How underground exploration is the perennial frontier of adventure travel

May 19, 2020

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“Even the briefest trip into a tunnel or a cave can feel like an escape into a parallel reality, the way characters in children’s books vanish through portals into secret worlds.” –Will Hunt

In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Will talk about our imaginative relationship with underground places, and how it often starts in childhood (4:30); the concept of “urban exploration” in the industrial spaces underneath cities, and Will’s fascination with a NYC graffiti artist named REVS (11:00); the catacombs of Paris, how easy it is to get lost underground, and how hard it is to map underground passages (26:15); going underground as a form of time travel, the microbes that live underground, and the relics that can be found underground (40:00); the spiritual aspect of spending time underground in the dark zone of a cave (51:00); and how and why to get started exploring underground (59:00).

Will Hunt’s (@willhunt__) writing, photography, and audio storytelling have appeared in The Economist, the Paris Review Daily, The Atavist, The Guardian, Discover, Audible Originals, and Outside, among other places. He is currently a visiting scholar at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge. Underground is his first book. More about Will at: https://www.willhunt.net/

Notable Links:

Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá (underground church in Colombia)
Mount of the Temptation (hill in the Judean Desert)
Panoptikum (labyrinth in Budapest)
Freedom Tunnel (railway tunnel in NYC)
Urban exploration (exploration of abandoned places in cities)
Revs (graffiti artist)
Catacombs of Paris (tunnel network)
Philibert Aspairt (man who died in the Paris catacombs in 1793)
Cataphiles (urban explorers who illegally tour the Mines of Paris)
Metro-2 (purported secret underground metro system in Moscow)
How Getting Lost in a Cave Affects the Brain (article)
Strataca (salt-mine museum in Kansas)
Lakota Wind Cave (site in South Dakota)
Homestake Mine (deep South Dakota gold mine)
Gregory of Nyssa (Christian saint)

This episode of Deviate is brought to you by Tortuga Backpacks, which set the standard for the best, most durable, organized, and comfortable travel backpacks. Tortuga products also include daypacks, duffels, and other travel accessories, which are all made with the traveler in mind and have been featured by Wirecutter, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Business Insider, Carryology, and many other industry outlets.

This episode is also brought to you by AirTreks, an industry leader in multi-stop international travel. If you’ve ever planned a trip with multiple stops, you know that finding the right flights can be difficult. Between balancing travel logistics and cost, it often becomes impossible to build an itinerary that matches your travel goals. AirTreks is a distributed travel company with employees working from all corners of the world to help with your flight planning, specializing in complex routes with up to 25 stops. The AirTreks website offers suggested pre-planned travel itineraries to help you get started, but can customize to fit your journey.

The Deviate theme music comes from the title track of Cedar Van Tassel’s 2017 album Lu mber.

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