I always reckoned those crusty old fishermen, sailors and mountain climbers would never succumb to geekdom. They would always be out there in big skies, shunning computer keyboards and blinking screens for wide open spaces. I was wrong.
It happened when I was reading a magazine article about two brothers who combine fly-fishing with high altitude skiing on the logical premise that fish such as trout and steelheads live in cold water. In other words, wherever you find high mountains you will find crystal streams and good fly-fishing.
The brothers, Ian and Neil Provo, make their living going to wild places and filming their adventures, which are then posted on the web. The more web traffic they get, the more advertisers are attracted, the more money they make, and the more expeditions they go on. It’s a neat circle made possible by massive global internet access. Much of their stuff is about snowboarding and skiing down mountains so steep it makes your stomach swoop, but they increasingly are turning to fly-fishing.
They decided to go fishing in remote Bolivia and so did an internet search titled #goldendorado on Instagram. For non-fisherpeople, Golden Dorado is a fierce-fighting South American fish that is best caught on flies, and for non-geeks, Instagram is a photo-sharing social media network. Sort of like Twitter, except only pictures.
Now Bolivia is seriously third world with bandits and cocaine runners, and you don’t think there would be many people posting photos of fish on social media there, let alone knowing what a hashtag is. But it has big mountains and fast clear rivers. Within hours, thanks to Silicon Valley geeks, the Provos had linked up to a Spanish guide who was fishing in the area and just happened to have a solar-powered computer nearby.
The Provos packed their rods and were about to set off when they got an email from their guide deep in the jungle. It wasn’t good news; he was about to be airlifted to hospital as he had slipped on a mossy log and broken his leg while being threatened by local tribesmen who had never seen a white man before. It had taken him a whole day to be carried nine miles to the nearest bush clearing that moonlighted as an airstrip.
The Provos decided to go anyway. What followed was a rollercoaster ride where they braved almost biblical floods and were regularly accosted by aggressive locals threatening to break their vehicle’s windscreen if they didn’t pony up wads of Yanqui dollars to pass through.
Just as they were about give up as the muddy rivers were unfishable, they stumbled across a tribe of friendly Amazonians who paddled them far upstream to no-man’s land. Then the weather cleared. For the next two weeks they camped on the banks, catching metre-long Dorado and other species they didn’t know existed. The slept rough, living on what they caught, drinking rainwater, and when they emerged from the bush two weeks later, they had fishing stories to tell that would last them a lifetime.
How do I know all this?
Simple – the great outdoors is now digitalised. I watched their video on the internet and was green with envy.
They have done other adventure videos as well, such as an epic called ‘Steelheads and Spines’ about an Alaskan safari where they either jumped off mountains with only snowboards preventing them from being splattered on rocks below; or fished for steelheads that had never seen a hook before. I watched that too, even greener with envy – not from the skiing, of course, as my knees that carried me through a couple of Comrades Marathons now buckle at the thought of jumping out of bed.
But much as I enjoy having a virtual journey almost as it happens, it did get me thinking. When even the wildest adventurers are now seriously computer-savvy geeks – where will it all end?
Maybe this is the real revenge of the nerds.
