This is Last Wild Places, a Patagon Journal podcast where adventurers, conservationists
and other inspiring guests share their stories about nature's last frontiers.
Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode. I'm Lily Alford.
And I'm Jimmy Langman, the executive editor of Patagon Journal. In the Last Wild Places
podcast, we'll be exploring wild places around the world from a variety of perspectives.
Conservation, science, expeditions, adventures, indigenous peoples, outdoor sports and more.
Today's guest is Leon McCarron, an explorer and journalist from Northern Ireland. Among
his many outdoor adventures all over the planet, he has been a presenter for a BBC film about
sailing in the Arctic, journeyed by bike from New York to Hong Kong, walked 3000 miles across
China for a four part National Geographic Asia series and walked 1000 miles through
the largest sand desert on earth. Now a consultant on developing hiking trails, Leon and his
partner are based near the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where he
helped develop the trail network there and continues to assist the burgeoning local hiking
community to keep those mountains protected and is also at work planning the first long-distance
hiking trail in Iraq. Leon's amazing adventures have given him great insight into the beauty
inherent in wild places and the need to protect them. Some of his adventures are featured in
his three books, Wounded Tigress, A River Journey Through the Cradle of Civilization,
The Land Beyond, 1000 Miles on Foot Through the Middle East and The Road Headed West,
A Cycling Adventure Through North America. We're excited to have him on the show. Each
episode we also have the Backstory where we talk to the writers from each issue of the
Patagon Journal to get a deeper perspective on their stories. Today's Backstory is with
Ximena Martinez about her article, "Iceland, Heart of Ice and Fire" from issue 27. We hope
you enjoy the episode.
Hello, Leon McCarron. Welcome to the Last Wild Places podcast. We appreciate it greatly
that you're able to give us some time. We understand you're in Jordan, constantly traveling
all over the Middle East. We feel very honored to have you on the show. When I look over
your career, it's pretty amazing all the places you've gone. You almost seem like a modern-day
Indiana Jones with all the things. You're a modern-day adventurer like Indiana Jones.
What inspired you to do all that? I mean, it's amazing all the things you've done. What
inspired you as a young man to follow this amazing path you've gone down?
Well, first, thank you. Thank you for a number of things. Thank you for inviting me on. And
thank you for comparing me to Indiana Jones. That's very generous. No, I mean, I've been
really lucky. I grew up in a very rural part of the north of Ireland. And I grew up on
a farm. I didn't really leave the island until I went to Scotland a couple of times because
I had family there. But I didn't really leave the British Isles, let's say, until after
university. And I had this idea that I wanted to go and see some of the world before I started
into whatever career would take over the rest of my life. But I wanted to do it slowly and
really feel as much of it as I could. And I had this idea of getting a bicycle and just
seeing how far I could ride it before I ran out of my savings. So when I finished studying,
I saved up for a year. That was my pot of money to go off and ride my bike. I flew to
New York City because that was just a city that it felt it kind of felt familiar, yet
foreign to me. It was the same language. So I could start off with that. I mean, it turns
out the United States is incredibly foreign to someone coming from Ireland, but at least
it seemed culturally familiar because I'd grown up with so much media and influence
from the US. And then I just rode my bike. And it was an amazing experience. I lasted
about a year and a half before my savings ran out and I went home. But that showed me
just the beauty and size of the world. It showed me how varied it is. It showed me how
kind people are. It showed me how beautiful in so many different ways the world can be.
And it showed me, in keeping with the theme of this podcast, it showed me where these
wild places were and how they made me as a traveler, an outsider arriving into them feel.
And also every single one of them felt somehow under attack, somehow diminishing, somehow
shrinking, somehow being squeezed. And that really stuck with me as well, that I could
ride my bike for 14, 15,000 miles, 22,000 kilometers, something like that, and pass
through all these incredible places and still get a sense that we were losing so much. I
was gaining so much personally, but I could see so much was getting lost in the world
anyway. I think that's what sent me off. And then I just avoided getting a real job
ever since. And I started writing, I started making films, started trying to tell stories
and finding ways to turn it into a career as well as a passion. And that was kind of
a scarily long time ago. And that was 2010, I set off my bike trip. So it's coming up
to a decade and a half I've been doing this.
That's the bike trip, that's the subject of your book, The Road Headed West, the cycling
adventure through North America. Is that the same?
Correct. Yeah. I only wrote about the first part of it, simply because in the way in which
I was traveling, I didn't feel like I was going deep enough to have any great insights
about a lot of the later places I passed through in Southeast Asia and so on through into China.
But and I didn't speak any of those languages, so I was having quite a surface level interaction.
But in that first part of the trip, I was a young man kind of setting off across the
United States at a pretty interesting time in the country. So that book was kind of a,
I wanted it to do two things. I wanted it to be a rite of passage story of what happens
if you set off on a bike and they're pretty clueless and under prepared, but enthusiastic.
And also to see this cross section of a country that I felt I knew, but which of course is
so incredibly different in all sorts of ways. And so that was the first book, was just that
first section.
How long did it take you to do that trip?
I think it took me to get across the United States and well North America because I went
up and down into Canada a couple of times. I think it was about three to four months.
So I was going pretty slow. I mean, some people do that in, I don't know, nine, 10 days, something
like that. I was taking my time stopping off places. Because I was trying to make my budget
last as long as possible. I was camping and mostly eating peanut butter that I bought
from stores, not consignment stores where it was out of date. And so I was living on
three, four dollars a day. And it just, it was such a great sense of freedom. Such a
privilege to have that sense of freedom where I had everything I needed on the side of my
bike. I could put up my tent anywhere. I had lentils and peanut butter and a few apples
in the back of my panniers. And it was amazing. It was such a sense of freedom. So I was encouraged
to go slowly.
Where you spend time in the cities, in the parks and cities, what kind of places were
you seeing along the way?
I was seeing a little bit of everything. I think to begin with, I tried to plan my journey.
And this was, I mean, I'm aware I'm increasingly sounding very old and also kind of a Luddite.
But I didn't have a smartphone. I didn't have any technology with me on that trip. And smartphones
weren't a thing yet. So I was just carrying paper maps that an organization called the
Adventure Cycling Association in the US had produced. And that was helpful in kind of
helping to write me onto smaller roads. And I tried to, I looked initially to go into
cities because I'd heard of them. I wanted to go into, even if it was smaller cities
like Buffalo, New York or Syracuse or whatever, I started the trip, I'd go into them. And
then I realized that actually cycling in and out of cities was kind of a hassle. And as
all when you arrive in a city by car or by plane or whatever, you don't feel how a city
grows. You arrive by bicycle or as I've done more in recent years on foot, you really see
how industrial estates, agriculture blends into industrial estates, blends into suburbs,
blends into city center and you feel all that. And it's kind of interesting, but it's noisy
and busy and polluted. So in the end, I would mostly just try and stick to smaller roads,
smaller places, smaller communities. It was easier to meet people. And then certainly
in the US, I just looked for the big national parks as well and tried to ride through as
many of those as I could.
When I first started in the magazine, I came across something that you wrote about the
Rio Santa Cruz. You did a trip with, I guess, Tom Allen, is that right?
My friend Tom Allen and then an Argentinian friend called Jose Argento, three of us traveled
together.
And I came across an article that you wrote for a sidetrack about the last six wars on
the Santa Cruz. I was just reading it again recently and came across some interesting
lines. You talked about the step, traveling in the step on horseback. Sometimes the winds
were 120 kilometers an hour at times. So that's practically like a hurricane force. And you
wrote, if this sounds miserable at times, and that's good, it often was. Misery, of
course, is key to a successful expedition. Any fool can go to the other side of the world
and be happy. There's a huge sense of reward to be had in pushing oneself to deal with
and perhaps even thrive in such circumstances. It is so often the hardships that help illuminate
clearly the beauty and wonder around us. That to me seems to encapsulate a lot of what is
about to go out into wild places. What did you learn from that trip and how did Patagonia
affect you?
Yeah, of course. Thank you for finding that and reading it. What strikes me is I definitely
wrote that when I was a younger fan. The desire to go and be miserable is maybe leading me
these days. For as long as I could remember, I wanted to visit Patagonia. I had been very
fortunate to visit Mongolia, which was the second expedition that I did. I walked with
a friend, Rob Lillwall, from across the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and down through China.
In my head, from my rural upbringing in Ireland, the two great wild places of the world were
Mongolia and Patagonia. They held a special place in my imagination. Sometimes that's
really what matters. There's other great wild places I've since learned, but sometimes the
perception is actually the key part. For me, those were the high point, the zenith of wilderness.
When I got an opportunity to go in 2014 to Patagonia, it was because I'd read just in
passing a newspaper story about the Rio Santa Cruz, which was at the time the last large
free flowing glacial river in the Argentine side of Patagonia. There was plans to build
two enormous dams on it. The construction was due to begin quite quickly. I spoke to
my friend Tom, who was a talented filmmaker. At the time, we didn't know Jose very well,
but he was an experienced horseman and very passionate about his country. The three of
us, within a few weeks, decided to go and do it, find a couple of outdoor brands to
cover the costs. We flew out and we bought five horses. We bought them in El Calafate,
which was the end point of the journey. Then we transported them out to the Atlantic coast
and started to ride back upstream. We were also following in the footsteps, I suppose,
of Charles Darwin, who had traveled up that river with Captain Fitzroy as part of the
surveying expedition. Darwin had left these diaries about his whole time on the Beagle,
but quite detailed diaries about his journey up the Santa Cruz. Mostly, he was quite miserable.
He didn't really want to be an explorer. He kind of found all this stuff pretty tiresome.
I found it amazing to be walking. We were on horseback, but following the shingle from
the estuary up this river and imagining that in 1834, maybe, I'm not sure if that's correct,
but whenever Darwin was there, they'd been doing the same thing. He'd been picking up
these pieces of shingle and seeing fossilized sea creatures in it and starting to have these
thoughts for the first time that maybe the world is not as it always was and maybe something
has changed. This is a big part of the development of his thinking. To me, that was fascinating.
And to just be able to ride these horses for hundreds of kilometers along this river, to
be able to drink from this river and fish in this river and live alongside of this archery
that kept us sustained and to not encounter fences and not encounter obstacles. There
are the estanciers that have been there for a long time, but there's fewer and fewer of
those because the market didn't sustain them anymore. It was a very isolated journey in
lots of ways, which made it feel all the more wild. Things like that are such a great reminder
of how reliant we are on the planet. When you're in a landscape like that, you realize, firstly,
we realized that we were completely reliant on our horses and this bond between the five
of them and the three of us. We were completely reliant on one another and those human and
social relationships. And most of all, we depended on that river. Without the water
from that river and without the purity of it for all of our needs, we would not have
lasted. It's very humbling to be in such a situation like that. The world we live in
today doesn't encourage us to be in positions like that. Everything is provided for us at
all times and we're totally disconnected from nature. I'm sure this is something you both
think about a lot and it's something I think about a lot, but the fact that we buy our
food in plastic packages in the supermarket and we have no idea where it comes from, whether
it's meat or vegetables or whatever else, of course it means we don't think about it
and we don't understand where it comes from and we have to work hard to care about the
cost. So I think for me, that was a big part of this journey. I've rarely felt as connected
to the world around me as we did at that point in time.
The construction of the dams, I think they're now talking about completion in 2027 or 2028.
So it's actually been a bit longer than was first expected. How can you describe the experience
of knowing that there was going to be a massive impact on the ecosystem as a result and how
that affected your experience?
Sure, yeah. I mean, at the time it was all quite uncertain. We spoke to a few people
with the most who were willing to speak to us in Buenos Aires and then also in El Calafate
and it seemed like construction was pretty imminent and actually when we got there, there
was already some work going on. We saw some heavy machinery, some excavators, we saw some
land that had been cleared and it looked like it was going to happen within a couple of
years. I mean, as it turned out, there was quite shortly after that, there was quite
a surprising result in the elections and the government changed. And so that was the first
of what's been a number of upheavals in politics in Argentina and that put a banner in the
works, I guess. And it does seem like it's happening, it's just on a longer timeframe.
But I guess if I look back at what we were trying to imagine, we were looking at this
pristine landscape and it really was a pristine landscape and just trying to imagine what
that would look like when a huge proportion of it became a reservoir backed up behind
a dam. And I've since done a lot of work on rivers in other parts of the world, particularly
in the Middle East. And my last book was about the river Tigris, predominantly in Iraq, but
it starts in Turkey and runs to the northeast Syria. And the Tigris has got a huge number
of dams and the headwaters, Tigris and its sister of relief riddies. And most of them
have been completed, almost all of them have been completed. And so that was a case of
seeing things at the other end. In Turkey, there's one area called Hassan Keef, which
was a very well-known town, one of the oldest continually inhabited settlements on earth,
12,000 years of recorded human history with hundreds of archaeological sites, plus a modern
day population who live there and quite a well-known tourist destination. And it was
flooded as part of a dam called Alisu alongside hundreds of other archaeological sites and
villages and so on. And when I visited, I never got to see it in its glory, but I saw
the pictures. And instead, what I saw was just this very sparse place that the inhabitants
who stayed were moved to a village a couple of hundred meters up on a hillside and it
was barren and cold. And actually, the Turkish government poured a layer of concrete over
much of the old town to form a stronger foundation for the dam. And the juxtaposition between
what we experienced versus what had been there just, that was 2021 I was there, it was 2019
that the water was released. So the juxtaposition was huge. So if I go back to the Rio Santa
Cruz, that was kind of what we were looking at then was, it's almost unfathomable. You
look at this, it feels like perfection when you're in the natural world like that and
you have these mountains in the distance, you've got this incredible ribbon of life
in the river and this kind of cobalt blue. You have Wanakos running around, there's flamingos
further upstream. There isn't a huge human population, but there are some. And then of
course at the source of it is the Perito Moreno glacier, which was also, that was one of the
biggest impacts that was projected for this was that raising the water level would affect
the stability of the glacier. And so what we tried to do was just to look at what gets
lost. And in some ways, the Rio Santa Cruz was an interesting case study because there
wasn't a huge human population that was going to be displaced. Whereas in many parts of
the Middle East, I've been in, there is that element of it too. But here it was much more
a case of nature versus progress. And maybe progress isn't the right word because it can
be defined in lots of different ways. But the growing population, the big cities of
Argentina expect and can expect to live a certain quality of life and be provided with
electricity to run air conditioning units. And so that's what people have been, that's
how we developed and the expectations we have for the society we live in. But in order to
get that, are we willing to destroy the last wild places on earth in a very permanent way,
in a way that can never be undone? And what is the cost of that? Because the cost is not,
there's a huge intangible cost to it as well in terms of what we lose culturally and environmentally
and beyond a cost that can be measured in dollars or pesos or whatever.
Well, in Chile, where we're based, there also were around that same time, some big hydroelectric
dam projects planned for the Rio Baker and the Rio Pasqua in Patagonia. And eventually
the people mobilized and were able to stop it.
That's fascinating. Yeah. And that was a big source of inspiration to the activists and
environmentalists that we met in Argentina at the time was that these project leaders
have been stopped elsewhere. And over time, it's often shown to be exactly as you say,
it's fear mongering. And yeah, it's never just about the benefits that are told, right?
There's always the untold side of it and the economic value to whoever might be benefiting
from that.
Is that an issue in the Middle East, hydroelectric dams?
Yeah, it's huge. And it's been particularly huge where I've been based for the last four
and a half years in the Kurdistan region and the north Iraq. But largely the whole of Mesopotamia
was the name that the Greeks gave to this area, the land between two rivers. And these
days that roughly translates as it's mostly Iraq, but it's parts of Syria, it's parts
of Turkey and reaches out towards Iran. But it's the floodplain that the Tigris and the
Euphrates irrigate. And those two rivers, I mean, a very, very brief history in about
60 seconds is that 12,000 years ago, humans were living as hunter gatherers up in the
mountains, the Taurus Mountains in Turkey and the Zagros Mountains, they're not in Iran.
But they could see this floodplain down below. And so over the course of about 4,000 years,
they slowly began to move down and abandon the nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle and
start to work with these rivers and experiment with crop planting and animal husbandry. And
as successful over the next 4,000 years, they moved further south still and at the areas
on the banks of the river where their experiments were most productive, people gathered in greater
and greater numbers. And those became the first settlements, the first cities in the
world. And from that, we got the world's first civilizations, the first written word came
from there, and the world's first universities and legal systems and sailing boats and the
first beer was brewed and the first love songs were written and possibly the... I can go
on, I can go on. But anyway, lots of really wonderful things came from that point in time.
And now we're at a point where those two rivers that quite literally irrigated the earliest
civilizations and have left an imprint on how we live our lives today have been damned
almost to the point at which they no longer flow to their conclusion. Both the Tiger's
Neferage are predicted by perhaps 2040 to no longer reach the Gulf. And there's a few
factors to that. Poor governance of the waterways within the countries that they flow through,
climate change is a factor, although it's actually a lesser factor than some of the
others and a lack of effective water sharing agreements between the countries that they
run through. And so Turkey is undergoing severe water shortages and is holding back a huge
amount of water of the Tiger's Neferage. So the Tiger's in particular last year received
60% less water into Iraq than it did in 2015. And that's just not sustainable for the people
who live there. So these are huge, huge issues without, I mean, in the Middle East, everyone's
been talking about oil for the last 70 years, but now they're talking about water. And that's
what everything from every aspect of life will revolve around that. And I think it's
probably the same where you are too. Water is becoming increasingly understood as this
resource which we can't just do whatever we like with.
Right. I mean, you did a book about the Tigris, right?
I did, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which took about four and a bit years to produce and then came
out last year.
What did you learn in doing that book about how the river has affected these communities?
I mean, I think the biggest, it's affected people in so many different ways. And I think
that's probably true for a lot of places. Of course, it's a lifeline. It's quite literally
the source of people's sustenance. So Iraq is from those early days until now has predominantly
relied on agriculture and much of the country is made up of pastoralists and people who
fish for a living. And so if the river no longer flows or is poisoned, it affects those people.
But that's happening and that's happening at a terrifyingly quick rate. And the country
really is on an environmental precipice of that. But the river also has a huge cultural
impact too. And I know Iraq and the Tigris well from this work, but I'm sure the same
is true for many other places. You look at literature, you look at the arts, you look
at songs and poetry. And so often when they come from cities and communities that are
along rivers and countries through which rivers are an integral part of their story, people
write about these things. Rivers are the basis for a lot of cultural understanding. And so
it's absolutely true in Iraq. Everyone feels they have a connection to it. And even in
practical ways too, all of the major cities are built on the banks of a river. So from
Mosul to Baghdad to Basra, the river cuts right through the middle of these famous historic
cities and people understand them as almost a foundational element of where they come
from.
Is the river polluted? What is the current situation?
Yeah, I mean, the Tigris is a really sad story. It's kind of an example of what happens if
you take, you know, how could I put this? I mean, Iraq is not like a lot of other countries
in the Middle East. I mean, Jordan is one of the most water scarce countries on earth.
It may be the most. It's certainly in the top three or bottom three, whichever way you
look at it. There's just very little water in Jordan. The Jordan River is running dry.
The underground aquifers are historically low levels. There's very little rainfall.
Lots of other countries in this region have a similar story. Iraq shouldn't. Iraq has
got these two incredible rivers and it's also got a mountainous region in the north with
rainfall that feeds into tributaries that feed these rivers. Iraq should not be a water
poor country. And yet it is. And it's because at every possible point, in every possible
way, the river has been damaged. So from the dams to illegal construction of gravel mines
that dig out the bed of the river to anything and everything being dumped into the water
itself from the oil refineries to factories to just city waste to the lack of any upgrade
on water infrastructure for farmers to really archaic farming methods. Like many of the
farmers in Iraq still use these methods of irrigation from 5,000 years ago that the Sumerians
were using like flood irrigation, which is very wasteful. It's not farmers' fault. They
just kind of afford to upgrade. They've just got no support from the government. And in
some ways, the Iraqi government, they can't be excused for it because there's huge levels
of corruption going on and lack of care for this. But a lot of this came from 2003. And
after the invasion of Iraq, the entire system of the country was gutted. And none of it
was replaced. And it left this massive gap. And so the country has never recovered from
that. So the river, every possible way you could imagine a river suffering, that's the
tigers. And yet it still flows. And yet people still rely on it and so on. It's amazing that
it does. But there can't be many rivers in the world that are undergoing as much of an
assault as the tiger's.
You flooded the entire river, right?
Yeah, that was the plan anyway. A team of five of us started the source. We made it
to the sea after about 80 days, I think. It's about 1200 miles, 2000 kilometers. We used
local boats and local boat owners for most of it. In some sections, the security was
tricky. So whenever it got very tricky, we sometimes navigated around. But we were on
the water for the vast majority of it.
Yeah. So you've been in Kurdistan since 2017, is that right? In Iraq?
Yeah. So I started going at the end of 2016, 2017. I was going in and out. And then I moved
there in 2019.
How are you dealing with the security issues? I mean, you spend a lot of time, I know you
are involved in setting up the Zabros Mountain Trail, is that right? What's it like to...
Are you scared when you go out in the wilderness there and that something could happen?
No, I'm not. But only because I have had the privilege of getting to know the place really
well. I understand that there isn't really much to be scared of. I mean, there are a
couple of things to be scared of, which I'll come to in a second. But in general, my impressions
of Iraq from a distance were the same as most people's until I went there and understood
that these mountains, which were the reason I decided to go and live there, are just phenomenally
beautiful. In the Kurdistan region, which is a semi-autonomous region, 65 to 70% of
it is mountainous. And you've got huge river valleys and canyons and waterfalls and snowcapped
peaks in the east. And it's incredibly beautiful and thousands of years of history that adapted
around those mountains. So to walk in them is just such a... I mean, it's amazing. I
can't believe it. Sometimes it's such a privilege. And that was where the idea of the trail came
from was to create something that was a kind of container or a platform to allow others
to walk there as well, whether they be people from inside the region or people from outside
and to bring people together and create an economic opportunity for those who live in
these rural areas and to make it sustainable and to help create corridors to environmental
protection along that as well. So it had lots and lots of aims. But to go back to your question
and to think about this in terms of the wildness of it, which is, of course, it's great appeal
alongside where that kind of intersects with the hospitality and the culture. This is a
scarred and damaged landscape. It's a landscape that has seen decades of conflict and prior
to that many more as well. And it still wears some of that pretty heavily. So some of that
is now part of the story of the wilderness. So some of the guides on this trail that we've
developed are Peshmerga, which is the kind of Kurdish military force. And most of them
are retired Peshmerga now. But when Saddam Hussein in Iraq was carrying out his genocidal
campaigns against the Kurds and destroying entire settlements, he destroyed three to
four thousand entire towns and trying to wipe or drive out the Kurds. These guys as young
men and young women survived by hiding in the mountains and fought by hiding in the
mountains. So some of the trails that we use are the trails that they use to stay alive.
And as one of the guides on the trail, Ahmed Rizani told us in the early days of scouting
it, he said, you know, the beauty of this project to him is that it turned the mountains
from a place of refuge into a place of recreation. And so that reimagining of it is what inspired
me to spend so many years working on this. But there are there are things that are harder
to shake off. And one of those is the presence of landmines that were left behind by Saddam
Hussein and also on the Iran-Iraq border. And the trail that we've created stays clear
of those. But there are there are blight on the landscape. There are huge areas of these
incredibly beautiful mountains. If you see if you saw them from the air, if you see them
from a distance, it just it looks as pristine, as perfect as Patagonia. When I first went
there, you get up close, you realize that there's entire sections. Some of them are
some of the areas are marked with signs from from the Hitties that say there are mines
here. Some of them aren't some of the mines, the signs have disappeared over time, but
the shepherds know not to go there because it was never cleared. And so you see there's
something deeply kind of metaphorical, but also just intensely depressing about seeing
the most perfect hillside you can imagine, especially in spring, lush green grass and
wildflowers and everything else, and knowing that you can't go there because under the
ground are these these instruments of death and devastation. And so I think that's a lot
of my work, a lot of my life in the last decade and a half has been spent looking at ways
in which humans screw up beautiful places. And it is really demoralizing, but equally,
there's also lots of ways in which we can undo that or do positive things too. So without
dragging on too much, I'll maybe I'll just finish on that by saying that I think the
Zagros Mountain Trail has kind of been a case study for us in when damage is being done,
how do you then create something new on top of that that creates a better and more positive
version of the future that people want to live in and that respects and rehabilitates
the wilderness.
Are you seeing more tourism coming now?
It's slow. The trail is up and running, all the information is online. The way it runs
at the minute is still people hire local guides, stay with local homestays. I mean, the Kurdish
region in Northern Iraq, it's probably going to be a niche destination for a while. It's
going to take a little while before people are kind of looking at the Appalachian Trail
or the Kurdish region of Iraq. But that's fine. I mean, anyone who comes sees what a
great place it is. There's also a big local hiking community that use these trails and
they grow slowly, it grows sustainably. And the important thing is that people who use
it enjoy it and the people who live along it feel like they own it and get that interaction
with people who come from elsewhere. So yeah, slowly, slowly it's coming to life.
How would you compare it to other places, other wild places around the world?
I think it's equally beautiful. I mean, I've learned my lesson over the years of ever trying
to write beautiful places because it just, you know, everything is joint first for me
after a while. But it's spectacular. It has a lot of diversity in the landscape. And the
hiking is great. I mean, it is a mountain trail. It's up and down and up and down. But
in spring with the wildflowers and the greenery and in autumn with the changing of the season
and the colors of the leaves, it's unbelievable.
You're involved in Kurdistan. There's a hikers community there. Have you found that in other
places in the Middle East?
Yeah, I have. I mean, I think oftentimes where there's mountains, where there's beautiful
landscapes, people have a relationship to that. In the Middle East, there's definitely
a culture of people going to the mountains, to the green wild places and having picnics
and being connected to that place. And in Kurdistan, also, you know, in Jordan and in
the West Bank, there's been hiking communities that have grown. And, you know, the understanding
of hiking as it's seen in the Western world sometimes takes a while to catch on that it's
this sort of recreational thing. But it often meets in the middle. And there's kind of a
nice version to that too.
How would you, you've been a good part of the world now. What are some takeaways you
have from all of this, all your experiences on wild places?
I think I've learned to never underestimate the power of wild places and the importance
of wild places. We talk all the time about the protection of wild places mentioned in
that. And it's for very practical reasons. Environmentally, it's essential that we do
so and protect our water resources and so on. But also just for our own minds and for
our own relationship here, it's really important that we do that. So I think that has been
the key takeaway to me to never underestimate the power of wilderness and to never underestimate,
to never take it for granted because it really is under threat and always will be. And so
it needs champions. It needs champions like you. It needs champions like me. It needs
everyone doing everything they can to protect it.
So today we have with us Jemena Martinez-Astroza, also known as Nina. She's a photojournalist,
permaculturist and urban farmer.
Yeah, why don't you just to start us out here, can you tell us a little bit about your article
and what it was about? Just sort of a brief overview.
Yes, I did write this article because I didn't want to lost all the memories that I did have
from this travel. I lost my camera and I am a photojournalist. So imagine like your whole
identity, it's been like lost or I don't know. So how I was going to be in the presence of
this magnificent nature phenomenon without my camera. One thing that I want to say before
to start this space is I want to acknowledge the traditional elders of the land where I'm
living today, which is the five tribes of Kulin Nation here in Australia. This should be a
thing that we use in every day's life. We have to acknowledge the people who was here
before and they use traditional knowledge to take care of this land.
So that brings to a really good point what you just said. In your article, you talk a
lot about Icelandic culture and its relationship to nature. Can you tell me a little bit more
about that just from what you saw even outside of the parks?
Yeah, I think nature for them, it's in their veins. And this is something that we as maybe
Latino American or American people thinking in the whole continent, we have been missing
because of the Western culture, which is so strong and don't put in value or roots. But
Vikings are Vikings. No one's colonized them. They are very settled in their truth. They
love their culture. And for example, I did have a friend, a Chilean friend who was married
with an Icelandic guy. He's a scientist. And I think my love for Iceland started by then,
but they have a kid and the name of the kid is Wolf in Icelandic, which is Ulbur. So it's
very common for them to name the people with elements from nature. Could you believe it?
Because the names in our culture is like Maria, Jose, Ricardo, Petro. I don't know where that
comes from, but mostly of them, of course, are from religions. But where is our traditions?
I would love to know more actually about, for example, all roots in Chile. I just become
in my awakening traveling and I've been so mesmerized for their connection with nature.
And one day we'll come back to Latin America to know more about it.
Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, you wrote this story about your journey, you know, your
mission to try to see Northern Lights again. And so I sort of had two questions for that.
When was the first time that you saw them? And two, when you finally did see them, what
was that like?
That's a really good question, because it was the whole motif, like motto, for the travel.
The first time that I saw the Northern Lights was in Norway. I traveled with two other Chilean
friends. We were living in Denmark and we traveled all the way to Northern territory
in Norway, to a city called Tromsø. And we were in the middle of winter and we were just
too excited. I didn't sleep the first night just waiting. We have a beautiful unit, rented
unit that was looking at a fjord and a mountain in Tromsø. So it was unbelievable. I didn't
sleep the first night. We didn't see it. And at the other day, we just opened the door
and we said, like, oh, let's go for a walk and maybe we will see Aurora or Alice here.
And I remember I did open the door and I was talking with my friends and then I moved my
head around and Aurora was there, was in front of my eyes, was on top of my head. And it's
like a universe bath. And three of us, we started crying. It's like, this emotion that
you cannot explain. It's magical. It's a magical moment. And I love nature and I feel really
connected with nature. I'm a communicator and a journalist and I'm always struggling
how to communicate these feelings and human experiences. But sometimes I realized you
cannot just express it. So I did take some pictures from that, from Tromsø experience
and I did an article that was published in Outside Magazine. So if you want to know more
about it, the whole story is there. And when I travel and when I went to Tromsø, we saw
the Northern Lights every single day. And versus when I went to Iceland, following the
same forecast, I saw the Northern Lights once and was very low and was very like far away.
It wasn't that intense like in Tromsø. And I was like even up north. So I thought it
would be in the other way around the experience. But I didn't see the Northern Lights. And
then nature taught me another thing again. It's wild. You cannot control it. Even if
we create where the smartest beings on earth because we create the forecast, no, no, no,
no, no. Nature does her own thing. Mother nature and Mother Earth and the universe.
We are many machines of the universe, but I think we lost connection. We have to tune
again into the universe vibration and try to understand the things, not necessarily
with words. And I think something maybe I could add to my article in the future, it
may be try to be less journalist and more human to do the writing. But in the end, everything
is connection.
Yeah. So your article, you talk about your journey to Iceland, all that you went through
trying to see these Northern Lights, trying to photograph them, what it's like in Iceland,
their culture a little bit. Was there anything that you didn't include in your article that
you also thought was interesting or funny or whatever it might be that just didn't make
it in for whatever reason?
Yeah, actually, in one of the tours, we did have a tour guide that was talking about Christmas
because it's in the article. And when you go around the downtown, you can see a big
mailbox and a Christmas shop and it's open all the year. And we don't understand pretty
much Santa's story and all the Christmas in winter because we are in South America now
and living in Australia and we have Christmas in summer, so it's quite the same. But by
then, I didn't really understand just because I did live Christmas when I was in Copenhagen,
so I could get quite some of the stories about Christmas and Santa and the cold. But then
the tour guide said a story when she was a child. So she said, when you have a bad behavior,
when you are a kid, in Christmas, you get a sock, which is like, let's talk like 15
years ago, they did use socks, like that was true, to hang instead wrap things or gifts.
They used to use socks, then they hang them next to the fire inside of the house, like
next to the fireplace. And if you have a bad behavior, you will get potatoes. If you have
a good behavior, you will get fruits and possible candies and in the better case, like a little
chocolate. But because this is island is so far away, everything is imported. So makes
total sense. Even fruits are hard to get there. Like everything is imported. They mostly have
like greenies. So that was fun to know. Like, oh, imagine now kids have like several and
very fancy gifts. But before it was a sock with potatoes. And she did have the funny
stories. She didn't have a sock one year with potatoes. But she came at night and she changed
the potatoes for oranges, like the only two oranges that they did have in the house. And
the parents said that the other day, like, oh, you got oranges. I'm surprised because
you didn't really behave this year. And she was like, Oh, my God, I'm so happy because
I got oranges. But she changed them. And of course, that's so funny. That's amazing.
That's funny. And one thing that I could I could love to highlight. Then I went to Iceland.
And after I went to Iceland, I thought this is my favorite place in the world. Because
the culture is very connected with the land is they have a very they're very conscious
of the impact in the city about every policy that they have. Everything in Iceland is a
national park counts as a national park and is protected and is part of the culture and
it has a story and it's put in value. So I thought, Oh, this is my favorite place in
the world. And after that, I came back at some point at Chile. And for first time, I
went to Patagonia. And I thought, Oh, my God, wait a minute. What's how is my hobby is my
ignorance than I was. I didn't know Patagonia before. And I thought Iceland is like the
the best system, the most beautiful landscape than I've ever seen. Patagonia is incredible.
Chile is amazing. We have everything. But we don't put it in value. We don't protect
it. We don't care. Everything is highly privatized is kept size for private companies or private
individuals. And these need to change because land and ecosystems doesn't belong to us.
We don't own it. That's a new concept from you can call it capitalism, neoliberalism.
But we have to come back to the thinking that we are the custodians of the land. We are
here to take it all take care of it for future generations. And something that I would love
to create consciousness about is that we have a beautiful country. We need to own it. We
need to embody it. And we need to protect it. And we can do this, creating consciousness
from the school, talking with our friends about it, and making an opinion about it.
This is not something that just a government will fix in the future. This is our duty,
because we are living in this earth, in this land. And we have to do it with joy, because
we came to this earth to take care of it.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great sentiment. And I think, I think it's really unique to
hear that perspective, you know, as a Chilean who just maybe came to know Patagonia a little
bit later in their life, and see, you know, the beauty that is is here and in the land.
So yeah, I really appreciate that you sharing that perspective with us.
Published in print and digital since 2011, Patagon Journal is a bilingual magazine
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