Tom Claytor - A Life Less Ordinary

An Explorers Odyssey: Bush pilot and Polo player Tom Claytor’s Round-The-World Journey is the stuff of dreams and nightmares

By Karen Kranenburg. Photos provided by Tom Claytor.

Tom Claytor is living a life most people just dream of living, free and unencumbered from the trivia of daily living as he traverses the globe. It isn’t as though this is a frivolous endeavour flying from one jet set gathering to another, there is a serious purpose to his enterprise, as he touches down in remote, and at times dangerous locations, places that most people have never heard of and certainly place to where most people will never go.

Claytor set out in a single engine C-180 Cessna plane from his home state of Pennsylvania in 1990, at age 28, on the adventure of a life-time, in what he calls a “global voyage of discovery”, the journey was originally planned as a 2 year, 7 continent expedition to study the role of bush pilots who live and work on the frontier of civilization.  When he started out he had a book contract from a major New York publisher, the blessings of the National Georgraphic Society, for who he subsequently made a film and the New York based National Explorer’s Club, of which he is a Fellow and whose flag he proudly travelled with, and he had a plan.  Claytors project christened  “The Bush Pilot Expedition – Seven Continents” was underway.  According to Claytor “Bush pilots operate across deserts, jungles, mountains, and ice caps and they provide a unique perspective on these changing frontiers, the bush plane is a tool for exploration, conservation and research”. A venture which in these days must seem even more pertinent than when he started out, as we come to terms with  global warming and it’s immediate effects on the  earth and our lives, battle with the preservation of endangered species, and where conservation has become a priority (some-times genuine, some-times virtual) on almost every political agenda.  His journey was extended and originally expected to end in 2000, but here we are in 2009, and Claytor is still airborne “seeking out wisdom from those who live in the remote parts of our world, to have experiences and share these with others”.

So what prompted this ambitious endeavour? and what was the motivation that has kept it going all these years? The inspiration behind this solo voyage reflects the philosophy of another professional bush pilot, one of history’s great aviators and Claytor’s hero – Charles Lindbergh.  “Lindbergh was one of the first people to see so much of the world from the air”, explains the young adventurer.  “As a conservationist he saw the need for a balance between technology and what he called “wisdom of the wilderness”. Claytor sees his work as an update of Lindbergh’s original vision.”

Claytor’s love affair with travel started when he was a young boy, with the influence of his grandmother Mary Ingersoll, who as a woman aviator was a pioneer in some ways in her time.  He started bush flying while studying Physics at Colby College in Maine, where he worked at the local airport flying fishermen and hunters into the New England wilderness.  Those simple shuttle flights left Claytor with wanderlust and a longing for wider horizons. When he graduated he won the coveted IBM Thomas J. Watson fellowship, and from there everything fell into place. It was then that he started his work as a bush pilot and documentary filmmaker in Africa for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Again like the shuttle flights in Maine, this experience led him on to bigger ideas and he decided that his next challenge would be to circumnavigate the globe. This was the birth of the “bush pilot” expedition.

Since that time he has achieved his initial goal to visit all 7 continents, and gone beyond. As one can imagine, his journey, which has traversed almost 90 countries, has not always been a Sunday afternoon walk in the park, and danger and high drama have been regular visitors. But Claytor walks hand in hand with danger with the ease of a boy scout helping an old lady across the street. He has been arrested in Liberia as a mercenary, in Togo as a spy and in Madagascar for arriving on the wrong day. He has been shot at in Zambia, suspected of smuggling diamonds in the Cameroon and red mercury in the Congo, although he says he still does not know what that is. He has suffered from all the usual African ailments, malaria six times, tick fever twice, and one  bout of Bilharzia. He has radio tracked elephants in Thailand for the World Wildlife Fund, flew his small plane around the summit of Kilimanjaro, has seen extremes of 40 degrees below zero in Greenland and 122 degrees above zero in the Sahara, has skirted military coups and suspicious governments, come face to face with the aftermath of civil-wars, eaten bush rat, swam with whales and learned some very interesting lessons in the intervening years, some of which have been key to keeping him alive, like the time he arrived in Greenland, inadequately equipped with warm weather gear.  He says “the temperatures were so cold  that the metal handle of my plane broke off in my hand”. The modern cold-weather clothing and sleeping gear he had brought with him didn’t keep him warm, so the villagers gave him something that did: seal skin. It wasn’t tanned, but the fat had been scraped off. “You may smell like a dead seal,” he said. “But the skin is very, very warm.” and that is just a short list of the adventure of Tom Claytor, to describe all of his escapades in detail, well that would be a book or a movie in the making, it certainly would be enough to make a  Hollywood Producer scream “Get this guy an Agent”.

Its not surprising that a man with this much lust for life has chosen polo as his number one sport. Claytor came to polo late in life, at age 23, whilst in Kenya filming his first documentary for National Geographic, at the time several of his fellow Kenyan bush pilot friends were farmers and polo players, and they introduced him to the game, the rest is history.    Claytor is living proof of Winston Churchill’s famous quote   that “a polo handicap is a passport to the world”. Claytor said “ When I started my journey, I thought that bush pilots would be a world-wide fraternity that looked after me and introduced me to different cultures I dropped into.  What I didn’t realise is that polo would do the same.  My handicap is only 1 but I have been welcomed and  invited to play  everywhere by polo club members, and of course the great thing about polo grounds, is that they are good places to land a plane - if they will allow you” !!

Whilst he has sacrificed certain luxuries for the sake of weight control in the plane, his polo gear is always on board. Claytor has played polo in an impressive number of places throughout the world, but he especially likes Africa.  “In Africa flying and polo seem to go together,  Polo is not a pretentions sport there.  You fly up to a farm, get on a horse and play”.  Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania & Kenya have all been polo destinations, but Claytor has a particular affection for the rugged polo he experienced in Ethiopia.  “Addis Ababa is the most amazing place.  We played on tiny Ethiopian ponies at 7,000 feet”.  He says he has also had wonderful times in Dubai, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Thailand where he went to play elephant polo...  It is here that I met Tom Calytor this year at the Audemars Piguet Gold Cup at the Anantara, and became fascinated by his travels and even more enchanted by his stories. When asked what polo means to him… he says it is a passion – “A French expression best sums up my feelings  - La Passion a toujours raison – or passion is always reason, when I compare flying with polo, the similarity lies in that one is being gentle with a wild thing, one wins not by force but by finesse”.

In addition to the 1 goal handicap, Claytor speaks a varying levels of a dozen languages, from the obvious European ones to the more obscure African and Asian languages such as Zulu, Dzongkha (Bhutanese), Swahili and Thai.  He says that he has learnt that with every language that you learn you acquire another soul.

Claytor is as passionate about conservation as he is about polo, but he is a practical conservationist. Realizing that people must utilise the resources that are at their disposal to ensure their future sustainability.  He says just like we have factories, to manufacture things, they must utilize the means  they have, to sustain them, be it the Rhinoceros, or the Elephant, or the Whale e.g. “In Thailand, two thirds of the elephant population are domesticated, but out of work, so they are gradually being released into wildlife reserves. I have been working on a project that is doing this, but I have also been able to share relevant experience from Nepal where elephants are used in national parks to take tourists to view wildlife.  There are many  advantages to this option, and I have been able to communicate them first hand to my Thai friends.”  The money raised from these tours, can be put back into the conservation effort, as most conservation efforts severely lack funding.  As you can imagine his conservation efforts have put him at odds with many, but that has not stopped him, if anything it is the fuel that continues to drive his endeavour.

Claytor’s life on the road has been that of a solitary nomad with chance encounters.  When he started out 19 years ago he left behind a girlfriend who later visited him in England and Africa, but distance and time took a toll on their relationship. Despite his lonely existence, he is not immune to the charms of women.  He says there is still a thrill of discovery about women,  “it’s special not to see girls in some places and then discover them some-where else.  One extreme makes you appreciate the other”.  One could almost take it for granted that he is content in his adventurous solitude. However quite the contrary, Claytor says “There’s room in my plane for another, but I haven’t found her yet”. More-over  that would probably be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and would be a separate project in itself  as there probably aren’t too many women out there that would be willing to live that gypsy life-style. More than contemplating a companion though Claytor’s thoughts often turn to home. He misses everyday pleasures such as books, movies, hot showers and pillows, but most of all he misses his family.  “I think more and more about home”, however it isn’t as though he hasn’t seen them in 19 years, as they do pop up occasionally to visit him along the way - when I met Claytor in Thailand his mother and step-father were visiting from the USA.

Over the years his story has been covered by a number of media outlets, from the BBC, to National Geographic, to the Discovery Channel, and many local media outlets along the route he has taken and he is some-what  of a celebrity in the adventure circles, as he continues to live the dream.

Claytor’s travel has taken on a new dimension as in 2000 he found “The Timmissartok Foundation” (named after his plane) to assist individuals with adventurous projects that will take place in a foreign country. The Foundation believes that one individual with a dream can be more powerful than a string of committees. Albert Einstein showed us that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” And that Ideas inspire people. The Timmissartok Foundation wants to invest in the people like Claytor with the big dreams - “the hungry dogs” - who have a strong enough heart to make their dreams come true. The motto of the Foundation is “Travel with a Purpose”.

Claytor believes that “travel is one of the world’s greatest teachers” and there is an old saying which says that the “journey is more important than the destination”, and he is living proof.  When will this particularly journey be over, he has no immediate plans. Although he has touched down in more countries than most people will ever visit in a lifetime, his voyage of discovery still continues…  When will he finally return to his family farm in Radnor Pennsylvania, a place he has not seen in 19 years?  There’s a Swahili expression saa-ngine – that means anytime from now, until then he continues to soar with the eagles, in  “A Life Less Ordinary”