Around the World in Ten Thousand Days

Karl Bushby’s 28-year walk home (via Mefi) is a fantastic read, with a perfect ending. Realising he’d left behind a son was unsettling, despite their forced separation when Bushby was still a serviceman. But his comment about past explorers gave me pause: When you look at some of our great heroes, like Shackleton and Cook, they were the worst family men you could humanly imagine. They abandoned families left, right and centre. That’s the bit that people don’t think about. Those people had families back home, and they never saw their father. It shows considerable self-awareness, recognising that he’d been as bad a family man as they were. Unlike some fathers, at least, he didn’t disappear completely. Robert Falcon Scott left behind a wife and an infant son when he left for the Antarctic and died there. Werner Herzog is making a documentary about Bushby; the director of Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man seems the perfect choice. Hiking the world in search of rare cheeses. The Guna kept…

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