A
ruminative essay
by Robert Earle Howells
A
full-grown hippopotamus can pretty much swallow a rubber raft whole.
Tip it over? Like a bathtub toy. Chow down on Homo sapiens? Like Reese's
Pieces. It might be prudent, then, for any sane person to adopt a credo
something like "Don't paddle a rubber raft through hippo-infested waters."
Richard Bangs isn't much for credos. Certainly not cautious ones that
would dictate a life bereft of challenges. Which is why, one day in 1981,
Bangs gingerly threaded a raft down a stretch of Tanzania's Kilombero
River among — hold onto your paddles, folks — 2,000 hippos.
Compulsion
to share
Dodging a couple thousand hippos is all in a day's work for a man who
has spent more than 30 years navigating strange waters and pushing personal
and geographic boundaries with zeal, grace and a generous compulsion to
share. If anything separates Richard Bangs from your average world-traveling
vagabond, it is that he invites us along for every wild ride.
He
lets us sit shotgun on wild first river raft descents, get splashed with
hippo mucus, feel the spray of frothy water in our faces, and hear the
affectionate hum of exotic, disease-carrying insects in our ears. With
Richard as river guide and adventure-travel executive, as magazine writer
and book author (with more than a dozen titles to his credit), as filmmaker
and Internet-travel pioneer, his virtual and live fellow travelers have
paddled African rivers, journeyed to Antarctica, trekked to Himalayan
mountain thrones, bestowed digital cameras upon New Guinea highland villagers,
and made the first 21st-century Western foray into Libya.
 Placating
the rivergods
Bangs' appetite for running wild water dates back to college summers spent
as a Colorado River guide in the Grand Canyon. After college Bangs and
some friends concocted a plan to run wild rivers in Ethiopia. It was then,
he recalls, that "the axis of my life began to spin around my identity
as a river guide." In February 1973, he and his scruffy crew successfully
ran the Awash River, despite an omnipresence of poisonous snakes, lions,
hyenas, man-eating insects and, most terrifyingly, crocodiles. ("Think
about it; their most basic instinct is to eat meat. We were easy targets.")
With the logic of the smitten ("It was an amazing, life-changing experience"),
Bangs and his penniless friends figured they could finance a return trip
or two by taking clients along. And so they did — on the Omo River
in Ethiopia — and Sobek Expeditions was born, named in gratitude
for the Egyptian crocodile god who mercifully spared the lads on those
early first descents.
 Sobek
became a river-running exploratory company via which Bangs and fellow
guides totted up a dizzying succession of first descents: the Yangtze,
Euphrates, Blue Nile, Indus... "You name a great river, we probably did
the first descent."
But
for Bangs, Sobek was about more than bagging rivers: "It became this wonderful
canvas whereby I could pursue anything I wanted. As my curiosity grew,
Sobek expanded. Any thing, any place I was interested in, I could pursue:
wild rivers, mountains, literature, film, ecology ... it was all incorporated
into Sobek."
Worldwide
horizons
When Sobek merged in 1991 with another adventure-travel company, Mountain
Travel, the combined company carried on the spirit of those early years,
while Bangs began exploring yet another horizon: the Internet. A Web site
he helped create for Mountain Travel
Sobek in 1993 was among the first travel sites on the Internet. Early
on he grasped the Web's "you are there" potential: "You could spend a
year producing a catalog, but the Web could change. It was dynamic. You
could hear the sound of a glacier crunching, a camel breathing."
Soon it occurred to him that he could "broadcast" an entire expedition
live over the Internet, which he first did with a 1995 voyage to Antarctica
in a Web production called Virtual
Antarctica. This caught the attention of a certain tech company based
in Redmond, Wash. Bangs, in fact, received a phone call from no less than
Melinda French Gates, who coaxed him to come to Microsoft to launch a
pioneering Web site that would feature live, multimedia dispatches from
expeditions around the world.
That site, Mungo Park, lived for two ahead-of-its-time years before
it begat Microsoft's juggernaut travel site Expedia and such spin-offs
as Expedia Travels magazine — Bangs was the publisher — and
Expedia Radio, where he was executive producer. He then continued
to meld his twin passions, the potential of Internet technology and a
zest for exploring places and cultures, as writer/producer for Slate magazine's
Well-Traveled, MSNBC's Great Escapes, and MSN's First
and Best. All of which were preparatory for his most recent adventure:
Richard Bangs Adventures for Yahoo!.
 No
Limits
Just as Sobek was a canvas for a younger Bangs to explore and expand,
Richard Bangs Adventures (let's face it; he's earned the eponymous title)
was his forum for another ambitious mission — in his words, "to
understand, celebrate, and share as much as possible in a lifetime."
Now,
there's a lot of lifetime in a man like Bangs, and as it turned out RBA
was not the last stop on his travels, and the project was launched into
hiatus after a year and eight robust expeditions.
So
once again, Richard Bangs is off on an adventure and bringing us along.
But watch out for those hippos; they're still lurking in mysterious waters.
Robert
Earle Howells is a contributing editor to National Geographic Adventure
magazine, a longtime correspondent for Outside, and the former editor
of the Outside Buyer's Guide. He is a two-time Lowell Thomas Gold Award
winner for his adventure travel writings. This biographical sketch
originally appeared on the Yahoo! site Richard Bangs Adventures.
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