It’s natural to want to carve your own path when traveling, but sometimes, says our featured contributor Leon McCarron, there’s something special about following in the hallowed footsteps of explorers long gone.
We’re inspired to travel in so many ways. My first desire was to see if the real world matched up to the one I’d read about; my second was to see if I was capable of making my way through either.
Aged 23, I set off alone on a bicycle in a new continent and, to my delight, discovered places and peoples and ideas that I could never have imagined. The world was not as had been described in my books—it was better.
And yet, I’ve always been fascinated by following in the footsteps of someone else—perhaps, initially, it was the appeal of clinging onto the coat-tails of a better, braver explorer, in the hope that some of their wisdom or luck might be transferred onto me.
Lewis and Clark, while in the US army, were tasked with exploring the Pacific Ocean, mapping and reporting back on the tribes they met at the start of the 19th century.
Photo: Leon McCarron
On that first journey, riding across the USA, I carried with me a copy of the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. To Americans, this journey will be familiar, I’m sure, but my European education hadn’t taught me much about the race to explore the Wild West.
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Between 1804 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out from St. Louis, headed for the Pacific Ocean. They were tasked to find a route, map it and report back on the indigenous tribes they encountered, speculating on who may be friendly and who would not. On the eve of their departure, Lewis wrote:
“We were now about to penetrate a country at least 2000 miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trod. The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels we are traveling with contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves…
“Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last 10 years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”
Left: A 23-year-old Leon McCarron reaches the highest point of his solo US bike ride while crossing the Rockies; Right: Finding company on the road in South Dakota.
Photos: Leon McCarron
Now, with a little more knowledge, I can read this with the context of the colonial era—Lewis and Clark are generally regarded as having been respectful, humble travelers who were well received by those that they met, yet it’s also true that their explorations helped set in motion a terrible series of events for the native peoples.
“In the desert, I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance.”
Wilfred Thesiger
But at the age of 23, what I noticed most keenly about those words was that same desire—a need to launch oneself into the unknown, and relish the adventure. Throughout the journey, I enjoyed that camaraderie across time and, equally, I was happy to remind myself that however tough my journey became, at least I didn’t have to deal with quite so many roaming bison as he did.
Leon’s travel companion and fellow adventurer Alastair Humphreys reads Wilfred Thesiger’s accounts of walking across the Empty Quarter desert as they re-trace those same steps.
Photo: Leon McCarron
Having another perspective on the very same point of land was something I appreciated, and a couple of years later I tried to develop the idea further. In the Empty Quarter desert, Alastair Humphreys and I followed in the footsteps of the late and great Wilfred Thesiger. It was Thesiger’s description in Across the Empty Quarter of the inherent value of deprivation and serious physical challenge that made me wonder how I’d respond. He wrote:
“I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which derives from abstinence; the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving of sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.”
Al and I, of course, suffered nowhere near as much as he did. We traveled in relative luxury and dragged a cart full of food and yet, even so (and the modern technology we had) it was hard. It was really hard. We sweated, and toiled, and pushed ever onwards into an all-encompassing desert.
Argentina’s Santa Cruz river valley, explored by one Charles Darwin in the 19th century.
Photos: Leon McCarron
For six weeks, we were surrounded by the same Arabian Sands as him, with a seemingly endless amount of time in which to ponder upon why we were there, and what we hoped to find. In the end, the conclusion I came to was more or less the same as Thesiger’s. And of course, he phrased it more poetically:
“In the desert, I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance.”
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Since then, I’ve used parts of the journeys of ancient travelers like Ibn Battuta in the Middle East, and I’ve followed more modern stories such as Andrew X Pham’s journey in Vietnam. It was in Argentine Patagonia, however, that I read the most remarkable account from one of history’s greatest figures.
In 1834, a British boat that had been charting the coastline of South America paused for a few weeks, and mounted an expedition to explore the Santa Cruz river valley. One of the men who would undertake the journey was a young geologist, and somewhat lost in life. He had failed in his attempts to join the clergy, and ran away to sea to find purpose. His name? Charles Darwin.
There’s something evocative and rewarding about tracing the footsteps of some of the world’s famous explorers.
Photos: Leon McCarron
As I, along with my companions Tom Allen, Jose Argento and our five horses, began our modern day journey in his footsteps, we trod upon the finely polished stones and pebbles that lined the shore of the estuary. I bent down to pick one up, and saw inside the fosillized remains of some long-extinct sea creature.
That night, reading Darwin’s diaries, I discovered he too had done this very same thing. The world, he supposed, must not have always been as it is now. This thought process developed quickly, and formed the basis of what became his great offering to the world: Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, as described in On the Origin of Species.
Do we need someone to guide us in a new place? Of course not. But it is fun, I think, and it gives us a thread to follow.
There’s so much wonder in the idea that a simple act like this can change the course of history. To be able to experience the same place for myself made the idea more real, somehow, and more powerful. To have been there is not a prerequisite to understand, but it did give me something I’ll remember for the rest of my life, helping to re-frame how I see the world around me too—it seems there’s value in everything, even the stones beneath our feet.
The Badlands in the US, a landscape that Lewis and Clark explored between 1804 and 1806, and a journey retraced by Leon McCarron.
Photo: Leon McCarron
These are my stories of letting someone else take me by the hand, for a while, and sharing part of their journey. There are many others who have done so too, and written about it beautifully—Nick Hunt’s account of following travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in Walking the Woods and the Water is wonderful as is, in a different way, William Dalrymple’s account of following Eastern Christianity and those who spread it in From the Holy Mountain.
Do we need someone to guide us in a new place? Of course not. But it is fun, I think, and it gives us a thread to follow. There’s also some comfort in knowing that someone has attempted a journey or a route before us—and yet knowing that our experience will be different and will provide a new set of challenges and rewards. This too is key—following allows the traveler to see how they match up against someone else, and to mark our experience against another.
To be led might seem restrictive, but I usually find that retracing another traveler’s journey can also be liberating. And ultimately, it is down to us how rigidly we stick to their ideas and plans, and how much we simply use their bravery or foresight as inspiration.
I’m a fan of the latter—let’s say, to start on the same track, and perhaps aim for the same destination, but to let the path before us define itself as we move.
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