MAGAN'S WORLD: MANCHÁN MAGAN'Stales of a travel addict
IN THE PAST two decades Mike Horn has probably seen more of the world than anyone alive. In 1997 he swam the Amazon in six months, hunting for food and sleeping in trees. In 1999 he circumnavigated the equator: walking, cycling and sailing across the Atlantic, the Pacific, South America, and the entire breath of Africa. It took him 18 months. In 2002 he solo-circumnavigated the Arctic Circle, a distance of 20,000km, through Greenland, Canada, Alaska, the Bering Strait and Russia/Siberia – while pulling a sledge with 180kg of equipment and food. Then in 2007 he climbed Everest without oxygen.
He is now in the midst of his most audacious expedition, sailing to all seven continents over four years to introduce young people to the beauty of their planet. He designed and built a high-tech exploration yacht, the Pangaea, and has been bringing groups of young people on life-changing journeys to the Antarctic, India, New Zealand, the Arctic, Himalayas and Mongolia.
His next expedition is to the North Pole and he is looking for dynamic self-starters, aged 15-20, to join him on the journey to experience and explore the natural world, learn about its challenges, find possible solutions, and above all, act swiftly to help change things for the better. For Horn, young people are the world’s greatest energy source. His travels opened his eyes to the alarming changes occurring in our environment and he now regards it as his urgent duty to motivate them to become involved in the stewardship of the planet and to find solutions to the challenges we face. If your child strikes you as a budding Shackleton point them towards pangaea-yep.com. The deadline is April 17th.
Horn is being sponsored by Mumm champagne who were looking for someone to lead a set of eccentric expeditions to commemorate the first Frenchman to cross the Antarctic, Commander Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who celebrated Bastille Day 1904 by laying a table on the ice and uncorking a bottle of G H Mumm Cordon Rouge – thereby setting in train a century of champagne-themed PR stunts, most notably the splashing of bubbly in the faces of Formula One winners.
Mumm’s commemoration entailed champagne dinners cooked by top chefs in outlandish locations. In 2008 Michelin two-starred Sylvestre Wahid cooked on an iceberg in Greenland, while three-star Michelin chef Gérard Boyer cooked in the Antarctic, and in 2009 chef Mauro Colagreco prepared lunch on a sandbank in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The most recent meal was last autumn when three-star Michelin chef Alain Passard created a Mongolian meal in the Gobi Desert.
There is rumour of a fifth and final meal with the public invited to compete for a place at the table. In return for Horn’s help in hosting and providing transport for the few lucky sybarites who got to savour these exotic meals, Mumm got some enviable photo opportunities of rare vintages and haute cuisine in exotic locations, (which they may be using a century later as proof of disappeared biospheres, just as they still use their 1904 image today). This continues a long tradition of mutual cooperation between adventurers and luxury brands.
Travel and displays of decadence were deemed as elitist and inherently non-democratic in the past and yet are now available to all. The Irish have become great travellers, but we are still less comfortable with luxury – or, is that just me? The exclusivity and indulgence associated with rare champagne and haute couture was always more a Latin than a northern European phenomenon. Mike Horn, who is South African, says: “Today, real luxury is about the freedom of making your dreams come true, whether they are big or small, so that they become daily victories. The impossible only exists until we find a way of making it possible.”
* See pangaea-yep.com