These stories are the absolute creme de la creme I’ve found via too much online wandering in this specific genre. I share these yarns because I found them by chance, and others could easily miss them. They are not well-known, but they are the best.
In addition to highlighting stories, this page functions as an ode to the Internet itself as a medium for adventure travel writing. As a rule, the people doing the realest Real World adventures don’t have time to carefully format their sites or publish on fancy media outlets. So we have a novel-length story written as a series of forum posts, a set of stories from a now-defunct site, a non-formatted site from the Internet’s early days, and more in the same vein. Strap in for an unforgettable ride.
For each one, I provide an introduction and a link. You can click the link to explore each site in its full glory. As a final disclaimer, this page desperately needs pieces by women, people writing about their own countries, and people who are not white- so let me know if you have ideas.
Table of contents
- Backpackology, by Steve McDonald
- Hajj Al-Sahara, by Christopher August Elliott
- Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa, by Frederik Willems
- How I Escaped from Jail in Afghanistan, by Muhammad Ismail Sloan
(1) Backpackology, by Steve McDonald
Approx. 2012-2014
https://backpackology-blog.tumblr.com/ (the updated site was backpackology.org, which is now defunct but visible on the Wayback Machine- https://archive.org/web/– I recommend visiting via Wayback Machine )
There can be no better introduction to Steve McDonald than the one written by the man himself. You can read it in full on the next page. He has also described himself as a “writer and photographer. Adventurer and didactic prick. Casual existentialist, bus stop gypsy. Rudyard Kipling on mushrooms. Smells of goat.” Currently, he is employed as a “Nightlife curator. Event producer. Dumpster bon vivant.”
Most high-intensity adventurers are dry writers; and great writers often fail to push the limits of adventure. Steve managed to do both at the highest level in his blog Backpackology.org, producing maybe the most entertaining travel writing ever published. I found Backpackology in college, and immediately admired his mix of raw humor, genuine desire for real connection with the world, deep thought, and willingness to toe the line of idiocy in pursuit of unique experience. I also identified with his upbringing in Boston’s “vanilla” suburbs.
I was hooked. Steve’s stories range from the deliciously absurd (titles include “Fringe Chronicles: Tried to Order Dinner in Tokyo. Got Assaulted By a Man in a Frog Costume Wielding a Puppet Instead” and “THE JJIMJILBANG DIARIES (Parts 1 &2): Six Days Naked in a Hot Tub Full of Old, Dirty Korean Men FOR SURVIVAL”) to the genuinely thoughtful. His blog design and standout photos took the stories to the next level (see the impressively high-effort photo from his packing list article below). Tragically, the site has gone down and he has never responded to my Instagram DM entreaties to put it back up.
But the Internet saves us thirsty readers: a tumblr site that was a previous version of the blog is still up, and the Wayback Machine contains snapshots of the site that let us recover many of the stories and photos. I’ve included the full photo version of the Mongolia story below. Strap in for a ride to the theoretical maximum of Type-2 fun achievable by a human being on the open road.
(2) Hajj Al-Sahara, by Christopher August Elliott
Website: https://caugustelliott.com/ (“Dispatches from the Periphery”)
Links to the story: Piece 1 about climbing the Hand of Fatimah, Piece 2 about being thrown in jail afterwards
Published in 2015, trip from 2013
Chris Elliott, sometimes styled as C. August Elliott, is a writer of the utmost quality, too good not to write full-time. Yet he existed for a long time in the netherworld of Internet blogging to a small audience. Later, he got bigger platforms by writing for news outlets in Australia and Canada. I think his best stories are still the ones published on his blog, Dispatches from the Periphery. This is the promise of self-publishing on the Internet and the real reward of finding a gem story on an unknown blog: freed from the shackles of publishing norms and constraints, the writer can tell the story however they want.
As of 2020-21 he is a PhD researcher studying the anthropology of conflict at a UK university. Previously he was a soldier and then a self-proclaimed dirtbag big-wall climber by profession. My favorite stories of his, included here, capture the atmosphere of a full-throttle adventure at the very margins of West Africa in a way that rings absolutely true.
The pull of his Hajj Al-Sahara is doubly strong to me because I have dipped my feet into Saharan travel and seen some of the magic in it. The setting is especially intriguing: Mali is impossible to visit now, but holds some of the world’s most fascinating and mysterious sites. One day, it will be possible to visit Mali again. When that happens, these stories may be the best and most recent guides for those who would follow his footsteps.
(3) Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa, by Frederik Willems
The author’s first name is Frederik Willems. His account name on expeditionportal.com is RadioBaobab.
October 18, 2010
Link to the story: https://expeditionportal.com/forum/threads/democratic-republic-of-congo-lubumbashi-to-kinshasa.50799/
Link to the author’s website: http://www.radiobaobab.be/pagehome.html
I feel extremely lucky to have stumbled upon this story. The author recorded it over a month-long period as a series of thread posts on an obscure overland-travel forum called Expedition Portal. In all, the posts add up to over 50,000 words- as long as a short novel- spread over 33 forum pages. To my knowledge, the story has never existed in any other form, and yet it remains a legendary piece of overland writing. Even today, more than a decade after publishing, the forum thread remains active as people discuss the story and try to get full-PDF versions of it.
What makes this account of a Jeep journey from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa, in the DRC, so special? The most obvious factor is the incredible difficulty and rawness of the trip: this route simply cannot be done, but they did it. Next, the author is emotionally honest throughout in a way that might be lost if the story were told through traditional media. Third, the story is a valuable snapshot of a land that we have almost no other way to learn about.
The incredible challenges that people face in this deeply cut-off interior of the country deserve to be known, and the story leaves us with unforgettable images: men pushing thousand-pound loads on rusty bicycles through muddle jungle single-tracks, mechanics painstakingly modifying car parts by hand, workers whooping in the dark after receiving a small cash reward for three days hard manual labor with little food, vital bridges and ferries crumbling into dust. We are left with a deep respect for the powerful spirit of the Congolese who find a way to live with kindness despite everything stacked against them.
(4) How I Escaped from Jail in Afghanistan, by Muhammad Ismail Sloan (previously known as Sam Sloan)
Written in approx. 2001
- Link to Sloan’s personal site: http://www.anusha.com/
- Link to this story: http://www.anusha.com/escape.htm
- Link to the best article about the author by a third party: https://newrepublic.com/article/158088/mr-sloan-went-washington
Ismail Sloan is not a good, ethical, or admirable person. Any discussion of him or reproduction of his writing must start with this disclaimer. He has travelled widely with the purpose of finding, marrying, and impregnating women, some of them young and poor. His misogyny is palpable in some of his pieces. Sloan’s actions have far crossed the line of what cultural exchange, travel, and adventure should be about- they are plain wrong, and a warning of what not to do with one’s life. He makes no apologies.
That being said, Sloan has led a wildly intriguing life and has unabashedly catalogued it in excruciating detail. He wavers on the line between madman and savant. It seems he got his start in the free love era at UC-Berkeley, and then traded stocks, competed in high-level international chess tournaments, drove a New York taxi, successfully taught himself law and won a case arguing pro se before the US Supreme Court, made the aforementioned travels, became embroiled in countless other legal battles, and now loses repeatedly as a perennial candidate in various US elections. He has maintained a personal website since the 1990’s where he publishes stories, rants, and manifestoes. It was originally samsloan.com, then ishipress.com, now anusha.com- while only some of the words have survived, they are still enough to form an infinitely deep rabbit hole into a bizarre mind.
The site brings us straight back to an earlier age of the Internet, when there was less aggregation and pretty formatting, and more anarchy. People realized they could publish their wildest thoughts to hundreds of readers for free, and Sloan clearly thirsted for such a platform. The site consists of black text on a white background, thousands of words and hundreds of post links in a scrollable form with no organization. Some of the claims on his site are independently verifiable, but many are not. It is probably best not to take all details of the following story as literal truth; and yet, many specifics do seem genuine. Perhaps some yarns are just too good to be made up, even from the mind of Ismail Sloan.
Should Sloan’s voice be propagated beyond his obsolete corner of the Internet? Does a person like him deserve any more readers? I am not sure, as the question turns into the old debate of separating the artist from the art. So far, I have decided to include the story, with as clear a disclaimer as possible.