It’s only when the bright orange boat blasts off towards the horizon, without us on it, that my sphincter starts to wink.
The jolly fisherman and his pumpkin-coloured dinghy of doom have just left me and a handful of others stranded on Jura – the horrendously remote island in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland.
“We’ll host you, give you a vehicle, and point you in the rough direction,” says Tom Morgan, the convivial dreamer and architect behind ‘The Adventurists’ who has met us at the shore. “After that, you’re on your own. If you break your legs, you’re going to be crawling your way out.”
Given it’s taken myself and photographer Mark Riccioni two days, three boats and the minor inconvenience of having to get our car towed out of a ditch by a farmer to even get to this point, these are hardly words of reassurance.
But my journey is rather paltry compared to some. In our random cabal of piss pot-helmeted misfits is one chap who has arrived from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe… via Harare, Lusaka, Dubai, London, two trains to Oban, a bus and a not insignificant hitchhike. But that doesn’t matter, because that’s the aim of the game. We’re all
