Be The Jam

I made a bit of a mistake the other night, I had a chat with a friend of mine who has actually been to the jungle. She and her boyfriend managed to get separated from the group they were with and then walked off through the undergrowth looking for them and so became lost. Apparently this experience was terrifying, they were constantly being bitten by insects and the humidity was unbearable. I managed to put all this out of my mind until yesterday when browsing through a bookshop I discovered Bear Grylis' book on survival which has a chapter on the jungle. Reading this chapter has not put me at ease. I think I need to spend at least as much time as I possibly can on getting physically and mentally prepared.

Good news though

There is now £94.41 in the going away fund

My current focus of attention is, rather boringly, on fundraising / paperwork / earning money. None of which are much fun to do and I rather imagine are not that interesting to read about either. The interesting bit, actually practicing for living in the jungle, has rather fallen by the way side of late on account of the sheer amount of time that the other activities take up. Such is life.

I have a question for you.

Would it be cheating if I was to put a post on this blog asking the people who read the blog to put links to it from as many places on the web as they can find? If this were to happen it would increase both traffic to the site and the status that search engines consider it to have and so increase the potential for it to make money.

"Such a request is unethical", discuss.

Admitedly I had been away from home for a few days so i suppose I can't complain that when I got back things where askew but it it a bit annoying to get back to find the 300 gram bar of Swiss chocolate I had bought in Geneva for my parents had gone. Well I didn't come back and notice it was missing it was more that I came back and found the chocolate wrapper torn and scattered about the place, it was this that alerted me to the fact that the chocolate was missing. I can't say for sure that it was badgers that took it, but I suspect that the door mice that live next door would have had a bit of trouple lifting let alone carrying off / eating that much chocolate, after all it took them nearly three weeks to eat half a loaf of bread.

I have had about five hours sleep since Friday morning, have walked numerous miles, danced a fair bit, worked for about 32 hours on my feet and not been home. I stopped drinking coffee a long time ago but over the past couple of days I seem to have drunk  quite a few. This is probably not a very healthy was to cary about the business of living but I think it is probably sensible to start getting my body and mind used to prolonged periods of discomfort and lack of sleep. Then again it might not be the most sensible thing to do at the moment as I really need to be on the ball when speaking to potential backers. 

Yadda yadda.

More interestingly, what with this site also being a travel guide, a couple of friends of mine are currently en route to Transnistria.

WHERE?

From what I understand Transnistria is a break-away Modovian republic / Soviet style communist state / gun running and people smuggling capital of Europe. Quite why they have gone I don't know. If anything goes wrong I rather suspect that they will be in an awful lot of trouble as there are only two countries in the world that recognise Transnistria as a country, there are no diplomatic relations with the UK. They have been advised by some military types to treat the boarder guards as they would a rabid dog, quite how offering bribes fits into this picture I don't know. If they get back I'll be trying to persuade them to write about their adventures for this site. If they don't get back I'm going to have Rob's flat until his release.

I just received this email from them. 

"Am currently driving across Romania with a guy whose usual job is getting Romanians through customs at Dover and finding them illegal jobs. The Daily Mail would love him and he's being very helpful to us, if a little Borat-esque.  Just had a near miss with a horse and cart but fortunately it only scraped the paint work and left a little blood.

Crazy place. Border awaits."

At work on Sunday we re-cast the popular Star Wars film with politicians

C3P0 - Tony Blair

R2D2 - John Prescot

Luke Skywalker - Charles Kenedy

Boba Fet - Peter Mandelson

Princess Lea - Simon Hughes

Yoda - Margret Becket

Darth Maul - Gorden Brown

The Dark Side - Clare Short

Jar Jar Binks - David Cameron

The Ewoks - The Liberal Democrats

Jabba The Hut - Mark Oten

Chewbacca - Ken Clark

Neil Kinnock - The Emperor

The Sith - Peter Mandelson

The Death Star - Margret Thatcher

However.

Hmmm, I seem to have quite forgotten what I was going to write.

Er.

Well this is interesting.

OK then, I guess I'll just have to do a quick update.

In the next couple of weeks, or so, I'm gonig to be on Saturday Live on Radio 4 talking to Fi Glover about living in the woods and the intention to live in the jungle, hopefully that will raise the profile of this venture a little. Did I mention this before? I can't remember, anyway it's a big step and so I'll probably keep mentioning it.

The next few weeks are crunch time as far as the whole venture is concerned, it could all still fall apart for lack of funding so it's a matter of working all hours and having fingers crossed. One thing I am considering if the budget is really tight is reducing the length of stay to six months as this significantly decreases the amount the expedition will cost.

Readership of this site has increased by roughly 1000 people in the past month so I think it is about time to start selling advertising space here to try to raise some more cash.

If you are interested in advertising please email me hugh.sawyer@gmail.com or if you are interested in becoming a Friend of Mission Improbable and haing a link put up from the all shiny new "Friends of Mission Improbable" page have a look at this.

I did have lots of things I wanted to say but I have been up and mostly on my feet for 35.5 hours now and my thought proccess are begining to suffer, I think I might go to bed.

Perhaps this post might better be called High Horse as I am on mine today. 

 
A battle sometimes decides everything; and sometimes the most trifling thing decides the fate of a battle.

Napoleon Bonaparte 

The overwhelming aim of the trip to the jungle and this website is to raise money for Rainforest Concern to support the work that they do in protecting the rainforest. There is another side to this site, an idea that is why this site is called Be The Jam. It's basically that mankind is destroying the world and the idea that "there is nothing I can do about it" or "it's someone else's problem to deal with" is wrong, the only people who can do something about the state of the world are us, the ordinary people, not the politicians or celebrities or boffins.

When you look at the size of the areas the vast tracks of land that they are protecting from destruction seem huge until you compare them to the areas of land under threat or already stripped bare. It would be easy to dismiss protection efforts as being just a drop in the ocean, an ultimately futile gesture. Surely though such an attitude would be pessimistic to the point of admitting defeat. The world might well seem to be full of big events controlled by powers unassailable by us the ordinary individuals but if you look a little closer you com to realise that life is just made up of lots of very small events that combine together to bring about a result. The Berlin Wall for example fell because the overwhelming desire of the people behind made keeping it up unsubstantial. This is not to say that various non Soviet political powers did no help to create an invironment in which the revolution could take place but ultimately it was down to the ordinary individual to decide that enough was enough, once enough individuals had decide this the tipping point was reached and the swell of public desire to be free was unstoppable. When it came down to it the Wall came due to ordinary people deciding to do something. Right now we are in a situation where our politicians are increasingly keen to set up a frame work  in which protection of the environment is assured, but once again it is down to individuals to act, to reverse the tide.

It all starts with the smallest of actions.

 At the risk of preaching to the converted take a look at this film when you have a spare ten minutes The Curse of the Carrier Bag

Towards the Tipping Point

 You may well have noticed the banner add at the top of this page, it is a link to the Live Earth site and contains information about an event called Save Our Selves (SOS) on the seventh of July, if you can't be bothered to read the site this is what it's about in their own words.

"SOS is designed to trigger a global movement to combat our climate crisis. It will reach people in every corner of the planet through television, film, radio, the Internet and Live Earth, a 24-hour concert on 7/7/07 across all 7 continents that will bring together more than 100 of the world’s top musical acts. Live Earth alone will engage an audience of more than 2 billion people through concert attendance and broadcasts. MSN has partnered with SOS to use its reach to make the Live Earth concerts available across the globe. The Live Earth audience, and the proceeds from the concerts, will create the foundation for a new, multi-year global effort to combat the climate crisis led by The Alliance for Climate Protection and its Chair, Vice President Al Gore. SOS was founded by Kevin Wall, who won an Emmy as Worldwide Executive Producer of Live 8."

Exciting stuff. 

Things are picking up speed, getting done, moving on. All the various threads of Mission Improbable that I have been working on over the last year have started coming together. It is all quite a relief, not that things are in anyway far enough along to be in any way remotely able to be considered as finalised but it's getting there. Trying to get this together has involved a huge mass of planning and ideas, many hours spent networking and emailing people and a lot more time just spent thinking about everything from whether it would be going against the environmental aims of the mission to seek sponsorship from airlines through to how much string I will need to take. Mostly I have been so swamped with ideas, plans and ongoing conversations that I have not been able to see the wood for the trees, it is quite a relief to discover that it's going to work. I'm not exactly sure how the whole thing will pan out just yet as there are still a large number of variables but I'm certainly a lot more confident about things than I was a month ago.

One of the developments that I can probably talk about at this stage is the fact that a friend of mine might well be coming along as well, not until July but it would be very good to have some company. Especially as Felix is a doctor, I quite like the idea of having a doctor about the place, especially one as bright as Felix (Oxford and Harvard both educated him). When I got back to the UK from Italy and heard about junior doctors being awarded posts via a system that was not much more complicated than pulling names out of a hat I was outraged, the very idea that the NHS was being forced to employ people on anything other that ability seemed completely outrageous. However, Felix is now without employment from July and is seemingly keen to come to the jungle. Best of all he has quite an interest in tropical diseases! Bargain. Now if only someone would sack Ray Mears.

Somewhere I'll be visiting  

Slowly but surely things are picking up pace, I detect positive movement towards actually getting to South America and living in it. There still remains a mind numbingly large amount on things to be done and my mind is pretty constantly racing from the moment I wake to the moment I go to bed. June the 20th seems only a moment away.

Today's main concerns are finding portable solar panels that will cope with 12 months use in up to 90% humidity and either a satellite phone or a satellite modem that will be able to cope in the same environment. I also need to acquire a decent head torch and a camera.

Developments

I have had an offer of fishing lessons.

I'm talking with a major media organisation about writing a weekly blog for one of their websites.

There are a few other things going on behind the scenes that will raise the profile of Mission Improbable and so increase the potential for raising money for Rainforest Concern. However, these things are all in the early stages of development so I don't want to talk about them here incase they fall through.