MAGAN'S WORLD:AS A RECOVERING travel addict, taking on a fortnightly column in Go may not be the wisest move, but I've been clean now for five years. Of course I still occasionally wander (if I had an addiction counsellor I would be hiding my most recent frequent flyers statement from her), but I'm over the mindset that had me perpetually roaming the furthest reaches of the planet. I have a home now. I'm a settled nomad.
For me, it started innocently enough with an interest in St Brendan the Navigator during childhood, followed by a bit of harmless roaming around Europe in my teens. Soon that just wasn't enough and I started down the road towards obsessively reading maps and travel books.
My first cowardly, ham-fisted attempt at true adventure came when I was 20-years-old. I set off overland on a truck from Dublin to Nairobi through the Sahara and central Africa. It was an insatiable craving to get out and explore. I paid £1,000 to a company in Wales to sit on the back of their ex-army truck for six months with 20 others. It changed my life forever. Primarily it made me realise that I had to keep travelling, but I could never travel in a group again.
I spent the next six years wandering around India, South America and Canada, until eventually in 1997 TG4 gave me my own travel series. That was like letting a drunk run a bar. I was out of control. I went everywhere from Greenland to the Gobi desert at the tax-payer's expense . . . Sorry!
Five years later I knew I had to sort myself out or I would end up as one of those lost vagabonds forever condemned to wander remote areas. I came home and built a little straw house in Westmeath, like I had seen done in Africa, and began writing books about my travels.
It was only once I had settled, that I realised I wasn't alone in my addiction. All around me were people heading off on new adventures to South Africa, Florida, Argentina, Dubai. At first I thought it was just people finding novel ways to spend their money, but over time I began to realise they
were expressing a deep ingrained curiosity about the world.
As I travelled around Ireland doing book readings, people would introduce me to the local adventurer in their own community - the quiet figure in the corner who had been a blacksmith in New Mexico, the elderly neighbour who had been logging in Montana or on the missions to Africa. These were people just like me, but from a earlier generation. People for whom a life working in a factory in Boston or Birmingham would not have been tenable. They had to roam further afield seeking adventure - real adventure, not the lily-livered approximation that Lonely Planet-dependent milksops like I made do with.
These early pioneers of Irish travel are still among us, often ignored by the community, who couldn't make sense of their exotic tales of getting dragged under the ice by huskies or mixing a snake poison serum out of desert leaves.
Now that the Irish are beginning to travel more it's time we seek them outand listen to their tales.
Have I told you about the time I was arrested and jailed twice on the same day in Peru? Or the time I fell off the train on my way to the total eclipse in Rajasthan . . .
What? Is that the end? But, I haven't even . . .
Manchán Magan is a writer and documentary maker. He has published books on his adventures in South America and India - Angels & Rabies, (Brandon, 2006) and Manchán's Travels (Brandon, 2007). His new book on Africa will be published in Sept. He has made over 30 travel documentaries and he presents the RTÉ radio travel series, The Big Adventure. He has published two Irish travelogues