Trekkers walk the final kilometres to Everest Base Camp, Nepal. Photo/ Kriangkrai Thitimakorn, Getty Images
Trekkers walk the final kilometres to Everest Base Camp, Nepal. Photo/ Kriangkrai Thitimakorn, Getty Images
You no longer need a bushy moustache and to be a member of an exclusive club to be an explorer, writes Thomas Bywater. The world may have shrunk a lot over the past century but is no less adventurous.
150 years ago, the fictional Phileas Fogg set off from the Reform Club in London on an 80-Day journey that would change travel forever.
Around the World in Eighty Days captured the imaginations of armchair travellers and explorers around the world.
Jules Verne set the adventure in one of the “numerous societies which swarm in the English capital,” focusing on a clubbish London gent. Which is a stroke of genius that still rings true today.
With his sole qualifications being fabulously wealthy and fabulously unbusy, Fogg might be the great grandfather of the ‘travel influencer’.
They don’t plan travel during seat sales or using price comparison websites, but in smoke-filled drawing rooms. Preferably surrounded by leather-bound travelogues and atlases.
You might then wonder what sort of person signs up for an actual Explorers Club?
The ornate fireplace of the Explorers Club of New York at 46 East 70th Street. Photo / Wikimedia Commons
The Explorers Club in New York has been described as a “secret travel club” whose members have been everywhere, from the bottom of the sea to outer space.
Based on the 19th century social clubs of London, especially the Royal Geographical Society, it didn’t have time for such high highfalutin pretences at furthering science.
There’s a breathless enthusiasm for exotic adventures in its founding articles, which state its purpose as: “To further General Exploration”.
And its roll call of members sound like an Avengers mash-up film of the world’s greatest explorers.
From Roald Amundsen to Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, it lists the top of Everest and the South Pole among the club’s “famous firsts”. Buzz Aldrin took their flag to the moon.
Like the Latter Day Saints, they seem to collect members and achievements under the banner of the Explorers Club. Although more recent enrolments such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would suggest it still pays to be wealthy in the expensive game of exploring.
James P. Chapin carries the Explorers Club Flag up the Ruwenzori Mountains, Uganda in 1925. Photo / Wikimedia Commons
The original stuffy, elitist clubhouse in Manhattan is a bit of a relic. The 1904 clubhouse - built to impress potential expedition sponsors - comes across as pompous. Women were only allowed past the threshold of 46 East 70th Street in 1981.
But in its 120 years, the club has become a little more diverse and dispersed around the world.
The Australia-New Zealand chapter, for example, is run out of a cafe in Sydney.
There are 15 Kiwis among the current members, whose clubhouse is the Balmoral Boathouse. For some of them, Phileas Fogg was as much of an inspiration for their adventures as the pantheon of explorers.
“Around the World in 80 Days is probably the only fictional book on my bookshelf, which will tell you how much I love it,” says Philipp Sültrop, a Christchurch-based club member and engineer.
University of Canterbury doctoral student Philipp Sueltrop is working to prevent the effects of fuel slosh in rockets, using mathematical algorithms. Photo / Supplied
“I am probably a bit of an unusual member of the explorers club in the sense that most of my exploration work focuses on different types of unmanned aerospace.”
Sending tiny robots to space the high-altitude balloon system his work is inspired by the pages of Jules Verne and aviator Bertrand Piccard.
“We are a very small membership in New Zealand,” says Helen Ahern, a guide and expedition leader whose family followed Edmund Hillary to Nepal to build hospitals.
When not working for NGOs in Benin she is leading tourists into some of the most remote parts of the globe - including Antarctica, the Pacific and Africa. These corners of the world are a lot more accessible today but no less adventurous.
She says that part of club membership is as much about representation as it is funding future expeditions.
“As a female in a male-dominated industry it is important to be “at the table” - both for myself and for those who come after me.”
Her hero, aviator and explorer Amelia Earhart said it was the responsibility of those who didn’t already have a runway to “grab a shovel and build one for yourself and for those who will follow after you”.
Expedition Leader and Naturalist Helen Ahern in the Sub Antarctic Islands. Photo / Instagram; a_little_kiwi
For whatever reason members join, the club does serve one purpose: to mark the achievements and milestones of explorers past. And inspire travellers with the possibilities and destinations, a little further beyond the edge of the map.
It’s a century since Egyptologist Howard Carter broke into a pharaoh’s tomb, discovering wild treasures making Egypt and Tutankhamun a global obsession. With the treasure now resting in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, you can visit both the modern city with Intrepid Travel and take a tour on the Nile to see the Valley of the Kings where the pharaoh was found.
In 1923 a small corner of Antarctica became part of New Zealand. IN the year that saw the death of Ernest Shackleton and the end of the so-called “Heroic Age” of exploration, the Ross Sea became a dependency of Aotearoa. It’s where New Zealand’s Scott Base would eventually be built. You can track your way down through the Subantarctic islands and icefields with Ponant, with departures from Dunedin or Ushuaia circumnavigating the frozen continent.
May will mark 70 years since Hillary and Tenzing knocked Everest off - an achievement in mountaineering but also New Zealand folklore. Nepal and the Everest Valleys are still a place many adventurous Kiwis regard as a must-visit. Though not everyone is heading for the top, trekking tours to Everest Base Camp have become a pilgrimage.
This year World Expeditions has partnered with the Himalayan Trust to mark the milestone with a series of fundraising tours and events in Nepal.
