“Every year you need to flush out your system and do a bit of suffering … if you deliberately put yourself in difficult situations, then you get a pretty good idea of how you are going. That’s why I like feeding the rat. It’s a sort of annual check up on myself. The rat is you really. It’s the other you, and its being fed by the you that you think you are” (Anthoine, M., in Alvarez, A., 1988; 158)
Feeding the Rat has been a constant theme of life, whether on the mountain or the road.
Following a big change to life in 2014, the chance to ‘feed the rat’ was taken once more. This time, I wanted to go back to the early days of travel and experience something a little more on the edge. A bus trip seemed in order … A criteria was decided:
- No private transport (except where unavoidable)
- No pre-booked hotels (Except for entry and exit)
- No posh stuff!
So in April 2015 I set off from North Wales to Morocco, intending to travel as far as I could by public transport. The single aim at this point was to spend a night in the desert. The trip evolved as I went along, and in the end I had a much richer experience than I had ever expected. The outcome was down to ‘the kindness of strangers’.
Click this link to watch the video on Vimeo
