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Asia Answers the Call of the Wild
Affluence, fashion—and daring—have created a new breed of adventurer
By ALEX PERRY
There is an ice chute on Mount McKinley in Alaska called the Orient Express. The tag refers to the disproportionate number of Asian climbers among the 20 who have died since the early 1970s on the most rapid and dangerous descent from North America's highest peak—1,800 m of sheer rock gully, starting 6,000 m up. Rangers and guides working the 6,164-m summit say, despite some world-class climbing teams, Asians—Japanese, Taiwanese, South Koreans, Chinese, Indians—have a reputation for recklessness. "The classic example is a group flying in from Asia, going down to K Mart to get their equipment and heading up the mountain," says Gordon Janow, of guide company Alpine Ascents. "There's a real lack of preparation."
Only a generation ago, few Asians willingly went into the great outdoors if they could avoid it. Adventure was for soldiers, bandits or the occasional eunuch—people of such lowly status they had little to lose. Urban Elites lived behind high walls and left the countryside to peasants, the wilderness to wandering monks and the mountains to evil spirits and uncivilized hill tribes. The orderly, conservative values of Confucianism and Hinduism promoted lives that were settled, rule-laden and confined. Besides, centuries of eking out a living at the mercy of floods, droughts and marauding foreign hordes argued against romantic visions of either nature or the outside world. The Noble Savage had no Asian parallel.
But as affluence has spread —and with it stress-filled desk-bound lives spent in modern canyons of glass and concrete—Asians are suddenly nostalgic for the beauty and simplicity of nature and the elemental challenges it provides. Indian adventurer Mandip Singh Soin, who now runs speciality travel firm Ibex Expeditions, began hiking on weekends when he was 14. Then after university he took a year off. "That was it," says Singh, 44. "I traveled all the time and knew that I could not have a job—however important—that involved sitting in an office all day pushing files."
While some are lured by the call of the wild, other Asians are feeling the pull of fashion. Action-packed weekends of trekking, mountain-biking, surfing and skiing have become signs of chic affluence, as they are in the West. Advertisers push the notion of the outdoors as one big playground for rugged traveler-executives and nailing a peak or a snowboard halfpipe as fulfilling as any boardroom deal. And where aspiration leads, fashion follows. From outdoor apparel-maker Patagonia's eight Japanese stores to the tractor-grip trainers of Hong Kong's tai tais, adventurer chic is suddenly cool.
Bill Kulczycki, Tokyo-based international vice president of Patagonia, says disposable incomes and the advent of Western-style leisure time has prompted a more laid-back lifestyle. "It's that Californian life that they want," he says, "the surfing at lunchtime thing." Robert Houston, editor-in-chief of adventure travel magazine Action Asia, adds Japan now has the most surfers—1 million—outside the U.S. and one in 10 in Japan skis. More also visit Nepal, with its whitewater rapids, bungee jumps and rock climbs, than any other nationality. "Asians are no longer intimidated by the outdoors," says Houston.
And as Asia opens up to the world, it's producing more and more top-notch adventurers. Take Japan's Takako Takano, 38, who has skied across the Siberian Chukotski Peninsula, parachuted near the North Pole and canoed down the Amazon. She made history in 1995 as a member of an international team that was the first to cross the frozen expanse of the Arctic Ocean from Siberia to Canada, via the North Pole, by dogsled. Or South Korean mountaineer Heo Young Ho, one of a handful of climbers to achieve the so-called Adventure Grand Slam—reaching the highest peak on the seven continents, plus the North and South Poles.
Some suggest this slightly loopy compulsion to test body and mind against the elements, to set new standards of strength and endurance, is neither Eastern or Western but countercultural. "There's the ski bum mentality," says Patagonia's director in Japan Bill Werlin, "kids with no money going out snowboarding, surfing. The idea of saying, 'To hell with it, I'm going climbing'; getting away from the historical national effort and getting out there. It's making a real difference to the whole essence of nations." As Korean climber Heo, 47, puts it: "It's better to die in the mountains than be hit by a car." Just dying in bed, one gets the feeling, is no longer an option.
With reporting by Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi, Donald Macintyre/Seoul and Ned Randolph/Hong Kong
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