KEY POINTS:
Claes Grundsten goes to extraordinary lengths to take his photographs of nature and the people who inhabit it. We bring you a taste of his book Trek! - a celebration of the best trekking destinations in the world.
To capture one of his striking images, photographer Claes Grundsten might observe his subject for as long as two days.
"It might be a rock, a bend in a river, something about the vegetation or a panorama that has a geomorphological quality," says the Swedish author and nature photographer. He will watch how the light plays on the image he wants to record, how it might alter during the day or even under a full moon.
"I am looking for something special, something that tells a story about the area where I am travelling."
He wants, he says, to share the beauty he finds in wild places and perhaps inspire others to seek out compelling destinations.
Grundsten has been on the move since 1972 when he first went to the Himalayas. Though he spent his teens exploring remote parts of Sweden, his trip to the world's highest mountains inspired a lifetime of wandering across the planet.
He turned a record of some of those memorable journeys into Trek!, a richly illustrated book of walking trips in some of the world's most breath-taking surroundings. For Grundsten, trekking is not simply a physical undertaking - he calls it mental therapy.
"It is an experience you cannot get from television or the internet. It is something you can experience by yourself, you can trek in the mind. In other words these experiences nourish the senses."
At the same time Grundsten admits that the intrusion of (mainly) western travellers into untamed environments can undermine fragile cultures or sensitive landscapes. His appeal is for trekkers to respect the worlds they enter.
He regrets that regional instability means parts of the world are off-limits. No longer would he risk going to Afghanistan, a country of raw beauty and fascinating cultures.
His favourite part of the world remains the soaring Himalayas, where he maintains it is still possible - in spite of the mass of walkers and porters and animal caravans and helicopters - to still feel a deep sense of wonder. But he is fond, too, of Mitre Peak at the end of the Milford Track, which he witnessed on a rare fine day, of Australia's arid outback and Lapland, well to the north of his home near Stockholm, where he lives on an island. At 59, Grundsten
keeps fit with 10km runs and journeys to remote places, often with his wife or two children as companions. A former Swedish Nature Photographer of the Year, he is completing a book on Sweden's national parks. The book will be a gift from his country to the European Union, marking the start of Sweden's turn in the rotating EU presidency.
"I feel my work is a privilege. It was hard to get into it and survive. It has been a long journey."
Grundsten doesn't intend to stop walking, or venturing to places which nourish body and spirit: " I will go on as long as my legs carry me."
Wadi Rum
Jordan's most written-about desert area is Wadi Rum. It tempts us to go on a real desert trek.
Our car turns off from the motorway between Amman and Aqaba and we see the landscape taking shape with small, block mountains rising up. Lawrence of Arabia stayed here in 1916 during the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. "The crags were capped in nests of domes, less hotly red than the body of the hill; rather grey and shallow. They gave the finishing semblance of Byzantine architecture to this
irresistible place: this processional way greater than imagination."
In this way, T.E. Lawrence describes the landscape vividly in his classic work, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. At Wadi Rum he found the perfect base for his raids.
The area is mountainous desert and unusually well suited to trekking, thanks to its interesting topography and accessibility. We walk between the high rock faces of the mountains, which are brown and beige and look as if they have been dipped in melted chocolate. I see Wadi Rum as an immense archipelago, where the islands consist of high sandstone massifs and the bays are flat sandy plains. Sometimes these are wide and open, sometimes narrow like
channels, and the mountains are grouped in clusters. The massifs are riddled with a complex of passages and are astoundingly high.
The whole geography of the place arouses great curiosity, lending us the necessary energy to tramp over the heavy-going sand. We can barely manage 12 miles (20km) a day and en route wander into narrow gorges which are blind alleys.
We spend the night under the open sky far from any buildings. The next day a camel ride awaits us. Some Bedouins meet us in the morning with dromedaries and from the animals' high humps we can see the whole landscape spread out before us. But the price is a sore bottom.
Papua New Guinea
At seven in the morning we reach the summit of Mount Wilhelm, 4509m above sea level. We are in the middle of the interior of New Guinea, not far from the equator. On days of crystal-clear weather you can make out both the north and south coasts of this enormous island.
New Guinea is a travel destination outside the norm and I consider the island to be the last unexplored outpost for trekkers.
The name still conjures up the legend of Stone Age people, but of course that is an old-fashioned and inappropriate view, and headhunters are banned. The country is trying to adjust to the present day and the global market's best-known brands are seen even here, but many of the indigenous people's old customs live on and the landscape on the island is timelessly fascinating, as are the improbably beautiful birds of paradise, the unusually pure rainforest and the strange mountain landscapes.
Jackson and Michael (local guides) accompany us up Mount Wilhelm, the highest mountain in Papua, and New Guinea's second-highest peak. Slowly we walk higher and higher up through the mountain rainforest. Compared with the jungle lower down, this type of forest is lower-growing and the trees are quite slender. In a few places views open up to reveal the undulating and beautiful landscape.
Above the treeline we emerge on to an open grassland with tree ferns. A waterfall bubbles merrily over a rocky shelf. The path leads past this and above it we find the Pindaunde Lake, beautifully set in a cirque. Close to the shore there is a simple hut where we leave our baggage.
Cecilia, a woman from the village who has come with us, makes a meal on a camping stove of packet soup with tasty bread. During the afternoon we wander around and try to get used to the altitude - 3500m above sea level. There is another lake in another cirque even higher up. The rock shelf between the lakes also has a waterfall, but the afternoon banks of mist conceal it. The mist makes the area seem enchanted, at the same time it prevents our seeing the geography. The summits are not going to reveal themselves and we don't have a map.
At 1am we leave the hut and start our climb by torchlight.
We walk as if blindfolded, one behind the other, slowly and with increasingly laboured steps the higher we go, past lakes and up a steep gradient on the crest of the mountain. For five hours we move slowly through the darkness until the dawn gradually begins to spread light over a landscape which until now has been hidden from us. When the sun rises we are high up. Breathing is hard work but the light gives us fresh strength. Immense expanses open up.
The rainforest deep down below is covered in dense cloud. The path leads up to a ridge and finally the mountain's highest crag appears, a surprisingly sharp and challenging formation. The last stretch consists of an easy climb and up on the summit itself space is limited. Our feelings are diluted by the lack of oxygen, but even so I think that a great deal of happiness lies in geography, in the fact that we have managed to reach a place that so far remains inaccessible and enigmatic on this shrinking planet of ours.
Mongolia
We mount the horses, a little caravan with five pack horses, three Westerners and four Mongolians. The spirit of the people of the steppes pervades the area, but I have only ridden once or twice before. The horse notices my uncertainty and suddenly bolts while I hold tight to the saddle. A Mongolian rider catches up and stops us. The horse and I are overwrought, but calm is restored.
After just 500m the horses are wading up to their bellies in the Tuul Gol river with us on their backs. Fantastic, I think, as we reach the other side, and I'm delighted when our pathfinder, Tulga, says that my black stallion and I will make a good team before the journey ends.
Our goal is Hagin Har Nuur, one of the few lakes in the desolate mountain chain of Khentii Nuruu, to the northeast of the town of Ulan Bator.
The most impressive sight is the forest. It has never been cut. The great woodland extends from the steppes in Mongolia to the trans-Siberian railway in the north - more than 500km of trackless, almost uninhabited terrain, a boundless wilderness with quantities of bears, lynx, wolverines, wolves, elk, red deer and sable.
We are riding through a pastoral valley bottom, across flourishing grassland where numbers of untethered horses graze, surrounded by wooded uplands. The landscape and the animals belong together and in my imagination I can see some wild warlord with warriors on horseback looming up in the short grass. But peace prevails here.
Hagin Har Nuur is now within our reach and when we finally glimpse the lake after five days and around 100km on horseback, it is a silken jewel shining behind a curtain of trees. The lake is known in Mongolia as a divinely endowed and almost unattainable place. In the 13th century, Ghengis Khan declared nearby Mount Burkhan Khaldun sacred and banned hunting and fishing in its vicinity.
In wilderness on this scale the seasons rule and wild animals are the only inhabitants.
We leave Hagin Hat Nuur and ride into a narrow valley that leads to meadows beneath the ruins of a 17th century monastery. In these enormous remote forests, Mongol monks, adherents of the Tibetan form of Buddhism, were able to hide when the Chinese conquered their kingdom.
By the tents our horses are grazing languidly. They seem quiet enough in spite of all the predators around. However, after I have been walking off on my own for a couple of hours, Ichee (a guide) becomes anxious and comes after me. I look out over the immense deserted country that we have only nibbled at the edges of. "There are so many bears and wolves in the forest," he says.
Images and location reports from Trek (c) Bokforlaget Max Ström 2005, 2008. English edition (c) Duncan Baird Publishers Ltd 2006, 2008. Text and photography copyright (c) Claes Grundsten 2005, 2008
