Laurence Gonzales has a unique and interesting take on travel and the financial crisis in the latest NG Adventure (which I’ve been gleefully reading the last few days). Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the article online, so I’ll just have to recount his points here.

While most writing about travel and the financial crisis involves ski areas getting worried, or where you can get a sweet deal (Iceland), Gonzales looks at the inevitability of the calamity, and how it serves as a lesson while adventuring.

Self-organizing systems generally involve numerous agents (people) acting by fairly simple rules that cause the actions of one or more agents to influence what other do. For example, my partner is going to climb higher; therefore, I’m going to climb higher. […]

If you decide to couple yourself to such a self-organizing system, there are few things that are useful to know. The first is that it is impossible to prevent accidents in such a system as a whole. […] once a system reaches a critical level of complexity, there is no clear cause for the accidents. They become an inherent characteristic of the system. In that regard, it is inevitable that a system as complex as airline travel, for example, will be beset by many small events (a blown tire or failed toilet) and the occasional large crash in which everyone is killed.

It is a morbid thought that by roaming the earth we are participating in a system in which it is inevitable that some people will die in fiery plane crashes. But it is true. And while hopefully none of us will ever experience that type of catastrophic system failure, complex travel plans will inevitably run into a few bumps along the way.

The key is to deal with these bumps appropriately. If you get hit by bad weather on a mountain, and climb higher and faster to beat the weather, you’re simply increasing the chances that something else will go wrong. This might be the right way to go sometimes, but when you’re mid-adventure, it is crucial that you stay level headed, accept that you might not accomplish what you started out to do, and figure out the best plan of action.

Woo hoo! My first month of National Geographic Adventure arrived. The subscription was a present that I am most grateful for. Hopefully it will fuel some more trip ideas and other crazy things here on Questing for Adventure.

The online version of the mag is pretty good too. Check it out.

Update: Wow, apparently photobooth shoots images in mirror image, totally didn’t notice that. Creepy.

Other than being awesome adventurers, one of the biggest things my parents did to feed my wanderlust as a kid was to keep around a giant National Geographic Atlas. I would spend hours just flipping through that thing realizing just how much world there is to explore.

National Geographic is still putting out their atlas, but in the days of Google Earth, I’m sure it doesn’t sell as well as it once did. So now they’ve put it online as well. It will remind you of Google Maps, but it loads very quickly and marks neighborhoods and landmarks without lots of other clutter. Well worth checking out.

Though really, I prefer the old book to this system. If I ever have kids, you can bet your boots that they’ll have a National Geographic Atlas.

h/t Adventure Blog via Intelligent Travel