A lot of long-term and RTW travelers think of their lives as full of adventure, and surely there is some truth to that. But now and then you see what a truly adventurous life looks like.

I got a glimpse today while reading The New York Times obituary of John Fairfax, the first man to row across both the Atlantic and Pacific. (That’s right, he rowed.)

But that’s the least of his life. From the Times:

“Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate.

To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.”

The details in the Times obit are even more amazing.  Definitely worth reading the whole piece.