Kick On!

Abandoned by their caravan of 20 camels after a sandstorm frightened them off, John Hare and his crew stood by the desiccated edge of dried-up Lop Nur in the forlorn Gobi Desert and scanned the horizon with slowly increasing dread. They’d immediately dispatched herdsmen to track the animals, but several days had passed with no news. As their situation grew increasingly bleak, the team carefully estimated how long they could hold out before jettisoning all but food and water and attempting a 480-kilometre trek back to their vehicles.

With typical aplomb, Hare describes this 1997 expedition as a “testing experience.” The crisis was resolved thanks to calm minds and a dose of expedition providence. “Fortunately, the herdsmen plus 18 of the camels reappeared the night before we were due to set out on foot,” he says. And that was that.

On an expedition to that same region the previous year, Hare’s crew was trapped on a vast expanse of jagged rock salt that shredded tires and damaged the sump of their two vehicles, which began to burn oil at an alarming rate. The team was deep within the former Chinese nuclear test zone in the Gashun Gobi, far off their projected route, with no means of calling for help. If the vehicles quit, it would mean the end of them as well. “We got out of the situation by mixing cooking oil with the gearbox oil and putting it in the engine,” Hare says. “We travelled this way for 220 miles.”

The trip resulted in the first recorded north-to-south crossing of the Gashun Gobi by a foreigner. Hare recounted these harrowing experiences in The Lost Camels of Tartary, widely hailed as a classic of desert travel.

The urge to explore came early for John Hare. Born in 1934, he lived in Toronto from age 5 to 10. After the Second World War his family returned to Bexhill, England, where he completed secondary school. Hare reports that as a child he was captivated by “far-away and distant places, and ‘unspoilt’ people.” At age 11 he read Exploration Fawcett, which detailed the quest of Sir Percy Fawcett’s son to find his father, who had vanished while searching for a lost city in Brazil’s Mato Grosso. The book left a lasting impression. “That, I thought, is what I would like to be—an explorer who would get to places which were not known to contemporary society.”

This childhood dream would influence his choice of career. He was commissioned as an army officer in Nigeria at age 19, and at 22 became the last recruit accepted into the Colonial Service as a district officer. This was the eve of Nigerian independence, when senior people were deserting the Service in droves. By the time he turned 27, Hare was posted to the most remote location possible—the Nigerian/Cameroon border—where for four years he administered a roadless plateau, travelling by foot and on horseback. “I loved both the responsibility and the excitement,” he says. “At one point, I discovered an unmapped village which was not known to the outside world and whose inhabitants had not seen a white skin. This linked me to Fawcett and my boyhood dreams.”

This is only one of Hare’s many expedition “firsts.” In 1995 in the Gobi, he was able to capture unprecedented photos of a wild camel and its seven-hour-old calf. The camel had given birth just before he stumbled upon it deep in the nearly unexplored Kum-tagh sand dunes.

In 1999 Hare discovered “two unmapped valleys near the Tibetan plateau in China, together with a ‘naïve’ population of wildlife that had no fear of man.” This achievement proved instrumental in his bid to convince the Chinese to establish the 65,000-square-kilometre Lop Nur Nature Reserve to protect the unique desert ecosystems that are home to the critically endangered wild Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus ferus). Combined with adjacent protected areas, the preserved zone totals 175,000 square kilometres—an area larger than Texas.

Hare considers the establishment of this nature reserve and his quest to protect the wild Bactrian camel to be his greatest achievement, providing him with an overriding reason for his expeditions. Says Hare: “My work and travel is for a cause which is dear to me.”

In 1997, Hare created the Wild Camel Protection Foundation, a UK-registered charity with renowned conservationist Jane Goodall as its patron. The foundation works to secure much needed financial support to protect an animal that has seldom been studied, and that is rarer than the giant panda. The foundation also runs a captive wild Bactrian camel breeding program—the only one of its kind in the world—to increase numbers of the wild camels by using surrogate domestic Bactrians to carry their offspring.

Hare’s dedication to this cause is such that in 2001, at the age of 66, he set out to cross the Sahara by camel to raise international awareness of the plight of this creature. His three-and-a-half month, 2,350-kilometre journey followed an old slaving route from Kukawa, Nigeria to Tripoli, Libya, completing a south-to-north transit of a route taken by the explorer Hanss Vischer in the opposite direction in 1906. This epic journey was the subject of Hare’s 2003 book, Shadows Across the Sahara.

What continues to drive him to such feats, especially at an age when most would be content with comfortable retirement? “I love exploration and my appetite for this has not diminished,” he says. “I am fortunate that I do not worry about obstacles, which can be formidable. I treat them as something to be overcome. It will come to an end one day when physically I will not be up to the hardship.” Until that day arrives, says Hare, “I will continue to do what I do for as long as I can.” His personal ambition is “to have the physical stamina ‘to kick on’.”

So what does John Hare know as a result of his travels that the rest of us do not? How does he sum up the lessons of a lifetime of exploration? “It’s not what I know,” he says, “but rather the fact that I believe that if you really want to do something or achieve something, with good fortune and persistence you will do it.”

John Hare’s latest book, The Mysteries of the Gobi, is scheduled to hit bookstores in April, 2008. For more information on the Wild Camel Protection Foundation and on Hare’s expedition lectures, please see www.wildcamels.com.

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