Way back in 1955, Tim Slessor, a British traveler and author, along with a small team set off on what was billed as one of the most arduous and adventurous trips of all time: An expedition from London to Singapore. In Land Rovers. Crisscrossing 23 countries. The distance? 19,000km, give or take a few.
Plenty of adventures later, and driving through some of the most hazardous terrain, the team made it to their destination six months after they set off.
Fast forward to 2019 and another British gentleman, Alex Bescoby, also a traveler, filmmaker, author and television personality, decided to ‘recreate history’s greatest road trip’ in pretty much the same fashion that the men did it the first time- in the same car that was part of the first expedition and tracing the same route. The only difference was that this time it would be from Singapore to London ‘completing the journey they’d started’.
The trip went on to become a documentary series and a book titled The Last Overland: Singapore to London: The Return Journey of the Iconic Land Rover Expedition, for which Tim wrote the foreword.
Alex, the author of the book and the man behind the documentary will be speaking at the forthcoming Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai.
‘I’ve always been fascinated with the story,’ says Alex, in response to my question on why and how the trip came about. ‘I dreamed of doing it some day.’
So when the first opportunity presented itself, the history and travel lover did not think twice, quickly making plans of shifting gears and setting off.
Two things helped get him and his team on the road. ‘The first was meeting a guy named Adam Bennett who had found Oxford, the only surviving car from the original expedition, on the tiny island of St Helena in the south Atlantic.
‘The second was meeting with Tim who had been on the first journey.’
Alex quickly realized that the thirst for adventure was still raging strong in the now 87-year-old Tim. The octogenarian was raring to join the team for an overland trip in a 64-year-old car. ‘And I was stupid enough to agree,’ says the man whose works have been shown on Channel 4, History, BBC, Discovery, among others.
(However, sadly for Tim he had to pull out at the last minute after he fell ill and his grandson Nat took his place.)
Several adventures and ‘interesting incidents’ later, Alex and his team drove into London 111 days after setting off from Singapore clocking 19000km on the odometer.
An adventure and travel lover myself, I am eager to know about some of the exciting moments he had during the trip. ‘There were just too many,’ says the author. ‘To start with, the car is an adventure in itself. It has no power steering, no disc brakes, no synchromesh gearbox, no air-con, no heating….’
And true to Murphy’s Law, the car broke down in almost every single country they drove through- and they drove through 23- but it also ‘kept coming back to life every single time’.
Alex recalls driving through Tibet where it was freezing cold which meant that they had to drive while zipped up in sleeping bags to stay warm because the temperature was ‘somewhere in the range of minus 10’.
‘Then there were moments when we were driving and could see Mt Everest through our windscreen, or driving on the Pamir highway for 200 miles along the border with Afghanistan… There were huge highs and lows of the trip,’ he says.
For those who came in late, Alex documented more than an epic road trip. If the award-winning documentary filmmaker’s Forgotten Allies explores the history of the Second World War in south-east Asia, his second work, We Were Kings, tells the story of Burma’s lost royal family, the latter earning him the Whicker’s World Foundation Funding Award, the biggest single documentary funding prize in the UK. But more about these works later. I’m eager to know how the arduous, nearly four-month-long road trip shaped his perspective on life.
‘I’ve traveled across the world and worked in more than 70 countries, and I’ve always had a sense that the world is a lot kinder than the news often gives us credit for,’ he says.
‘[In almost every one of the 23 countries] we drove through, we were welcomed, positively and warmly, and although the news is full of dreadful things, I’d say that most people are kind and welcoming- particularly if you’re traveling with the right intentions and the right attitude. Yes, the world is a very kind place. That was a big lesson.’
Travelling by road also left him with a new perspective on the world.
‘It’s different than when you fly,’ he says. On a flight, you get in, fall asleep or watch a movie, then land on the other side of the planet. ‘You don’t understand just how big this world is. The beauty of overlanding is travelling through all the places in between that you’d never see if you rely on air transport, and this gives you a sense of how all the world truly fits together.’
Up until he was 19 years of age, Alex had not travelled much except on holidays with family. Then in University ‘by fluke’ he won a scholarship and went off first to Australia then Thailand and Myanmar to study Thai and Burmese history. He admits the culture shock he experienced was ‘dizzying, scary and wonderful’.
Learning new alphabets, being exposed to ‘completely different worldviews, different religions, and ways of just looking at everything... I enjoy that feeling of being completely out of your depth and having to learn. That for me is what travel is all about. Constantly being put out of your comfort zone and having to learn and to be to be open minded about how the world works’.
It was perhaps this sense of open mindedness and the desire to tell a slice of history from the point of view of the characters who experienced it first hand that led him to make We Were Kings.
Alex’s debut documentary, it tells the story of the surviving members of the Myanmar royal family and how one of them lost the chance of becoming king by a whisker.
For those who came in late, the British army invaded Burma and deposed its king in 1885 resulting in the death of the king in exile in India bringing down the curtains on a thousand years of monarchy. During the chaos that ensued in the aftermath of the king’s forced exile, the royal family disappeared and the country was plunged in war. Alex and his team spoke to the lost members of the royal family and, after filming for over three years, premiered the documentary in 2017 telling the story of the family and of a country that emerged after several tumultous changes.
Alex considers it a privilege to have helped tell the story of the royal family of Myanmar. ‘In a sense, it was about giving back…of allowing people from Myanmar to tell their stories to the world. It was such a privilege.’
As a historian, Alex believes it was important that the people of the country tell their story. ‘The country is so rich in history [but] also misunderstood,’ he says.
‘For me, what I loved about the story was it was in one sense a way of explaining the history, then connecting it to the present, but also showing how one family had navigated this incredibly, dangerous, devastating period of history. So that’s why that story will forever be my first love.’
Two years after making We Were Kings, he made Forgotten Allies which also had a link to Myanmar. This one told of a few surviving Burmese war veterans who fought a brutal battle for Britain against Japan but were forgotten and neglected by Britain after the Allied victory.
So what is he working on right now?
‘A sequel to the Last Overland which is even bigger,’ he says, reluctant to share anything more. “I can only say that it’s a road trip that I’ve wanted to do for year, and it’s even longer than the Last Overland.’
The author and adventurer is also looking forward to the sessions at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature where he will be sharing tales of his travels as well as his documentaries and how he made them.
‘I think the big question in the [Lit fest] sessions will be what is it that drives people to go on these extraordinary long and punishing journeys, and what have we learned along the way.
‘So, come along if you’ve got a burning desire to go on a journey and maybe figure out the why first and the how second.’
