysore and part in the Nilgiris. She began writing when she joined advertising. “It’s a great discipline where deadlines are always ‘yesterday’. So, after four or five years there, when I had a baby, writing seemed a natural thing to pursue. It’s also when I gathered the courage to begin illustrating,” she says. When her daughter was two, in the days before Indian publishing took off, Kavitha began writing and illustrating for the kids’ supplement of the Karnataka-based newspaper “Deccan Herald”. And there began a fascinating journey into stories.

Writing like Kavitha Mandana

• Read a lot…the more you read, the better you’ll write. Also you’ll discover which genre you prefer to write in.
• Most of us who write, want our work to be read. So look out for those in your peer group (classmates, bus-buddies, cousins, grandparents, etc.) you could share your first stories or reports with. If you find even two others like yourself, read each others’ work and share what it is that you like about the work and what you might like changed (all politely done, of course!).
• A good exercise is to look t a piece of writing that you did for a school assignment, like an essay on your holidays. That would have been written with your teacher as your ‘audience’; which means you would use language appropriate to her age (not yours) and the point of the writing would also be to score marks. Now imagine writing about your holidays – for your friend. The age group changes; things you couldn’t mention in a school essay could be mentioned here, and in this case, you’re not interested in marks, but in entertaining or making things interesting for your friend. Compare the two pieces about the same holiday and you’ll learn a lot about how to write for different audiences.

The writer’s routine

“What inspires me is real life, mostly,” says Kavitha About her novel “No. 9 on the Shade Card”, she says, “It happened just by watching what was playing out in my, at that time, teenaged daughter’s life. She is very outdoorsy, athletic and generally played any game she got a chance to. But when trying to build relay teams or throwball teams, she realized that often even very talented girls weren’t permitted to play outdoors because of safety concerns or the parential worry of girls ‘turning dark’.”

In fact, a lot of her short stories are based on her childhood growing up in the Nilgiri hills, in boarding school, at her grandparents’ place in Coorg, and more. In fact, her first novel for middle-graders, “Bando, the Dog Who Led a Double Life” was really a combination of the goofy Labradors she had at home when growing up. “Of course, none of them could cartoon, like Bando could, in any book!” she laughs.

Kavitha confesses though that she has no process or pattern to her writing time. “I’M a very fits-and—starts kind of person. Besides, I have a full-time job that pays the bills! So writing is fun,” she reasons.

Kavitha Mandana’s books

• Trapped
• No. 9 on the Shade Card
• The Emperor Who Vanished: Strange Facts from Indian History
• The Sixth Grade Wedding Planners

Picture Credit : Google

Books and films regale us with stories of multi-millionaires leading a double life. They often don capes like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, or plunge into adventure like Lara Croft. But in the case of Victor Vescovo, the truth is stranger than fiction.

The Dallas-based multimillionaire, who flies his own jet and helicopter, believes in living life to its fullest. So, the 53-year-old former naval officer has climbed the highest mountains on each of the seven contients and skied to both poles, becoming the 38th person ever to conquer the so-called Explorer’s Grand Slam.

And last year, he did the unthinkable: he conquered the oceans. Vescovo became the first person to dive into the deepest point in every ocean – Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Ocean.

Exploring the deep was a dream of Vescovo’s ever since he was a little boy reading about the great adventures of 20th century explorers.

Using a state-of-the-art submersible called Limiting Factor, he plunged into the depths of the Challenger Deep, the Puerto Rico Trench, the Java Trench, the South Sandwich Trench and the Molloy Deep – in a short span of one year.

Some of these trenches had never been reached by humans before. On others, Vescovo created new records. He also discovered four new marine species in the process. Here’s an account of his dives and what he found down there:

From the trenches

The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean contains the deepest known points on Earth. And at its bottom lies the Challenger Deep.

A gap between tectonic plates, it is the deepest spot in the ocean. Its depth is pegged to be around 36,070 feet, that’s 10,994 metres. The world’s highest mountain, Everest is 8,848 metres. And while thousands have successfully scaled Everest, only three have been able to reach the Challenger Deep. More people have walked on the moon!

The first dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench took place in 1960 by US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard. Then in 2012, James Cameroon, the director of Titanic, descended to the bottom of Challenger Deep, briefly reaching 10,898 metres. His sub was irrevocably damaged.

When Vescovo made the deepest manned sea dive ever recorded, at 10,927 m, the pressure at that depth was incredible. It reached to 16,000 pounds per square inch – enough pressure to crush a bulky car within seconds.

Though he descended safely, what he saw was disturbing. No, it was not some mysterious mythological creature, but a plastic bag and candy wrappers! Vescovo’s dive proved just how much damage humans have inflicted on the oceans.

Close encounters with third kind

Located in the Ring of Fire, the Java Trench in the Indian Ocean is one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Shifting tectonic plates regularly generate rattling earthquakes and mega tsunamis. As the submersible ploughed silently through the trench, a jellyfish-like creature became visible. The gelatinous animal had a small, shimmering balloon dangling from its body.

The team was able to capture it on camera. It is thought to be a rare species of stalked Ascidean.

His final dive was on August 24, 2019, into the Molloy Deep, the lowest point in the icy Arctic ocean, situated west of Svalbard, Norway. It marked the first manned dive to reach to the bottom of the abyss.

What’s next?

After scaling the mountains and the oceans, it’s no surprise that Vescovo has now set his sights on going into space. He also plans to conduct further dives in previously unexplored trenches around the Pacific Rim.

Picture Credit : Google