Decade of travel ‘brings challenges and builds character’

The last decade has been eventful for Brian Cavanagh.

From living like a local in Fiji and the Amazon rain forest to near brushes with death on more than a few occasions, Brian has lived a life less ordinary.

The Mullingar native has spent the last 15 months living in Iceland after arriving in the one of the most expensive countries in the world with only €40 in his pocket.

“I just knew in my heart that I needed to be here and sure it wasn’t long before I got offered a room and got a job,” he told the Westmeath Examiner.

Currently residing in a house in the hills about 30 minutes outside Reykjavik and working as a private chef, he says that while we have a shared Viking heritage, the cultures are very different.

“It’s been strange to live in a country where there has been practically no war and not much crime. It’s very, very different. It’s like the collective nervous system is so different to the Irish. We’ve had almost non-stop strife since almost the 11th century and the roles that we have had to take the role of the slave or of the rebel, what we had to take on to survive, such as the destruction of the language and culture. It marks a people and it’s passed down.

“Here, it’s just been them against nature. It’s not really them against people. There is a lot more easy togetherness, even with foreigners. You help each other survive the weather, whereas in Ireland your enemy is other men. Who is going to hurt me or my family? It’s not the weather. Iceland feels like Ireland, if we didn’t have a thousand years of war.”

Thanks to the Vikings, many of the Icelandic women could easily be mistaken for their Irish genetic cousins. Walk down any street in Reykjavik and you will see many familiar looking faces, Brian says.

“A majority of the female genetic line is descended from Irish women. The Norwegian [Viking] men took the Irish women and brought them here. So the male line is mainly descended from the Norwegians and the female from the Irish slaves, wives and concubines. Not a hundred percent, there were Norwegian women as well, but the majority of female of Icelandic DNA comes from Irish women.”

“I’ve just left the house of one [before our phonecall]. She wouldn’t be out of place on the streets of Kinnegad. A lot of the women, they have the bone structures of the Irish,” he said.

During his stay, nature-lover Brian has embarked on a number of one-man hiking expeditions into the unforgiving Icelandic wilderness.

In May of last year, in the space of two weeks he hiked the 400km plus from the south to north coasts of the country, through its barren central plains. His supplies consisted of little more than his tent, sleeping bag, a small cooker, food and a compass.

At that time of year, Iceland has 24 hour sunlight, which made the experience all the more special.

“It was amazing. It [24 hour sunlight] is like a drug. At two o’clock in the morning, you can be fully hiking across mountains. It is like a drug, your body keeps feeding off the light. At 2.30am, the sun just kind of dips down and the sky gets a shade bluer. Then it returns and it’s back again.”

There were a number of advantages to embarking on an expedition like this while there was 24-hour sunlight.

“I could do more kilometres in a day and have to carry less food, as I got the trip done a bit faster. I could also walk at my own rhythm. I didn’t have to wait for dawn. Some nights I’d be too cold to sleep, so I could just pack up and start walking.”

Hiking across such a varied and difficult terrain on your own is not for the faint-hearted and Brian acknowledges that “some people might see it as extreme”.

While he “loved it”, there were a few hairy moments.

“I didn’t have snow shoes so sometimes when I was in the thick, soft snow my feet would punch through the snow and I’d go down to my knees or even to my hips in the snow. Then you’ve got to pull your leg out and drop it down again. In terrain like that it could take four hours to do a kilometre.

“The other extreme is pure, flat hard rock land. Then you can turn on the afterburners.”

When you are wading through hip-high snow, Brian says that there isn’t much time for abstraction.

“If I stop moving, I die. That makes things very simple. There is no argument to be had. It’s just one foot after the other. My only question to myself was can I take another step? Yes? Then, do it. I knew in my heart, it’s where I needed to be.

“I had a reasonable intuition that I wasn’t going to die. I continued and thankfully it was a lovely balance between adventure, difficulty and survival. I didn’t get any major injuries. It’s interesting – a lot of the emotional components start to fade away. They seem to be only useful in society.”

On the same hike, Brian had another near escape when he fell 15m while trying to climb out a canyon, but luckily fell on his backpack, which bore the force.

However, he says that having to cross up to 20 glacial rivers some days was the “scariest of all”.

“You stand at the bank of the river and watch that icy current bring rocks along and know you’ve got to get in there and cross it and feel the power of it. I had a little bit of post river trauma when I got to the north coast and started seeing rivers again (laughs).

“In the centre of Iceland, there is a glacier called Hofsjokull and that was the main glacier I was working around, so all the rivers there are glacial run-off.

“If I had tried to do the walk a week later, I wouldn’t have been able to do it because the temperature was coming up and there’d be more glacial runoff and they would flood. Because they are coming from the glacier and it’s Iceland and it’s in the highlands, which is at least 500m {above sea level], they are icy cold.

“I tried a lot of different ways [to get across]. Probably my favourite way was with socks. You’d take your shoes off. I’d keep one pair of socks for crossing rivers. They’d give me some grip and also protect me from sharp stone. In a day I could be crossing 20 rivers. You get used to being wet. A couple of them nearly took me into their grip and it is a scary experience.”

Iceland is the eighth country that Brian has lived in since he first left Ireland nearly a decade ago for Australia and New Zealand, where he narrowly avoided death after he was taken a mile out to sea by a rip current. The last place he lived before Iceland was the central Brazil on the banks of the mighty Amazon river. It’s a place and period that he looks back on with fond memories.

“The river where it passed our village was 10km wide. Obviously as an Irishman, that is crazy. It takes hours to paddle across the river. What an amazing place the Amazon is.

“I was living in a way that didn’t require money. I was living with people and we caught fish. We harvested fruit. We grew veggies. They were quite a land based people.”

The people of Fiji and their hospitality also left a big impression on Brian.

“What a people. Big strong people. I’ve been to a few cultures where their level of giving, their level of care of their guests blew my mind. We don’t have that in Ireland any more. If I walk down a small country road in Ireland, no one invites me in for tea. Not these days. Whereas there, every house I passed asked me in for tea, asked me in coffee, asked me in for rice. Told me their stories.

“They held me with such reverence. They would say: ‘The guest is God. God has come. They have an understand that God lives within each of us and is not separate from us.”

“I had some really amazing feasts in Fiji. Proper medieval feasts with giant tables and a whole pig.”

Possessing a deep connection to nature and critical of how wealthy, industrial societies plunder the planet’s finite resources, Brian feels a great infinity with the indigenous tribes he has met on this travels.

“With the more traditional cultures maybe it was not as familiar for me but it was easier in that they lived how I dreamed we could live.”

He also admired their sense of place and their attachment to the land of their ancestors.

“A lot of the indigenous people I met, they couldn’t understand why a man would leave his home.”

He may have seen a lot of the world over the last decade, but Brian’s travels have been driven by something deeper than getting stamps on his passport. He is on as much of an existential journey as a physical one.

“I’ve seen a bit but travelling was never the goal. I just moved and then I stopped and when I wanted to move again, I moved. I wouldn’t recommend the path I’ve taken. It’s been very difficult... Having no money and sleeping in the cold sometimes, but also builds character, perhaps.”

While it has been physically and mentally taxing at times, he is in no mood to put down roots yet. Set to leave Iceland in the next few months, he is excited about his next destination.

“The place that attracts me the most is the Carpathian mountain range in the south east of Europe, stretching from Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania down to Bulgaria.

“Apart from Georgia, which is arguably Europe, it is the last wilderness in Europe. It’s the last area of proper expansive wilderness where a man could walk for days and be in the relatively untouched wild with big animals and ancient trees.

“The big dream is to walk the length of it, which is about 2,200km. Some of the most incredible nature in Europe, I would imagine, is there. Like ancient beech forests, European bison, all kinds of big animals, different cultures. I might get 200km, find something and stop there,” he said.

Although he travels back to Ireland fairly regularly to see family and friends, Brian doesn’t believe he will settle here. To truly be himself, he needs to be immersed in nature.

“In the last 10 years, I see the value of cities but I also see the madness of them as well. If I have a choice, I will be living closer to water and mountains than the city.

“It comes with its challenges but I think those challenges can build community and character rather than be annoyances or obstructions. It can slow us down to a more natural way of life.”