A fellow traveller in Vanuatu last year recommended a travel writer to me, suggesting Benedict Allen’s Into The Crocodile's Nest (about New Guinea). I couldn’t easily obtain that one, so I read Into The Abyss, about a trip by dog sled up the Chukchi peninsula in the extreme east of Siberia, part of Roman Abramovitch's Chukotcka province. He had the eventual aim of crossing the Bering Strait on the ice, alone, to Alaska - something that had only been done in the myths and stories of the locals, though no-one doubted that he had been possible in the old days. I confess I was very disappointed, especially as I’d heard the author speak extremely entertainingly at a London Library event a few months before. I am interested in the Arctic, and this was the kind of trip to capture my imagination, but I found the whole book too inward looking, too disjointed and inconsequential, and too padded with snippets and snatches of history, other people’s writings, memories from utterly different trips. It was, for me, a pot pourri without enough of a unifying theme.
And yet, there was much to enjoy. There pungent comment about the Soviet abuse of the native dwellers in these remote lands, about Inuit culture, and about the political prisoners that were sent here. There is human warmth, much traveller’s frustration, and the occasional drama. I found it half a book, missing much of the detail and narrative of his trip, and loaded down with semi-philosophical musings about danger and survival; and there was too much about totally unconnected events in New Guinea, or with Scott and Amundsen in the Antarctic.
Allen's relationship with his dogs is central to the book - the humans he encounters are often caricatures, and increasingly he finds them a hindrance and a burden, especially when they get very drunk - all too often. But he grows closer and closer to his dogs, half savage as they are, and that's a redeeming feature in anyone! By the way, he learned to drive a dog team well enough to go out alone confidently, and he did get about a third of the way across the Bering Strait. But by then, he had got lost a couple of times, and decided to turn back before the lack of ice forced the decision on him. What he would have done in Alaska, with no entry permit and a team of Russian dogs, is anyone’s guess!