Live Your Adventure

"You have a beginning, a destination, and a question mark in between.
No one knows what's going to happen." — Jim Malusa

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AdventureView: Jim Malusa, Adventures of the
Ultimate Under-Achiever
Reader Responses: a dolphin experience and a literary one

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AdventureView:
Jim Malusa
Adventures of the Ultimate Under-Achiever

The lofty goal of some mountain climbers it to ascend the highest peak on every continent. Not my high school classmate and friend, Jim Malusa — he had opposite aspirations! He rode his bike to the lowest point on each continent. That's right, the ultimate under-achiever. And he was actually paid to do it! In the early days of the Internet, Discovery.com put together a satellite communication system for him to upload photos and reports from the road. I chatted with Jim at his neighborhood coffee house in Tucson where he goes to check his email. In spite of having been involved with cutting-edge Internet technology, he is somewhat of an anti-technologist. He has no Internet at home, nor does he own a cell phone. He used my cell phone to call home from the café, and was quite amused that his name popped up on he screen. He is working on a book about his trips to the lowest points on each continent.

LYA: So, Mr. Malusa, tell us about your childhood, your formative years. How is it you set your sights so low?
JM: [Laughs] I discovered that going high was cold and uncomfortable. My wife and I always liked to ride bikes. Our honeymoon was a six-month bike ride. So we decided to go on a ride in Asia. I was on a bicycle trip with my her on the Chinese border and we had a choice: up or down. We said down, down, down, and it ended up that the greatest part of our trip was going 500 feet below sea level in Western China. After that trip I got my idea of hitting the low points.

LYA: Was that the lowest point on the continent?
JM: No. It would be on any other continent, but it turns out that Asia's lowest point is the Dead Sea (the lowest point on Earth), at an astounding depth of 1,300 feet. And that’s the shoreline, not the bottom of the lake.

LYA: So you didn't always want to go to the lowest points?
JM: I didn’t grow up with a hankering for caves or mines or anything. But once it became clear that writing was a career for me (I’m supposed to be botanist and still am sometimes), I began writing stories for Discovery Channel Magazine. I thought, "I could do this all the time." So I became a writer. And then the internet was born and it essentially ate the magazine, killed it. Some of the writers, including me, were disappointed that we only had the internet to write for because we didn’t like the idea of internet journalism. But Discovery asked me to do it. In fact the big cheese flew me out to their glittering headquarters in Bethesda, and he said, "This is the future." When they first suggested it my response was, "Over my dead body!" But while I was there someone was doing a story from the road and I thought, “This is something the internet is good for." A story that doesn’t have an end. You just begin, and every two days you’ve got a story. So your trip is kind of an old-fashioned one. You have a beginning, a destination, and a question mark in between. No one knows what's going to happen, not even the writer himself.

So in 1996 I took the first of my trips to Australia. I rode my bike from the top end, Darwin, right to Lake Eyre in south central Australia. I liked it, and they liked it, so we kept doing it! Every year I’d go to another continent. Luckily for me, Antarctica doesn’t have an official low point because I didn’t want to go there!

Thing is, it was never really about the low points, it was about travel and exploration. Just like your work, Mark. They're just places I’d like to go. And it ends up they’re interesting. I meet people down there, see salt flats, vast areas that are quiet and dry, and I like it a lot. Even though I had no idea where these places were when I began, I enjoyed seeing them. It reminds me of the blind travel of Dr. Doolittle. He would open up an atlas and say, "Okay, wherever we put down the pencil, that’s where we're going." And I didn’t even know where I wanted to go because hardly anyone knows where the low points are. Everyone knows Death Valley and we know about the Dead Sea, but what’s the lowest point in South America? Where is it in Africa?

LYA: Where is it in South America?
JM: It's not where you’d expect it. Low points are often right by high points, like Death Valley is right by Mt. Whitney. The low point in South America is hanging off the Patagonia coast of Argentina. It’s the continental shelf. It’s like finding the low point of North America in Cape Cod. It just doesn’t make sense, but there it is. It’s about 145 feet below sea level. But it’s weird. It’s this big peninsula.

LYA: Can you list all the low points?
JM: I mentioned Lake Eyre in Australia. The lowest point in Europe is the Caspian Sea which is 92 feet below sea level at the shoreline. It’s called the Caspian Depression.

In Asia the Dead Sea, on the border of Palestine, Israel shore line 1300 feet below sea level. Death Valley in North America is minus 283 feet. Djibouti, Africa... just finding out it was in Djibouti caused a brief moment of terror because I saw it was sandwiched between Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea. Then I realized that not hearing about a small country in Africa is probably a good thing. There probably hasn’t been a terrible slaughter or anything, and as it ended up that was true. Djibouti has a place called Lac 'Assal which is 500 feet below sea level, yet only about seven miles from the ocean. Djibouti is situated where the Saudi Peninsula touches Africa, where the Red Sea opens up to the Indian Ocean and that’s the beginning of the Great Rift Valley of Africa. So there’s this narrow bay that comes in from the Indian Ocean and it gets more and more skinny, and the lava cliffs get higher and higher, and as you approach Lac 'Assal you're about 2000 feet above the sea. Then ahead of you there’s this volcano that last erupted in the 1970s and just beyond that, 10 miles further, there's this huge glittering salt hole, and that's the only pit that is clearly below sea level. You don’t need a map to tell you the elevation. It's exceptional in that regard. So there you go, all the low spots!

LYA: What about the athletic part of it, the bike riding?
JM: That’s a good question. I don’t think you have to be in extraordinary shape to do this because it’s downhill. Not very far downhill usually. My wife is just a little thing, she’s 5'2" and about 100lbs, and she was riding her bike up mountains in Asia. You end up going up and down a lot and then a little downhill at the end, with the exception of the Dead Sea which really did have an astonishing downhill drop of about 5,000 feet. You drop off this plateau in Jordan and just swish downhill. That was a thrill. But you had to get out of the hole at the end, too.

I still think anyone could do these trips. Once you learn to not be afraid to be alone. I recommend traveling alone whenever possible, just for the clarity of thought you have when you’re by yourself. Plus, if you don’t have a rigid timetable you don’t have to go any particular distance. You can say, "I’m tired today and I’m not going any farther."

LYA: But why the bike then?
JM: The main reason is the attraction that it has for the people you're passing. You can approach anyone on a bike. There's never that insular effect you get in a vehicle. People are curious about what you're doing and how you got there, which really simplifies things if you need water or directions. People want to help you out. There's a great magnetic quality to being on a bike.

LYA: Are photos going to be a part of your book?
JM: Well I’ve liked taking pictures since high school. I would like to make it a part of my book. Another possibility is that when the book comes out you'll be able to go to a website to see pictures that go with the book. Or if they just happen to stumble upon the website and see the pictures they may want the book. I took two cameras with me on my trip. I had a digital camera that belonged to Discovery, and those photos belong to them. Then I had my own camera, just an old 35mm.

LYA: When you were inspired to do your first trip, did your wife accompany you?
JM: No, she didn’t. My wife is too attractive, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate enough to put out a thousand words every two days. This is probably the hardest work I’ve ever done. Not only that, but talking to people, meeting people, making things happen by being out there instead of just falling into my tent and writing something. And you have to write, write, write. The bike's good for that, too. You think about it a lot as you bike down the road. I have this little notebook and I stop and jot down ideas. So my wife did not come on any of these trips. The funny thing is, it never came up.

LYA: Deadlines! You had a deadline for Discovery and that’s why you had to write so many words?
JM: Right. Usually it was a long story and I had to be at the pit at the end of it. I didn’t like the pressure of that, but I was doing it for the money as well as the fun, so I had to. So I would hitchhike if I ran out of time or something happened. So these were not trips where I was determined to say I rode my bike every bit of the way.

LYA: So when you say a month-long story, how often did you send in a story?
JM: Every two days on average.

LYA: What kind of equipment enabled you to do that?
JM: I had a digital camera and a laptop computer at first. In the first of the Australia trips we tried to use land-based phones, but it was a great big hassle even in a modern country like Australia. Once you got in the outback the phones looked like they were steam-powered contraptions just off the boat or something! And sometimes I ended up dictating the entire story to my editor’s answering machine at three o’clock in the morning. So we ended up getting a satellite phone called Nera from a Norwegian company. It’s about the size of a laptop computer and weighs 5 lbs. You actually open the lid of it, point it at a stationary satellite which is in a fixed position over the equator. It rotates at the same speed as the Earth, so it sits in the same place all the time. It works just great. It was very slow, but basically I could send a story from the Sahara.

LYA: So you were essentially sending an email.
JM: You know, I didn’t know what it was.

LYA: The Discovery Channel set it up for you and you just pressed the button?
JM: Yeah. I would get a series of instructions, like do this first, do this second, do this third. I learned more as I went along, like how to attach the photos. I think it was called FTP downloading and it went directly to the Discovery computers. They had technical experts that would put this stuff together. They went along believing I could do it... This was the early days of the internet. There was another website called Mungo Park funded by Microsoft, and they went on a trip to Ethiopia. They had a boatload of technicians and satellite dishes. There must've been ten people for one writer. One very fine writer — David Roberts. But thanks to Discovery, I could do it all myself. Some people believed what I was doing was a charade, they'd email to say, "The jig's up! We know the Discovery van is right behind you!" They thought I was traveling with a bunch of people. Other people had the exact opposite misconception and believed I produced the entire thing from some ditch in the Sahara. They'd want to know about the graphics and the layout, how I picked my fonts. I didn't have anything to do with that, I just sent them text with photos and they produced the whole site.

The main problem with the equipment was I'd have to plug in and recharge everything as often as I could, but it ends up electricity is scarce, as you well know, in a lot of the backwards corners of the earth. They have a generator, it might be in a little house or a Coke stand, but someone’s got a generator somewhere.

LYA: Fascinating!
JM: Discovery, just like every other company, lost trillions of dollars when the internet dot.com craze crashed, and they jerked the rug out from under the website at that point. And there were no longer any stories like mine, they just didn’t have the money. These were expensive ventures with so many technicians and equipment... So the last two trips I just did myself. Never sold the story, just kept notes. The stories will only be seen in the forthcoming book.

LYA: What was your lowest point emotionally on your trips?
JM: Just before I went to Patagonia one of my best friends was killed in a climbing accident. I was actually angry at mountains, and when I crossed the Andes and I’d shake my fist at them. I’d think, "You goddamned mountains!" I was pretty depressed after that. But I recovered quickly.

LYA: What about down and out, what about no money?
JM: Some people would email me and tell me, "You think that’s the lowest point in South America, you gotta try eating guano in the basement in Buenos Aires 200 feet down. You know you can get a lot lower than that, buddy." So the jokes were frequent. I mean, you've got Julie Andrews, "Climb Every Mountain," the Air Force and their recruiting posters “Aim High," you get messages about feeling high — and being down, in the pits, it's bad. Every trip I had there were jokes, “Hope you're not depressed!” and then they'd put in large letters JOKE to make sure I understood.

LYA: You're a desert rat, raised in Tucson. Do you think that has something to do with being attracted to the desert?
JM: Yeah, I came to Tucson in 1972. I was born in Chicago but I’ve lived here most my life. The desert's simple, that’s what I like about it. Even though I grew up in Tucson, I didn’t seek out the desert until later when the allure became stronger. I always liked to camp so much that I wanted to be able to go year-'round and the desert allows me to do that. I fell in love with the emptiness of it, the space, the views, the balance. I like our desert best, all the giant cactus, and I wouldn't trade it.

LYA: Thanks, Jim. It was good talking to you again.
JM: Nice talking to you too, Mark.

One of the things I enjoy most about doing Adventure Alerts is the response I get from readers. Here are two I got last week that are worth sharing. The first is from Scott, better known as Señor Eh-Scott, who has joined me for several of my adventures. The second is from Dr. Farb, the doctors' doctor, a philosopher and metaphysician who has spent the better part of his life on the road. He emailed his piece without a title.

April 26, 2005