ADVENTURE isn’t what it used to be. Setting off on a journey that you can’t be sure you will survive, let alone reach your destination, has long gone out of fashion in these sanitised times.
Except if you’re Tim Cope.
I met Tim when I was working at Australian Geographic in the mid-1990s. At an AG function, a lanky youth introduced himself and we discovered a shared passion for roaming and writing.
At the time, I’d done a bit of both, and Tim, who grew up in country town Victoria, hadn’t. The situations have since reversed, plus some.
Tim soon disappeared into sub-Arctic Finland and Russia on a year-long wilderness guide course, from which he emerged to take on a cycling trip with a fellow Aussie, Chris Hatherley.
It wasn’t your average bike trip. Over 14 months they rode more than 10,000 km from Finland, across Russia and Mongolia, to Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
From somewhere in the depths of the vast Siberian Taiga forest, I got an email from Tim saying, “I’m 22. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
He’d already found out.
After the bike trip, he and three others patched up a five-metre rowing boat abandoned on the shores of Russia’s Lake Baikal and rowed it 4500 km through Siberia, up the Yenisey River to the Arctic Ocean.
The 24-hour rowing was hard, Tim reported; but not as hard living for four months cheek-by-jowl with three others in a small leaky boat.
On a visit sometime afterwards, he mused that he’d like to follow in the footsteps of Genghis Khan and travel on horseback from Mongolia to Hungary. The fact that he’d barely patted a horse, let along ridden one, didn’t deter him.
He spent five days on a packhorse ride in the Snowies, got some veterinary advice, and then set off for Mongolia to with all the necessary ingredients: toughness, intelligence, sponsors, and a desire to see what lay over the next mountain range.
It took him three and a half years and 13 horses to cover the 10,000 km that, from the 13th to the 16th Centuries, the “Golden Horde” of Mongol horsemen periodically traversed on great rides that ended in the rape, pillage and wasting of great swathes of eastern Europe and Russia.
His lack of Aussie horse-lore turned out to be an asset, Tim now believes, because he learned instead from the nomads of Central Asia. Rather than wanting to control a horse, to “break” it, the nomads aim to harness a horse’s energies. As Tim sees it, that’s a metaphor for how agricultural and nomadic cultures perceive nature in general.
Horse-handling was only a part of the challenge. Most people he met gave open-armed hospitality, but there were incidents: theft and fights and moments of great danger.
And there was the weather.
Occasionally during his Genghis trip, our phone would ring and we would find Tim on the other end, via his satellite phone.
One evening, the background to our conversation was the freezing steppe wind moaning through the bleak village in which he was sheltering in remotest Kazakhstan. He said he had spent the last week punching through waist-high snow in minus 20°C temperatures.
I was very, very glad to be a soft wage-earner, at home with my family in front of the fire.
Why does he do it? On the one hand, Tim says, the solitude allows him to get to intimately experience remote landscapes. On the other, he gets to engage with extraordinary people, most of them very poor in the economic sense, but at the same time hospitable to a degree impossible to fathom in the affluent West.
When, at the end of his trips, he returns to Australia, he wonders at the clutter in Australian life.
The Kazakh saying, “to understand the wolf, you must put the skin of a wolf on and look through its eyes” applies not just to an Aussie among Central Asian nomads, but also to the Aussie that returns home after a long time away.
The warring Mongols rode the Asian steppe with a small bag of grain swinging from their saddle. Tim carried a lot more, but his two packhorses still seldom carried more than 50kg each. The nomads he met had only the basics for survival, including their camel-packed yurt homes.
To a man who has spent most of his youth living with only as much as he can carry, Western life can look suffocatingly over-burdened.
Which may be why when we spoke at the end of July, he was packing for a return to Mongolia to lead an expedition, pick up on a suspended relationship with a girl, and plan his next multi-year trip.
* Tim Cope’s six-part documentary, “The Trail of Genghis Khan” is screening at 8pm on Wednesday on ABC2.
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