Doing It His Way

Tour groups or totally solo, travelling your way is the “Wright” way

Outpost: Where in the world are you still trying to get to?

Ian Wright: Siberia, I think. I’d quite fancy that. I like colder places. I like the landscape, to start with. The people are rough and ready, and tough as old boots as well. I’ve been up to Baffin Island and Svalbard. And Greenland. That’s a place that sort of blew me mind a bit. There’s nothing there but everything’s there. It’s just extraordinary. It’s so extreme. But God, I couldn’t live there. It’s too bloody cold.

O: It’s just the narrowest margin between the people and the environment they’re in, isn’t it?

IW: Yeah, but the people there are so resilient, so resourceful. We were up in Eagle, Alaska. People move up there, I think, because they crave that isolation; they’re trying to get away from all the mod cons, to something raw, how we used to be. I admire that. And small isolated places have their own autonomous rule as well. They live within themselves.

O: The rules that apply down here just don’t hold up there.

IW: They don’t. It’s the same in Eastern Europe, which I love. There’s a toughness. ’Cause you live in a harsh environment or your history’s harsh. It takes time to get in. You can’t just tell a few jokes and you’re in. But [then], people are sweet as pie.

O: What’s your take on the idea that there are very few true travellers nowadays? That most of us are tourists?

IW: I have a real problem with that. To me that stinks of bullshit snobbery. My dad has always wanted to go to Petra in Jordan. He’s not going to go backpacking, he’s going on an organized tour with 80 other people on a coach. Good on him. For me, it’s just two different ways of travelling this planet. People get excited by different ways of travelling. I like isolated places, like Mongolia, say. [And] there’s Uzbekistan, that’s pretty full-on. Armenia. Georgia—if you want an adventure.

O: Which you do. You’re also soccer-mad. Strangest place you’ve ever played?

IW: Probably the most secure border in the world, between North and South Korea, in the DMZ. That absurd strip of land with a million soldiers on each side. Frightening. There’s a mile of no man’s land and we played with the Americans right by the fence. And I scored a beautiful header.

O: A header, even.

IW: What do mean even?

O: Well, it wasn’t just a penalty. So what’s the one bit of equipment a person can’t do without while travelling?

IW: Common sense, maybe? For me, it would just be a sketchbook, watercolours. When people ask me that, it’s like they’re looking for this Holy Grail, waiting with bated breath, what’s he going to say? But there can’t be one thing, can there? Because if I knew, I’d be making millions off it now. I just tell people it’s best to travel light.
—Compiled by Stephen Smith

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