I've heard alot about this book but only just found it online to read, here.
It's brilliantly eccentric. In the 1980's the Crane cousins cycle from Bangladesh, over the Himalayas, across the full length of Tibet and into the Gobi on light weight racing bikes carrying only a few kilos of gear each. No tent, no stoves, no change of clothes. Weight was so important to them that they refused to carry any food on their bikes and never more than one liter of water each at a time. One of the funniest bits is when they have to spend a night under the stars without even a torch or the means to light a fire.
Anyone planning a similar ride should have a read before they kit their bike out like a tank and load it up with 35+ kilos of gear.
Definitely one of my favorite travel books.
Right, i'm off to cut my gear levers in half....Enjoy
I read the book quite a while ago. Some adventure. I did read he got quit a bit of flak for "living of the locals...."
It's a good read isn't it.
With the bikes it wasn't just that they were lightweight road bikes - those can be pretty robust if you've got no luggage, they didn't even adapt the gears for high altitude riding on dirt roads. No way could I push gears that big over the himalaya.
I've taken some ideas from what they did, but I'm not into scrounging from people who are already on the edge of survival, and I like some level of comfort.
I too read this book immediately after it's release, further i met the crane twins in the canteen of the bbc wales studios following interviews on our respective trips. Actually nice guys.It's a good read and i agree accepting help to fuel yourself from a people who are already on the base line isn't good advocacy for light weight expeditioning.
regards tulley mars
Nicholas Crane walked from Cap Finistre at the Atlantic coast in Spain to Istanbul all across Europe. The book about it Clear Waters Rising is a good read too.
I don't understand what connection there is between scrounging and light weight touring. As if those fully loaded never use any of the resources of the local people. What difference is in cooking the food you bought at the market vs. eating the food you pay in a restaurant? Or camping in a tent vs. paying simple accomodation in people's houses? I'd say the former is a bit on a stingy side.
Igor, I certainly believe that paying for accommodation when it is available is ethically preferable to camping when in a poor country, and probably also safer. I think there are two ethical concerns at what the Cranes were doing. (1) They were relying on people's instinct or custom for hospitality. It is one thing to enjoy such hospitality when it is offered; another thing to expect and rely on it. (2) The quantity of food in the countryside in places like China can be very scanty, especially after the state enforcers have been along to remove what they want to take to the city. Since they had the opportunity to buy food in the city, that would have been the ethical course. I would observe that some friends of mine had difficulty even buying enough food on a tour of remote parts of Mongolia.
Well, China had obviuously changed enormously since the Cranes were there. I can't imagine an area in China remote enough where people have so little that they couldn't give something to a tourist who is willing to pay.
A propos Mongolia - there is a story maybe much more brilliant then the Cranes' one. There were two guys who came to cycle in Mongolia and brought 2 months worth of food with them. They had about 90 kg of food carying it in two trailers. At the end they had to give some food to local people to prevent their trailers from falling appart. A touching moment which brought tears to my eyes was when they were camping beside a yurt and a girl brought them warm milk in the morning. They gave a 1 kg bag of rice in return. A touching story of ultimate self-sustainibility. Had they brought also all the water they needed, I would bow my head in deepest respect.
In general it is a good idea to trade with the locals. The difficulty arises when one arrives in areas where food is short and/or not traded.
There is the opposite risk - "banana tourism". South Africans who travel into Mozambique in their camper vans filled with most of their food, are said jokingly to buy only bananas from the locals, hence the insult "banana tourists". Tourists are supposed to bring commerce and wealth, but banana tourists don't.
But in remoter parts of Bolivia one does not find staple foodstuffs for sale, only a few luxuries like beer and biscuits. People operate in a mainly subsistence lifestyle, and periodically travel to wholesale markets to sell their surplus production - their is insufficient demand for local foodshops to exist. In larger settlements, where urban trades are carried on, and therefore a population who buy rather than grow food, there is no shortage of food for sale. Even in a bad year.
The situation is much more difficult in a country like Ethiopia. There, the extent of the area where one would not find food for sale in the sense in which we are used to, and where people do not have anything to spare, is much larger than in Bolivia - 70% of the population is engaged in agriculture, and hence the size of the population who buys food in shops is quite small; because people can barely grow enough to live themselves, let alone sell to support the other 30%, then 10% of the population rely on food aid in an average year, and as much as 30% in a bad year.
In China (and also in Myanmar), the enforced rendering up of production by agricultural producers to the state means they may frequently have very little left for themselves, more especially in the past, but it is still common today. People starved to death under Mao, such was his desire to export food to pay the Russians for nuclear and military technology. Collective agriculture was principally aimed at putting the state in control, so that it had visibility of production, and could therefore enforce rendition. The extremity of the policy has plainly reduced over the years since Mao, recognising that malnourished farmers are actually less productive. But collective agriculture and enforcement of rendition to the state persists in many poorer parts of China.
I tour on a very lightweight racing bike and keep the weight down as much as possible but I pay for what I need. Agree that in some parts of the world, there are many things that are just not available. When I lived in a small village in Malawi, my diet consisted mainly of rice(expensive for locals), pumpkin leaves, cabbage and the odd piece of meat and it had nothing to do with money. There was just not much else...for luxury items like bread and potatoes, we had to go to the city.
Now... Is it wrong to buy a chicken from a farmer knowing that he may not have much to eat himself? Personally, I don't think so because he is making the choice to sell what he has in order to buy something else. As long as it's fair trading at a fair price, there shouldn't be too much guilt involved. At the same time, I do agree that abusing of people's hospitality without compensation is nothing to be proud of and trying to bargain things down to the lowest possible price with the poorest of the poor isn't something I admire. Doesn't mean that I like paying twice the price of locals for the same goods but if that means two dollars instead of one, it has to be put into perspective. I'm not sure that I would put camping on the ethically doubtful category. It doesn't really impact on anyone if you pitch a tent in a deserted area and if you ask someone to camp on their property and give them something in return, it's similar to staying in a hotel. Hotel or guesthouse owners are definitely not the poorest of the poor. Of course, one can always argue that as tourists, we should be contributing to the local economy but where does it stop? Does that mean we have an ethical obligation to bring back souvenirs too?
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