“The Art of Living Dangerously”

The Art of Living Dangerously

By Richard Bangs

Globe Pequot,  2023, 372 pages

A Carolina Paddler book report by Alton Chewning

-Adventure is not purposeful.  Adventure is prepared for whatever happens, good or bad.    Richard Bangs has taken adventure travel to an art form, with an evolving gallery of bold works, progressing in the breadth of experience from a life lived in pursuit of the Sublime.  What is the Sublime?  “Beauty was light, fleeting and charming.  The Sublime was large, overwhelming, and dangerous–like an avalanche.”

Bangs’ book takes a trajectory that many of us face in life. His is done on a different scale than most of us.  While we may view an imposing rapid as challenging, Bangs is the same, just transposed to remote countries with little recourse for failure. In his early years he is madly in search of reckless adventure, adrenaline-charged pursuits down raging rivers, shoestring exploratories in regions and cultures completely foreign to Westerners. In his middle years, he found how new communication means could bring the sense of the strange, the exotic, the beguiling to people who could not travel for financial or physical reasons.

In later life Bangs promotes, “Adventure with a Purpose.”  Adventure tourism as a means of bringing financial and environmental stability to regions with rich natural resources and little hard currency.  This is poignantly brought home in Madagascar, one of the most biodiverse places in the world, far surpassing the Galapagos as an island kingdom of unique endemic animals and plants.  However, overpopulation (the colonial French bizarrely outlawed contraception) and bleak food sources have forced the starving population to slash and burn their forests in a slow act of environmental mass suicide.

Bangs career began humbly enough, growing up in Bethesda, MD, learning to paddle through misadventures on the Potomac and other mid-Atlantic rivers.  Even in high school he cultivated the art of expanding on adventures and adding spectacle and pizzazz to an event and sometimes toying with the reality.  A modest but failed canoe trip became a triumphant voyage in the high school newspaper.  Bangs and a friend finished a race on the Potomac, paddling nude, a caper caught by a Washington Post photographer.  The resulting publicity nearly led the boys to being kicked out of the Canoe Cruisers Association.

The paddle fever steered Richard and friends to the Grand Canyon where they conned raft jobs with Hatch River Expeditions.  Within a couple of years, they were using their river experience and headfirst approach to tackle the Omo, Awash and Baro Rivers in Ethiopia and later the Blue Nile. They met heads of state and testicle hunters.  Friends died.

Hippos chomped on their rafts. Swollen rivers became impassable. Rafts and supplies disappeared. Some of their adventures floundered but slowly their expedition skills grew.  The friends formed Sobek, an adventure travel company named for an Egyptian crocodile god.

Over the years Sobek would grow, taking actors and politicians, celebrities, and scientists around the world on treks, paddles, climbs and dives.  The core founders laid claim to flipping and swimming on every continent, including Antartica.  Their web of friends and clients grew with their inventory of adventures.  Sobek merged with a climbing company and became MT Sobek.

Bangs grew frustrated with the ability to reach potential adventure travelers.  Sobek mailed out 200,000 glossy catalogues of travel destinations all over the world and would attract 3000 clients.  When the technology became available Sobek switched to the Kodak Disc players and other CD-ROM.  There was a small gain in reaching people but not until the Internet and the accompanying app, the World Wide Web, reached feasibility would the true broad appeal be effective.  Working with Global Network Navigator, one of the first browsers, Richard produced the first travel website on the Web in 1995. This would lead to further digital exploration.

Bangs experiments using the Internet brought a phone call from Melinda Gates of Microsoft.  Soon an on-line magazine, Mungo Park, was born with the Gates’ financing and influence.  Mungo Park featured essays from worldwide adventure travels of prominent writers and celebrities:  Jon Krakauer, Deepak Chopra, Ziggy Marley, Annie Dillard, Tim Cahill, Mary Roach, Martha Stewart and many more.  Their travels were financed by an almost unlimited budget and a matching desire for the exotic and profound.

Bangs was constantly dreaming up new high-jinks, new places to explore and innovative ways of promoting them.  Sally Field flying in a hot-air balloon over the animal-choked Serengeti (she broke her patella in the resulting crash), Having astronauts in orbit on the space station call the NPR show, Car Talk, and complain about funny sounds their vehicle was making.

A PBS Series on Smart Travels emerged. An NPR series, The Savvy Traveler, followed, along with various national broadcasts of expeditions led by the Sobek team all over the world. On the side Richard was organizing bespoke trips for Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mick Jagger, Barry Diller and keeping an eye open for entrées into previously closed countries like Iran, China and Libya.

Throughout the book, Bangs runs a subplot of his father’s secret involvement with the CIA.  Fans of the 2012 movie, Argo, might recognize this event.  Bangs’ father was apparently involved in the plot to use American operatives posing as a film crew to free captives in Iran during the infamous US Embassy hostage affair.

In his advancing years, Bangs once again shifts, promoting extreme travel not just for the privileged voyager or the limited mobility viewers but for the benefit of the remote places visited.  “Adventuring with a purpose,” using eco-tourism to help sustain indigenous culture and ecology in areas of the Earth rapidly disappearing, victims of our overuse, our human expansion and our extraction of the world’s limited resources and vitality.

Travel was also used to bridge cultures and political divides.  MT Sobek was the first to lead groups into Libya, Iran, North Korea, China and other previously closed societies.  Sharing the richness of their histories and environments became a way of encouraging tolerance and communication.

“The Art of Living Dangerously” takes us to some of the lesser-known spectacles of the ancient world.  The Leptis Magne ruins of the Roman/Carthaginian port in Libya rivals the best antiquities in Greece.

The Madain Saleh in Saudi Arabia and the Persepolis in Iran stand with the most renown and inspiring sites of antiquities anywhere.

With this heady menu of the world’s great sites, Richard serves up savory sides of other traditions, like sky burials in India, Tibet and elsewhere.  Corpses are placed on a pyre or tower where the body can be consumed by scavenger birds or sometimes allowed to dessicate in extreme aridity. Thus, the living remain untainted by impure spirits that enter the body upon death.

The writer’s touch can be light too. Bangs likes puns. When describing a native raft, laden with chickens as a food supply, gracefully slipping through a rapid, he notes, “The Nepalese guide for the chicken raft is good, and it glides through the first rapids with virtuoso artistry.  It was, from my vantage in the next raft, poultry in motion.”

Amid recitations of exciting and dangerous trips undertaken, Bangs regales us with historical facts.  For instance, “The volcanic eruption of Krakatau [near Java] was deafening the first day, August 26, 1883.  The next day, “the cone of Krakatau ripped itself apart with the biggest bang ever recorded on our planet, clocking in at 310 decibels.  … If  Krakatau had been in New York City, the big bang could have been heard in both London and San Francisco.”

Bangs had been scouting the remains of Krakatau for a possible commercial expedition. Their hired wooden ship sank near shore and after several days of hungry sightseeing, another even more decrepit boat rescued them.  Several years later, in 2018, Krakatau erupted again, birthing a tsunami that killed over 400 people and injuring thousands.

Bangs give us much to consider in his summations of what impact adventure travel can have, exploitation of pristine environments for tourism purposes rather than exploitation for resource extraction.  Going another step, he compares adventure travel to conventional travel. The motto of standard travel is “the best surprise is no surprise,” all experiences are familiar and uniform.  Adventure travelers try to appreciate a culture on its terms.  It “seeks out local guides, visits natural areas, chooses low-impact transportation, a raft rather than a cruise ship, walking instead than a tour bus.”  In adventure travel, a significant amount of money stays in the local area.

This book–Bang’s life–was, as we mentioned, a search for the Sublime.  The search for the moment truly unusual and grand, whether on a small scale or on a large.  A moment when our consciousness shuts down the inner drumbeat of interpretation and comment and simply experiences.  Wonder and awe course through us, changing our view of life and the world outside.

Here is Richard Bangs talking about the book at an Explorer’s Club meeting.