Leonid Rogozov – a hero-surgeon
Remember Jerri Nielson Fitzgerald, the American doctor who diagnosed herself with breast cancer at Antarctica’s Amundsen-Scott Station? It’s impossible to get people in or out of most of Antarctica during the winter, so the US Air Force dropped in chemotherapy meds and she had her non-medical colleagues perform a biopsy.

That’s pretty badass, but as usual Russia has us beat in this department. Meet Dr. Leonid Rogozov, perhaps the only person in history who’s ever had to remove his own appendix (there was another guy in 1921, Evan O’Neill Kane, but he only did it to prove a point). Rogozov was the only doctor stationed at Novolazarevskaya in the winter of 1961, and after diagnosing himself with acute appendicitis realized he’d have to operate or die. He assembled a crack medical team consisting of a meteorologist and a mechanical engineer, who both um, held the mirror, and proceeded to cut a 12cm hole in his own abdomen. He injected antibiotics into the incision, stitched it up and within a week he’d fully recovered.

I don’t know who writes English Russia, but sometimes they hit the nail on the head:

“An astronaut-pilot of the USSR, a Hero of the Soviet Union, German Titov wrote in his book “My blue planet”:

“In our country an exploit is life itself.

… We admire the Soviet doctor Boris Pastukhov, who injected himself with plague vaccine before applying it on the sick people: we envy the courage of the Soviet doctor Leonid Rogozov who made an appendix removal operation on himself in the hard conditions of the Antarctic expedition.

Sometimes I reflect upon this in solitude and ask myself if I could do the same and only one answer comes to my mind: ‘I would do my best…’“

The Mobile Lawyer – One Lap, No Jetlag
“I was an attorney in Northwest Arkansas that would rather be traveling the world. So I did.”

Michael Hodson is traveling across the world without getting on a plane. He’s in Thailand now, but he’s already made it through South America, Africa, Eastern Europe and across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railway. You can follow his Twitter here.

Riding Out The Economy
Tony and Cengiz are two awesome dudes who had pretty much the same idea I did.

Cengiz and I saw the end of college approaching and didn’t know what to do. He was working as a freelance photographer and concert videographer and I took a job teaching summer school English at Universities in Ohio and W.V. We were in the Midwest, making little money, and not thrilled with our jobs. The answer? Well, we didn’t know, so like any true debauched adventurers, we set off for the “Far East.”

Be sure to check out the best part of their project, the two fantastic videos they’ve edited together. Here’s the Bangkok one:

Stuck In Desert, Crazy Frenchman Builds Motorcycle Out Of Busted Citroën 2CV
Emile Leray drove a crappy French car into the Moroccan desert with ten days of rations. When it broke down in the middle of nowhere, he did what anybody would have – he busted the car apart and built a motorcycle.

I can’t tell if this is art or if Leray actually pulled it off as advertised, but with a picture like this I guess it doesn’t really matter:

Werner Herzog has done some insane things. He’s been shot at several times, eaten shoes on lost bets and turned down offers to murder troublesome crew members. He’s put some of the most bizarre stories ever told onto film, and he’s now offering a weekend seminar to show you how to do the same thing.

Werner Herzog opens Rogue Film School

“Now Werner Herzog is to enter the classroom, offering students the chance to benefit from his years of experience making movies in extreme locations and under inauspicious circumstances. The Werner Herzog school of guerrilla film-making is open for business, offering a weekend course with the veteran German director of Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Rescue Dawn, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde for only $1,450 (£882).“

Herzog’s philosophy goes way beyond film itself. The website has a number of excellent lines to take away, but my favorite is:

“Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.”

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Werner Herzog without mentioning this BBC interview, in which he’s shot with a pellet gun and reacts only with “What was that? … It’s not a significant bullet.”

Dutch bid to thwart young sailor

“Social workers in the Netherlands have taken legal action to try to stop a 13-year-old girl from sailing around the world on her own.
They want Laura Dekker to be made a ward of court, so that her parents, who support her plans, temporarily lose the right to make decisions about her.“

This, of course, sounds completely insane, but no more insane than the fact that she was born on a yacht during a round-the-world trip and did seven-weeks solo when she was eleven. Now she’s looking so set off around the world and apparently already has sponsors, but that nasty, no-good Dutch government never lets anyone have any fun. She’s aiming to beat the record for youngest sailor to circumnavigate the planet, currently at seventeen and held by American Zac Sunderland.

Of his travels, Sunderland said, “In other countries, 13 people are living in a dirt hut and when you meet them, they’re the kindest, most generous people,” which is basically what the rest of America thinks about ‘other countries’. Dekker, on the other hand, had something a little more insightful.

“I want simply to learn about the world and to live freely.”

Me too Laura, me too.

Hemingway said that nothing is any good unless it’s finished. This is the story of something that was almost good.

“In 2006, Zach Levenburgh and Graham French set foot on a voyage which would be the longest moped trip in history. Their five month, 13,000 mile trip to the southern most tip of South America at speeds of around 30 miles per hour are a testament that travel is not solely about the destination.”

The two succeeded, pulling into Ushuaia – the southernmost city in the world – in May of 2006. They published a photo book of their adventure appropriately titled “Moped to South America” and had planned put together a documentary with the footage they’d shot.

Unfortunately, the last two weeks of footage were stolen at the very end of the trip. The two were so determined to finish the documentary that they actually flew back to Argentina a year later, spent a month reshooting everything they lost and released two trailers on YouTube (1, 2). The documentary was screened in August of 2007.

And then… nothing. It’s been over two years since the premiere of the movie and it’s nowhere to be found – it itsn’t available on DVD or for download. There’s exactly one site on the internet where you can buy their book. Mopedtosouthamerica.com is dead. Their trip blog was half-assed to begin with, but it ends abruptly and offers no hints as to where this all went. They didn’t even bother to link their trailers.

I wonder if they just got lazy. It’s heartbreaking that such an ambitious trip should fade into obscurity, relegated to the netherworld of Google’s cache, but there’s an lesson to be learned here: you have to follow through. Unless you want to keep it a secret, the adventure isn’t over when you go home – the rest of the world couldn’t be there with you, so if you want your trip to have an impact on anybody you have to document it. If you can’t recreate the places you went and the people you met with photos, video or good writing, the journey will be for you and you alone.

Stories are only good if they’re told. A novel is nothing if never written down, a film useless if never shot. The adventure is just the story, the bare bones of what meaning it may hold.

How will we hear about yours?

Nowadays teaching English in Japan is a tried and true vehicle of expat life, but that wasn’t always the case. The profession didn’t really exist in its present form until the asset price bubble of the late 1980s, when a condo building in Ginza was worth more than several African nations and Japanese people were practically dumping money on all the white guys they could find. Of course, the Japanese had wanted to study English back before the Bubble too. Way, way back in fact – all the way back to the 1848 arrival of one anachronistically named Ranald MacDonald, the very first English teacher in Japan.

To do MacDonald’s story justice I need to start with two points:

– Japan wasn’t really a place you could just “go”. Between 1633 and 1853 it was the most isolated country in the world, North Korea’s nineteenth century analogue. Japanese who attempted to leave and foreigners who tried to enter could be put to death. There were some trade concessions to the Chinese, Koreans and Dutch, but they were limited to certain ports and were almost never allowed inland.

- Ranald MacDonald may, in fact, have been the single least likely person on the planet to end up teaching in Japan. He was born in the first American settlement on the west coast thirteen years after it was founded and only thirty years after anyone bothered to explore the area. Fort Astoria was a tiny trading post in the middle of hundreds upon hundreds of miles of Pacific wilderness, in a time when the area didn’t belong to anybody but competing merchant companies. His mother, Raven (or Princess Sunday, whichever sounds less like a Disney movie), was the daughter of a powerful Chinook leader. His father, Archibald, was a Scottish fur trader who’d been living in the wilds of America since he was 23.

When MacDonald was nine or ten, three Japanese fishermen wound up in Oregon after being caught in a storm (hilariously enough, they’d only meant to go 150 miles up the coast of Japan. oops). The men left such an impact on MacDonald that he resolved to get to Japan any way he could, despite the threat of death by Japanese authorities. After a few years in higher education and a lame stint as a bank clerk, he threw his arms up, said “screw this place” and left to sail the world.

MacDonald eventually convinced a whaling ship to drop him off the coast of Japan in a rowboat, washing up on an island off Hokkaido and claiming he was shipwrecked. The government sent him to Nagasaki, the only remotely international city in Japan, where he was imprisoned in a temple for safekeeping (he raved about Japanese hospitality for the rest of his life, no joke). Being an educated man he took to teaching English and western geography to upper-class samurai who had experience with the Dutch. One of his students was the genius Einosuke Moriyama, who would later act as interpreter to Matthew Perry‘s efforts to open the country.

MacDonald was in Japan for less than a year before being “rescued” by an American navy sloop, spending the next decade or so traveling the world before settling in British Columbia. He died in the arms of his neice on August 24th, 1894.

Ranald MacDonald’s last words were, “Sayonara, my dear, sayonara…”

Looks like John Yettaw, the guy who broke into Aung San Suu Kyi’s house, made it back to America.

Suu Kyi intruder returned to US

“The man jailed for visiting Burma’s detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has returned home to the US.
John Yettaw arrived in Chicago from Bangkok, where he had been treated in hospital after being deported from Burma on Sunday.“

Suu Kyi, on the other hand, remains under house arrest.

Jacob Holdt spent five years hitchhiking a hundred thousand miles across America, taking more than fifteen thousand pictures and developing them with the money he made selling his own blood. His photos, which he never intended to take in the first place, are a comprehensive documentary of class and race in 1970s America.

Holdt was hitchhiking from Canada to Mexico, not planning to stay in the US, but he found something in America that most people born here never seem to notice. He saw the violence and hatred endemic to this country firsthand and resolved to understand it, so he traveled from ghetto to ghetto and lived with the most marginalized of America’s citizens. He seems to have an almost supernatural ability to make friends with anybody, which allowed him access to not only crime-ridden slums but KKK meetings, the Rockefeller family and even the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee.

Nowadays he lectures, tours with his show and works for the poor all over the world. He also maintains this staggeringly enormous collection of email jokes.

Holdt’s site is a bit disorganized, but there’s so much fantastic stuff on there you can hardly blame him. He’s struck a wonderful balance between hubris and humility, detailing the mindset, methods (or lack thereof) and circumstances that got him in and out of all the unimaginable places without ever coming off as anything but geniune. See his short biography, a political interpretation and “How I made my pictures“.

“That I am so often seen in America as someone who has accomplished the impossible may actually say more about the feelings of powerlessness in American youth today than about me.“