Journey to the Bottommost of the Earth
Categories: Travel , Outdoors & Nature , Staff Picks
I recently snagged Jim Malusa's travel and adventure book, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents, published by Sierra Club Books. I found it to be an entertaining and quite amusing ride.
Malusa, a biologist and native of Tucson, Arizona, conceived of the idea of biking to the lowest places below sea level on each continent—he refers to these as "antisummits”—after he and his wife, Sonya, rode their bicycles through Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, crossing over a 12, 400 foot high mountain pass to get to the Turpan Depression in the Takla Makan desert. It's the lowest point in western China, some 500 feet bellow sea level.
They are obviously a couple who enjoy cycling and have a taste for adventure.
On further journeys to uncover the Earth's extremes of sunken geology, Malusa road solo and posted dispatches via satellite to Discovery Channel online, which provided funding and technical support.
He pedaled through the Outback to Lake Eyre in Australia, 1500 miles from Darwin to the sump of a godforsaken salt lake, 49 feet below sea level. Then he bicycled from Cairo through Israel to the Dead Sea, 1350 feet below sea level, the lowest point in Asia (and on the planet).
Malusa cranked from Moscow to Tishkova on the Caspian Sea, Europe's deepest depression at 92 feet below sea level. To visit the South America’s nadir of elevation, Salina Grande (at minus 138 feet) on the Penisula Valdes, he embarked on a brutally windy ride over the Chilean Andes and across Patagonia to the Atlantic coast.
Africa's deepest indentation is found in impoverished and malarial Djibouti, where the Red Sea opens to the Indian Ocean. Lac Assal is a great salt sea 500 feet below sea level. Malusa's route took him on a spin around the Gulf of Tadjoura, avoiding land mines along the way.
For his final trip, Malusa cycled from is home in Tucson to California's Death Valley, North America's surface cavity of distinction at 292 feet below sea level. (He wisely skips traveling to Antarctica's superlative hollow because it sits beneath 15,000 feet of ice!)
Into thick Air is a great book to take along on your summer journeys. The author's wry, ironic tone owes something to the wonderful travel books of of Bill Bryson, although Malusa comes across as less of a schlemiel. He is, after all, a scientist whose training makes him observant and knowledgeable about the natural world. (Sometimes his prose is quite striking: “Low chubby clouds skid out of the gulf and are scooped up like ground balls on the slopes of a big mountain only ten miles inland.”) And quite obviously, Jim Malusa is an accomplished bicycle athlete. Intrepid as hell.
