When Tim Cope was just 20 years old, he and friend Chris Hatherly were struggling to pedal their recumbent bicycles through the sands of the Gobi desert when a group of horsemen galloped up to check out the two-wheeled adventurers.
Then, as effortlessly as they had arrived, the horsemen galloped away over the horizon, but not before leaving a lasting impression on Cope.
“I was totally struck by these horsemen who would gallop over to have a look and then gallop off,” Cope said. “With a bike, I knew I could only travel on roads, following a pre- determined path. Travelling by horseback is total freedom.”
Inspired to learn all he could about the way of life of those horsemen, in June 2004, Cope embarked on his own horseback journey across that same landscape.
Already a seasoned adventurer by the age of 24, Cope had pedalled, with Hatherly, 10,000 kilometres over 14 months from eastern Russia across Siberia to Beijing. Then, just six months after returning home to Australia he was back in Siberia to join three others, including Canadian Colin Angus, to travel 4,200 km on the Yennisey River by cramped, leaky rowboat from Lake Baikal to the Arctic Ocean.
But it was the horseback journey he launched nine years ago, during which he spent three and half years travelling some 10,000 km from Mongolia to Hungary with his dog, Tigon, that continues today.
Thinking his actual trip would take 18 months to two years, Cope followed the trail of Genghis Khan, the founder and emperor of the Mongol Empire of the 12th and 13th century that grew to encompass virtually all of Eurasia. Living among the region’s nomads drinking fermented mare’s milk and eating dried mutton, Cope crossed the Eurasian steppe, camping on the high plains, fending off wolves and potential horse thieves and enduring scorching desert heat and freezing high mountain passes.
Along the way, despite numerous technical difficulties, he managed to film his journey through the harsh yet exquisite landscape unblocked by any fences, roads or cities all the way to the Danube River.
With the physical part of his journey complete, he returned to Australia and spent two years making a film about his remarkable journey, titled On the Trail of Genghis Kahn. The film earned him the coveted People’s Choice Award at the 2011 Banff Mountain Film Festival, among numerous other festivals’ awards.
Then he sat down to spend the next four and a half years writing his book, On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads. Along the way he enjoyed the opportunity to spend three weeks at the Banff Centre as a recipient of the 2011 Fleck Fellowship Award.
This Sunday (Oct. 27), Cope returns to Banff as featured guest of the 2013 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
“It still feels as fresh as if it was yesterday, it’s all one and the same journey,” Cope said by telephone from Haida Gwaii, where he was visiting in advance of his arrival in Banff.
“To me, writing and the journey are one and the same. I still feel I’m on the journey. It didn’t end on the Danube.”
Since 2007, Cope has returned to Mongolia several times guiding 18-day trips for adventure tourists. Now fluent in Russian, through these trips Cope is able to stay connected to people he met during the course of his journey, as well as raise money for local schools. He also employs locals, including the man who lead him over a high pass in the glaciated Altai mountains on the course of his epic journey, who lends his skills as a camel herder.
“It’s a wonderful way of going back and being a part of their lives,” Cope said.
While his journey presented him with countless discoveries and challenges, Cope said one of the things that continues to resonate is how familiar the inhabitants of the vast and sparsely populated region were with their heritage and connection to Genghis Khan.
“I didn’t expect to find people as connected with their heritage as they are,” Cope said. “I didn’t expect them to understand my journey as much as they did. In Mongolia, everyone knows about Genghis Khan.”
Back in the western world, however, Cope said he feels dismayed at the utter lack of awareness of the Eurasian region as a whole, and even more so that so few people are even aware of mass starvation spurred by Stalin’s policies in the 1930s that wiped out 2.2 million people in Kazakhstan - a full one-third of the population.
“It shocks me how little people outside of the region know about these places,” Cope said. “Most people don’t even know Kazakhstan exists. It was tragedy on a massive scale, not just in terms of individual lives lost, but the loss of culture and a way of life that had been around nearly 6,000 years. I think a lot about these things every day.”
In contrast to Kazakhstan, the Russian republic of Kalmykia, located on the Caspian Sea and Europe’s only Buddhist region, was one of the more memorable places he experienced. The saiga antelope, which sports a nose resembling a truncated vacuum hose, was another surprise.
While he continues to live his journey through presentations and return visits to Mongolia, Cope admitted it’s often difficult to connect with people over his experiences in a world “where time wasn’t broken down into little parcels.”
“For three and a half years, it was my whole life,” Cope said. “In London, people asked what charity were you raising money for? Charity? I was on a quest to learn about and document and record this landscape, and the culture and the history of the people who live there.
“It was never about following a particular route. The only way to do that journey was by horse, from one end of the steppe to the other. It was more like becoming part of the fabric of society, rather than passing on top of a landscape. I guess that’s what I was craving.”
To learn about Kalmykia and the saiga and many other wonders of the fascinating and little known landscape between Mongolia and Hungary, don’t miss Cope’s presentation at the Banff Centre’s Eric Harvie Theatre this Sunday at 7:30 p.m. For tickets or more info, visit www.banffcentre.ca/mountainfestival
