Connecting to a New Frontier

SEATTLE —  Above a sun-baked canyon a hawk is circling lazily. Down on the surface of the Yakima River, however, adventurer Richard Bangs and his crew are in the midst of a real-life drama.

A rubber raft crowded with Sunday picnickers has snagged on a fallen tree. The heavy current is about to flip the craft over, throwing the passengers, including a small child, into the treacherous grip of submerged branches and fast-moving water.

While some of Bangs’ crew beaches their nearby raft and brings out rope to help evacuate the frightened picnickers, the rest have broken out the cameras. The idea is to use the arsenal of high-tech recording and communicating equipment on hand to record the event for transmission to the World Wide Web.

The episode proves to be the perfect “wet run” for the electronic gear Banks will be taking down the Tekeze River, an unexplored, half-mile deep gorge in Ethiopia’s Abyssinian Plateau, to launch a new adventure-travel Web site.

The site, named Mungo Park after an 18th-century Scottish explorer of Africa, will carry daily journals, photos, sound and video clips from the Tekeze trip. The expedition’s members will become the eyes and ears of the computer-bound armchair traveler, says Bangs, the site’s editor in chief.

“It’s multimedia, so you can hear the sounds of an African chant, the roar of a lion or the laugh of a hippo,” he said. “There are no filters, so there is a rawness to the information. It’s seductive.”

Mungo Park, part of Microsoft Corp.’s drive to become a major producer of programming, or “content,” for the Internet, is just the latest and most ambitious example of a worldwide rush by adventurers to the new online frontier.

But it’s also already raising questions about whether the unique you-are-there aspects of online exploring may prove to be less a blessing than a curse. Critics argue that the very experience of exploring remote corners of the globe--an experience that once drew its romance from the adventurer’s splendid isolation--is deeply marred by the presence of high-tech gear that can accomplish instantaneous contact with civilization.

Others fear that bringing an Internet audience along on a trip can dangerously influence the split-second judgments explorers must often make in unpredictable and life-threatening situations.

Last April, for example, reports reached two separate Web sites, long before they reached newspapers, that several expeditions on Mt. Everest had run into a killer storm.

Web fans found the drama riveting.

“We were able to bring the raw excitement of the tragedy to readers,” said John Healy, publisher of Outside Online, which carried journal entries sent in by mountaineers via satellite telephones.

But Jon Krakauer, who was on Everest during the tragedy, suggested in a recent Outside magazine article that the new medium may have contributed to the tragedy, in which eight people perished. Krakauer argues that the superhuman effort to literally pull Manhattan writer Sandy Hill Pittman, who was filing daily to an NBC online site, up to the summit led to a series of fatal misjudgments.

Of course, the quest by adventurers not only for the uncharted destination but for publicity and fame is not new. Henry Stanley’s search for David Livingstone in the heart of Africa was a newspaper stunt, after all, and Richard E. Byrd was so driven by the pressure of publicity in his 1926 expedition to the North Pole that he may even have faked his success, according to recent evidence.

Thus, by reaching lots of people cheaply, the Net represents merely a modern extension of the same impulse.

But there is a difference. Because of the limitations of technology, past expeditions unfolded well out of the eyes of sponsors and bystanders. Now, increasingly, each step into the remote wilds can be transmitted virtually in real time, influencing and distorting the nature and experience of adventure travel as well as the critical judgment of adventurers.

“It’s bizarre that we have to be flooded with instant data and sensation the second it happens,” said Bill Henderson, the Wainscott, N.Y., head of Pushcart Press, which recently published “Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club,” a collection of essays by such technology skeptics as Russell Baker.

“You go out to the wilderness to find the soul you’ve lost, but then you carry all this gear,” Henderson said. “It negates the whole experience. You might as well be at the office.”

Others question whether instant Web reports, in contrast to the more reflective travel writing available in books, can ever do justice to the travel experience.

“The Web denigrates genuine travel by turning it into a game, a television-like product,” said Clifford Stoll, a Berkeley astronomer and the author of “Silicon Snake Oil,” a critique of computers and the Internet.

While the best travel writers, such as Jack London and Paul Theroux, have always offered intensely personal experiences, says Stoll, the Web pretends to be objective.

“It’s an example of the vapid hollowness of the culture of computing that it pretends to deliver an experience when at best it offers a shallow simulation,” he said.

(And be forewarned: You won’t even get that level of experience in Mungo Park unless you are using recently released, third-generation Internet browsers along with software that gives you audio capability.)

Many also fret that the expanded push to find and report on unexplored corners of the world via the Web will trigger a rush of tourism that could spoil the few remaining pristine spots on the globe.

Already thousands of Web sites offer adventure travel to destinations ranging from Indonesia to Peru, employing every means of transportation from horseback to kayak to hang glider. Bangs hopes to make Mungo Park a gathering point for such tour companies.

And the trend is sure to continue. British adventurer Nick Sanders, who plans to circle the globe by motorcycle in a record 22 days beginning in mid-September, will post his daily journal and photos on the Web using a cellular phone and laptop computer.

Discovery Online--the online arm of cable television’s Discovery Channel--later this month will start chronicling a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon with reports sent via satellite. The National Geographic Society has its own elaborate Web site to publish illustrated journals from its exotic expeditions.

Bangs is himself an old hand at getting across to urbanites the joys of adventure travel.

The 46-year-old adventurer guided rafts down the Grand Canyon as a college student and has written 10 travel books on his experiences, including an award-winning account of the race to raft the Yangtze in China. Later he prepared multimedia CD-ROMs.

Last December, Bangs led an expedition to Antarctica that sent daily reports to an adventure-travel Web site created by his travel company, Sobek Expeditions. Posted were stunning photos and quirky, sometimes entertaining, journals.

A few months later Bangs was invited by Melinda French, the wife of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, and Microsoft technology guru Nathan Myhrvold to start Mungo Park.

For all that, he says he is mindful of the potential concerns.

“It’s human nature to do new dangerous things,” he said. And while he and his experienced crew will do everything they can to make his trips safe and comfortable, Bangs says he wants to do things never done before.

“The best expeditions,” he contended, “are when something goes wrong.”

But he also admits he doesn’t like to see the remote rivers he has explored become overrun with tourists.

The Zambezi in Africa was an isolated, feared river before Bangs led a trip down its crocodile-infested waters. “It was spectacular,” he said. “Now there is hang-gliding and dozens of rafting companies.”

But Bangs, a big believer in the “transformational experience” of adventure travel, hopes his reports will motivate Web surfers to “cut the tether,” take off into the wild and return with a better understanding of nature and the world.

For good or for bad, competitors figure Microsoft and Richard Bangs could be a compelling combination.

“Richard has done very well with large expeditions,” said Healy, the publisher of Outside Online. “Now [with Microsoft] he has a killer marketing machine behind him.”

The Mungo Park site will be offered free. It is still unclear whether it will attract enough advertising to cover the expense of sponsoring regular expeditions as well as salaries for its staff of 18.

But the site could be a crucial part of a broader push by Microsoft into the travel business. Mungo Park plans to eventually play some role in the adventure-travel tour business, although it is unclear whether it will organize its own tours. The Web site will also be connected to Expedia, a soon-to-be launched Microsoft Web travel service that will allow visitors to book airline and hotel reservations.

“It’s a huge leap from the old way,” Bangs said. “This is the model for publishing in the future.”

The team launched the site Thursday with a live chat with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as well as an extensive interview with Rahel Sikre-Selassie, great-granddaughter of the late Emperor Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s last reigning monarch.

Visitors to the site can read about the history and geography of this cradle of civilization. There is an article about the Ark of the Covenant, which is believed to hold the original tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. National tradition says the tablets reside in the Ethiopian city of Axum. There are also tales of King Solomon’s gold mines, also placed by tradition in the region Bangs will be exploring. Bangs is counting on the stories to add to the aura of adventure surrounding the trip.

In addition to the roughly 12 such trips Mungo Park hopes to sponsor each year, Bangs hopes to bring a new dimension to the travel field by tapping the talents of established fiction writers.

“We want geography, travel and adventure with the literary quality of the New Yorker [magazine],” he said. “Fiction writers bring a new view to things. It’s a marriage that cries to happen.”

Some of the writers are skeptical of the Web. Tama Janowitz, who once hung out with Andy Warhol and chronicled New York night life in “Slaves of New York,” her best-selling book of short stories, has somewhat reluctantly agreed to go kayaking in the nesting grounds of killer whales off Canada’s Vancouver Island.

“I have weak arms. I’m not athletic and I hate camping more than anything,” said Janowitz who has loathsome memories of camping with her father. “It’s terrifying.”

Bangs says he tried the same approach at his own travel Web site but had trouble getting famous authors to return his calls. This time, about half of the 100 authors contacted have expressed an interest, he says.

“Microsoft is a brand name,” Bangs said. “It’s seen as doing exciting, creative things.”

Though not without astonishing technological assistance. On his trip down the Tekeze, Banks is taking three portable satellite phones (weighing a total of 130 pounds), five laptop computers, six digital cameras (the higher-priced ones cost $24,000) and two gasoline generators to run the phones and recharge the batteries of the other electronic gear.

To skeptics, Bangs and his many cohorts are exploring a technology frontier that doesn’t need exploring. “It’s a terrific solution to a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Internet skeptic Stoll. “These things end up as sterile, unmoving, unmemorable events.”

The Internet address for Mungo Park is https://www.mungopark.com.