More than just the travel bug

Marc Shaw and his partner Lynne Walker discovered dinosaur bones on a palaeontology dig in the Gobi Desert. Shaw has visited around 80 countries.

Sitting in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia this year, Marc Shaw's partner Lynne Walker started digging away at a small piece of bone sticking out of the ground in an area renowned for fossils.

She and Shaw kept on digging and the bone turned into the rib of a dinosaur. It was 70 million years old and a type not found in any museum anywhere in the world.

It was pretty damned exciting but Shaw tells the story almost matter-of-factly, maybe because this travel doctor has been to "umm, about 80" countries. So far.

Eighty countries? Yes, that would be about right, he says, pausing in front of an alluringly large map of the world on the wall in his Newmarket travel clinic.

Phew, he must be tired, you'd think. But he doesn't look tired as he goes into his office with photographs of far-flung places on the wall and picks up a piece of glorious turquoise rock from the Mongolia trip.

On his desk are some of the necessities of travel to extreme climates; factor 75 sunscreen and army-strength mossie repellent.

It's a mysterious thing, the travel bug, and it has bitten Shaw hard. To give some perspective, there are about 190 countries in the world, which means Shaw hasn't been to at least 110 of them.

Neither is he interested in going to them all. He would love to go to more but not simply to tick them off a long list.

Travel for Shaw is also a spiritual and humanitarian quest, a striving to always do what he can as a doctor and to be a better person along the way.

Last week he was leaving on his latest venture, a trip to Sri Lanka to teach first aid to trainee ambulance officers.

The hallway at the travel practice is cluttered with equipment donated from St John in Hamilton to take with him.

It is the kind of trip Shaw loves. He was invited to go to the Hikkaduwa area where it is estimated two people die every day from road accidents.

There is no ambulance service to take them to hospital. A Hamilton-based initiative, Operation Phoenix, set up to rebuild houses after the tsunami devastated the area, found out first-hand the need for ambulances when one of its staff was injured. It donated one, but now it needs trained staff. Enter Shaw.

Word of mouth about the travelling travel doctor takes Shaw all over the place.

He gets invitations such as this one, or an archaeological trip to Mongolia, or to be the doctor for a group travelling by train from China to Russia, or the ship's doctor on a voyage to Antarctica.

Today the lanky 57-year-old is wearing his grey/white beard and a theatrical red scarf slung backwards, guarding against the unseasonable Auckland chill.

Shaw has long loved acting and directing - he ran his own theatre when he lived in Hamilton - and wonders whether the acting bug and the travel bug are sort of the same.

Maybe it's the superficiality he enjoys, he muses. Theatre, like travel, gives him the opportunity to be involved in something for periods of time and then to move on to the next thing, but to always retain and treasure the experience.

In some cases Shaw travels because he is a doctor, so his calling and training is to respond and heal, wherever the need is.

He recalls feeling impotent when he heard about the Boxing Day tsunami. As the death toll climbed, so did his desire to go and help. And he did, going to the island of Nias in Indonesia.

The other side of the travel bug, though, is that indefinable yearning for adventure which others equally bitten will identify with, but are not quite able to put their finger on.

Wanderlust. It takes people far from home and pushes them outside their comfort zones. Perhaps for Shaw it was brought on by his reading of Biggles as a little boy.

Whatever started it, the travel bug has led him to some incredible places, but there has been intense pain, too.

In 2001 he was in the Amazon as the doctor for Sir Peter Blake's navigation of the world's greatest waterway.

Blake had sat opposite Shaw in this very room, getting his jabs for the trip.

Blake joked: "Do you want to come?" to which Shaw said, "Yes, all right."

He never says no to travel but, although the Amazon turned out to be a trip of amazing highlights, it was also one of such terrible psychological trauma that, nearly four years later, the doctor's eyes brim with tears.

He talks of the silence which fell when the jungle team heard the awful news about the skipper.

Shaw and four other crew were not on board the Seamaster the night pirates shot and killed Blake when the boat was moored at the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil.

They were much deeper in the jungle exploring the Casiquiare and Orinoco Rivers in Venezuela, meeting indigenous Yanomami people, fighting moths and bugs and, for Shaw, tending ailments.

He still feels sad that he was not on the scene to attempt to resuscitate Blake. The other crew tried and they would have to live with that.

"Because these guys, really, they're going to get left with [the] psychological trauma of trying to resuscitate a friend and mate, thinking they could have done that little bit more, whereas the objective observer, which is what my job would have been, would be to say, no, it's finished."

He writes each year to the rest of the jungle team, keeping in touch with a crew which had felt so lost. He looks a little lost now.

But for the most part today there is a glimmer in his eyes of schoolboy Biggles wonder, of distant lands and sights and sounds and smells.

He loves it when other travellers come to the clinic. They tell stories and there is a shared excitement he calls "that spring of mind".

They talk about the trip and he sees the spirit in their eyes. He knows what the heat will be like, the weather, the sweat.

People who travel are on different levels, he reckons. The A-class traveller goes to places so they can tick them off. They stay in interchangeable hotels but don't really see.

"You know, in the old days in Africa they used to have the rifles and the rifles used to kill animals. Now photography does that. 'Did you get that?' 'Yeah, I got that.' 'Did you get her?' 'Yep, I got her with the child.' 'Did you get the one with the child and the elephant?' 'No.' 'Ah, you didn't get that one, oh, I got that one'."

On another level is the voyager. This is the person who does not want to live under bridges but who does want to see and touch places and have places touch them.

Then there is the backpacker. The backpacker will happily live under bridges. Shaw reckons he is mostly voyager and backpacker.

"I love it because, oh, it's just mind-dancing. You get up in a plane and it's almost like as you take off you leave the big black cloak of what you do in your normal day-to-day routine behind you.

"You have the meal and you watch the movie and the first four hours are fun, then after that it's 'oh, god', until you get there and then it's exhilarating from the moment you land.

"You put all that you're telling people about in your consultative process into action, and I think I'm richer in the knowledge that I give and that we as a clinic are richer in the knowledge that I bring back, because we have travelled."

With travel, though, comes inner struggles for Shaw. The more you travel, the more questions you ask, he says.

Is it right to even be there? And as a doctor, who do you treat along the way? About 25 per cent of the medical problems he treated in the Amazon were locals and from a humanitarian viewpoint it was good to help.

"The downside is collectively, globally, it's not a good idea to go to a place and give all sorts of new medicines and then sod off and leave the locals to think, well, what do I do with all this medicine, how do I use it, what are the side-effects?"

Travel can be humbling and an enormous privilege, he says. Not everyone gets to meet the stone age Yanomami who live deep in the Amazon jungle.

Shaw points to one of the pictures on his office wall. It is a Yanomami woman with pieces of wood sticking out of her face and who he thinks perhaps seems ugly at first glance.

When you look at her - really look at her - her beauty is suddenly realised, he says.

She is only about 18 and, most importantly, those little pieces of wood are meant to make her look like the puma, and the puma is one of the most beautiful animals spiritually in the Brazilian forest.

"Suddenly it takes on a whole new dimension. It really touches you then."