The great age of planetary exploration has passed into history. Ericson and Magellan, Shackleton and Hillary, Livingstone and Rondon... They and their brethren have mapped our oceans and summited our mountains; they've journeyed along our rivers and charted our caves. They have claimed all the earthly firsts that we consider worthy. But while ours may not be the age of firsts, the age of great adventures, it might well be the age of admiring those firsts, of looking back with our modern technology and our gift of hindsight and standing in awe of the achievements of those who did so much with so little. In Riding The Desert Trail, Ms. Selby has done more than stand in awe. She has re-traced one of the most epic of African adventures and, in doing so, given her readers a glimpse of both the African culture that hosted her and the singleminded drive to explore that impelled the great adventurers that preceded her.
In 1988, Ms. Selby, a writer and avid cyclist, set upon a long and dangerous journey. Traveling from her native England with only her bicycle, some diplomatic papers and a minimum amount of cash, she landed in Egypt with the intention of bicycling the full 4,500-mile length of the Nile valley. Inspired by Livingstone and Baker who, only a century earlier, had risked their lives to discover the source of the great river, she devoted the following few months of her life to adventuring from the smog of chaotic Cairo all the way to distant and war-torn Uganda in the hopes of completing an epic journey that, even a hundred years on from the age of adventure, remains difficult and dangerous.
The desolation of Sudan and the discord of Uganda would be treacherous challenges for natives to the region. For a lone, foreign woman to journey through this part of the world, a region that has never known, in living memory, the moderating hand of modern technology and organized education... The perils are obvious. And yet, supported by the sturdy bike beneath her and buoyed by the families along the way who generously gave of what little they had to aid her, Ms. Selby steered into the winds of risk and history to achieve, to see for her own eyes the mythical source of a river that has been feeding civilizazions for thousands of years.
Riding The Desert Trail is as much a memoir as it is a travel log. After all, it's difficult to write of such an epic journey without revealing much of ones own character. The middle-aged Selby possesses, here, the irrepressible curiosity of youth as, in this recount of her journey, she engagingly describes both the hostile terrain and the fascinating cultures that ply it with only occasional complaints about the physical and sociological roadblocks thrown up in her way. But as much as this work succeeds in its stated aims, of educating the reader about the heartland of Africa, its most powerful message is, to her, an afterthought. In the planning, the execution and the completion of her journey, Ms. Selby devoted months of time and energy, endured risk and hardship, for a single hour, to stand at the source of the Nile and take in its beauty and its history, months for just an hour to view beauty through ones own eyes... It may be that the age of planetary exploration has come and gone, But let us not for a moment think that the human spirit has lost its thirst to see, to experience and to know, to stand next to the history, of our people and our planet, just on the off chance that we can touch the past and the future.
A well-rounded tale marred only by its 1980s context which, from the second decade of the 21st century, is somewhat dated. (4/5 Stars)
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