A decade of living dangerously

02-16-2003

Robert Young Pelton vacations where wise men fear to tread. But that doesn't make him a fool, just a traveler with highly developed sense of adventure, a taste for dangerous places and fascination with perilous people.

During the past 10 years, the Canadian-born Pelton, 47, has independently explored dozens of the world's "hot spots," war-torn areas from Sierra Leone in West Africa to the Pacific island of Bougainville. In 1999, he stood with Chechen rebels during the Russian siege of Grozny, where more than 6000 shell impacts an hour were counted. He got up close and personal with Talib fighters and Tajik warlords in Afghanistan during the heat of military confrontation.

Pelton travels not as a journalist or in any official capacity other than as an "author of fortune," an interested, nonjudgmental observer of human behavior.

He has gone through extraordinary difficulties and distances to put himself amid the type of experiences that arise in extreme social situations, overcoming obstacles and facing his personal fears.

In this sense, he's been something of a fly on the walls of danger, albeit one who can set a scene and recount an experience with the wry eye and sharp prose of a Mark Twain.

His words evoke the odors of high explosives and sweat, with a cast of colorful and adroitly sketched characters. The variety of places and situations he's experienced and people he's met is amazing.

That he not only has survived these encounters but also has come back home to write about them eloquently is a testament to his remarkable skills. That he keeps going back and putting himself at serious risk is a testament to something else.

The author of four books and numerous magazine articles, the host of the Travel Channel's series "The World's Most Dangerous Places," Pelton spoke recently to some 500 people as part of the Town Hall South lecture series at Upper St. Clair High School. It was a lecture engagement that nearly didn't take place.

In early January, Pelton was hiking in the Darien Gap no-man's land along the border of Panama and Colombia, while writing an article in National Geographic Adventure magazine. He and two young American travelers were captured by a group of right-wing Colombian militants.

For 11 days, they were marched between jungle outposts. His wife learned of his capture only when he didn't return home as scheduled. When intermediaries contacted the head of the paramilitary group, Carlos Castano, a news release was issued saying Pelton was being held for his own safety. Once Castano's group of 150 men returned from Panama, Pelton was released, with no demand for ransom.

Two private contractors were sent to facilitate his return, one an ex-CIA operative, the other a former Delta Force operator. CNN also dispatched a plane to pick him up, and he was able to keep his speaking date in Pittsburgh.

For all his recent rigors and adventurous accomplishments, Pelton remains remarkably affable and approachable, a gifted story teller, with a sharp eye for detail, a wry sense of humor and natural candor, as he told the tale of his life to the audience in Upper St. Clair.

Pelton became an inveterate wanderer at an early age. "I always wanted to get out and see things for myself." As a boy, he attended a school with a rigorous curriculum that resembled an Outward Bound itinerary, with mandatory thousand-mile canoe trips and 50-mile snow shoe marathons.

A self-taught marketing whiz, Pelton launched a successful company orchestrating corporate multimedia presentations. Within a decade, he was able to sell his interests, making him a millionaire before age 40.

That good fortune also left him with the time and means to further his passion, the pursuit of exotic locations well off the beaten track -- in fact, off any track at all.

In something of a midlife crisis, Pelton resolved to "leave something that would echo and resonate beyond a brief flash of light. It was time to live like the wind and then to die like thunder."

Throughout his business career, he'd found himself taking long trips to increasingly obscure destinations, the dwindling number of unexplored pockets on the planet, for example, helicoptering in to the unroaded jungles of the Maliau Basin on the Malaysian island of Sabah.

In 1995, Pelton published his 1,000-page compendium, "The World's Most Dangerous Places," essentially a how-to guide for visiting lands to which most people would never dream of going.

Although his book was adopted unofficially as required reading by the CIA, it languished in bookstores until Sept. 11, 2001, when copies suddenly began to fly off the shelves. It's now in its fifth edition, with a trade paperback version due out this April. Long excepts of the book are previewed at Amazon.com and on Pelton's Web site, www.comebackalive.com.

Pelton has since written three other similarly themed recollections of his adventures, including in 2000 his highly readable autobiography, "The Adventurist, My Life in Dangerous Places."

In it he writes, "Anyone can make up an adventure. But to seek it, live it, survive it, and make sense of it, now that is real and precious."

A real action figure, he certainly practices what he preaches.

Among his list of adventures, Pelton spent December 2001 tagging along with General Abdul Rashid Dostum, anUzbeck Afghan warlord, leader of the Jumbish-e-Milli (Islamic Party of Afghanistan) and a central figure in the Northern Alliance. That led Pelton to Mazar-e Sharif, where he encountered John Walker Lindh at a field hospital after the uprising at the prison.

Alerted to the presence of an American among the Taliban prisoners, Pelton got medical treatment for the hypothermic Lindh and then took him to Dostum's house. The rest, as they say, is history.

In view of the current international terrorist alerts, I asked Pelton whether he thought travelers were facing greater perils these days.

"Yes, travel is more dangerous," he answered quickly, "because although security is being provided for government and military overseas, the traveler is a 'soft target,' and it doesn't matter who gets killed by a terrorist. I don't advise anyone to do anything other than to learn as much as they can about the threats and dangers and stay safe."

But are there more no-go places for the average traveler?

"It really doesn't matter when or where you travel based on the timing and locations of previous attacks."

As he wrote in his first book, "When I travel to the world's most dangerous places, I see the best and the worst in people with my own eyes. There's a purity in that -- seeing life for yourself, unfiltered by other people's judgments. And at journey's end, I find I'm never really the same person I was at the beginning. But maybe that's the biggest discovery of all."

In other words, the most dangerous place in the world is less a state on the map than a state of mind: ignorance.

 

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