World adventurer, international river explorer and award-winning author Richard Bangs talks to APT about his captivating travel special
APT recently interviewed world adventurer Richard Bangs about his new Exhcange Service special RICHARD BANGS' ADVENTURES WITH A PURPOSE "Egypt: Quest for the Lord of the Nile" (releasing 9/1/07).
You have been called the father of modern adventure travel. When did you decide you were going to be an adventurer and why?
I don't know if it was ever a conscious decision. I started out as a river guide in the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon in 1969. Very few people had been there. By1969, fewer than a 100 people had been down the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon — so it was a new activity and I loved it. I started a company called Sobek in 1973, and it really wasn't meant to be a company — it was a quest to explore the river with the new technology that was being developed for the Colorado River rafting. I wanted to take [this passion] over seas. My first target was the Blue Nile — because it was called the Grand Canyon of Africa. I got friends and gear together and took it over to Ethiopia and started to raft. It was such a passion; there was no idea that it was going to be the dawn of adventure travel as an industry. I spent several years doing first descents of rivers around the world, starting with many in Ethiopia, and somehow that kind of accidentally became a company, because people wanted to follow in my footsteps … or strokes.
You had named your company after the crocodile god, Sobek, before you even went to the Nile to explore the crocodiles. Why did you have this fascination with the crocodiles? How did this come about?
I was all of 21 years old, and I was casting about for a name for our little expedition. It was not meant to be a company, just an expedition of river-running friends and guides that I had envisioned and decided to put together… So, I went to the library of Congress, and spent a lot of time, actually, researching all the things that could do you harm while floating down a river in Africa — and there were many things, from the hippo to poisonous snakes to unfriendly local peoples to various insect-borne diseases. But the one thing that showed up again and again was the crocodile. So, as I was reading and having nightmares about crocodiles floating down this river and questioning the sanity of my expedition, I came across a citation on Sobek. The Egyptians had worshipped Sobek and they believed that he would let them have safe passage if they paid him proper homage. So I said, that's it, let's call our expedition Sobek.
What was the most dangerous experience you had while traveling the Nile?
I had a number of my rafts bitten by crocodiles over the years, and also by hippos — those were very frightening moments. They gave me a lot of pause. It's not an experience that you want to repeat very often. We had one incident on a river in Egypt where a crocodile clamped his jaws around one of the inflatable rafts. It was being piloted by my friend George Fuller, our doctor on the trip, and he didn't know what to do. His wife grabbed a metal bucket and started hitting the crocodile on the head with the bucket as he was rowing as fast as he could down the stream … She kept hitting him over the head and the crocodile finally got loose.
The program takes you into the pyramids, into the tombs, on the river itself, and beautifully ties together ancient Egypt and modern travel. What can we, as modern
travelers, learn from the past?
The story, I think, is in many ways an environmental one. It's looking at how the crocodiles, the original lords of the Nile River, … in just the last blink have disappeared as man
overpopulated, polluted, dammed and diverted the Nile. Certainly, what happens to the animal kingdom can be looked at as a potential scenario that happens to us as fellow
creatures on the planet. There are perhaps enormous lessons to be observed and learned by seeing what happens to the fate of a very powerful creature that was ultimately overwhelmed by conditions that are man made. They are coming back, which is very exciting.
What is bringing the crocodiles back to the Nile now?
Largely, [it is] a change in consciousness amongst legislators in Egypt. The crocodile has been named an endangered species in Egypt. It's a reversal of the way Egypt used to treat the crocodile — it used to be open season, people could come and hunt, and many professional corporations came and hunted the animal to near extinction. Now, it's illegal. It's not a very effective legal entity, because there are a lot of holes in its net, and there are a lot of poachers. Our hope is that people who enjoy the program and are inspired to travel to Egypt will take some sort of stand against the illegal poaching and trading of crocodiles, and find a way for them to live in harmony with man. There are ways, and crocodiles themselves can become an eco-tourism attraction, [just as] predators have become in Africa, lions and grizzly bears have become in Alaska, and sharks have become off of Africa. They can become a major source of tourism income if allowed to survive and be accessible.
Why did you choose public television for your vehicle for distribution?
That's a great question. I have been doing these sorts of things and working with various media outlets for many years. I was working on a similar project for Yahoo! before I got involved in the public television/APT series. It was a little frustrating to me. Yahoo! has an enormous audience — I think about 400 million people a month will go to a Yahoo! site worldwide — and we would often be on the front page of Yahoo!, and millions of people would look at it. But the problem, I discovered, was that numbers alone aren't good enough. It's really the quality of the viewer that makes the difference. Yahoo!, unfortunately, skewed very young, and what they were seeking … was stuff that had more adrenaline, more edginess. It was drifting away from what I thought was the important message, and the audience didn't feel right.
I had worked with John Givens, [the program's producer], in the past. I … was the primary sponsor for his series on Expedia called Smart Travels With Rudy Maxa. I was so impressed with the way he and his team put things together that when the opportunity presented itself to create a show like this, … I felt that John's talent and craftsmanship mirrored my own sensibilities and that the public television audience would be, I hope, ideal for this sort of messaging. It's hopefully reaching people who are educated and interested in these sorts of things… Hopefully, it inspires people to act and get involved.
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This interview is available on APTonline.org for uses that are related to the marketing and/or promotion of this program (via program guides, press releases and/or Web sites). No part of this interview may be used relating to any product or service, other than the program.
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