The Accidental Adventurer
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Ben Fogle has had a life for which the word extraordinary is barely adequate. He has rowed across the Atlantic, walked to the South Pole, run the Sahara and skated across Sweden. He has encountered WWII plane wrecks in deepest darkest Papua New Guinea, flesh-eating diseases in Peru and snakes in Venezuela. He has repatriated East Timorese refugees back from West Timor and filmed in refugee camps in Sudan. He got lost in a minefield in Argentina and caused a 747 to dump 200k of fuel before making an emergency landing in Rio de Janeiro. He has chased armed burglars from his house using a sledge, survived a tropical illness that required two months of chemotherapy and been bitten by a rabid dog. So how did a cripplingly shy, geeky, perenially homesick, spotty boy end up achieving all this? Ben's still not entirely sure himself, but this glorious book will undoubtedly strike a chord with anyone who puzzles about their life, and how to live it differently. This is not just another tale of derring-do and adventure. Rather it's a book about defying expectations, conquering shyness, battling laziness and, just occasionally, winning.
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I know Ben Fogle from his long-running television show New Lives in the Wild, where he visits people living in remote and unusual places and stays with them a week to get to know how they manage there. Sixteen seasons it has been running!
Beyond that I knew little about him - I thought he was a former Olympic rower (he is not, that is his mate James Cracknell, with whom he did some of his charity races), and that was about it. This book was published in 2011, before his New Lives in the Wild project began, and covers his early life and his career path up until that point.
My impression from the tv series is that he is an all-round nice guy. Empathetic, understanding and charismatic. Fogle is also a communicator who is able to draw the stories from others. There was nothing in this book to contradict any of that - in fact it reinforced that Fogle is an all-round nice guy.
While he doesn't consider himself a sportsman, he has proven time and again that he has the fortitude to perform endurance events in extreme conditions, and is driven and focused such that he doesn't permit himself to give up. Examples of this are rowing the Atlantic (with Cracknell); the six day Marathon des Sables desert race in the Sahara; and the Amundsen Omega 3 South Pole Race. Subsequently in 2018 he also climbed Everest (and came back down, which is half the achievement).
His marriage and children feature lightly in this book, and for the most part it is, as the title suggests, largely a book about how he became an adventurer - and a television adventurer at that. The chapters are almost all chronologically arranged, but with some flash back and forwards where it fits the narrative, and a mostly short accounts of each travel opportunity or adventure sports event he is involved with.
Fogle is pretty open about his experiences, he shares where he got things wrong, where things became dangerous and where he took risks. He shares what he learns from his experiences and plugs various charities on the way through. Overall, it is a light read, but a quick and enjoyable one. I would read more of his writing given the chance (well I have read most of his kids books to my daughter, but beyond those he has written more books about his adventures).
A solid 3 stars.
