Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

While escaping a desk, hitting the road and collecting new experiences is fun to do, there are always treasured people you leave behind. In my case these are my wonderful sister Laurie—the only person I’ve known my whole life—and her two children, Riley and Molly, plus my oldest friends, Nick Goodwin (has it really been a quarter of a century?), Hayden Jones and Marc Butler. I love you all, despite the names I call you.

It’s all the labradors’ fault. I grew up with two of them, as well as a brave cat who brutalised the dogs, an outdoor goldfish pond regularly raided by a red-bellied black snake, and the odd sheep—our neighbour had one because it made the perfect lazy man’s lawnmower. My single mother frequently borrowed Bunty for the same lawn-trimming purpose, though the poor creature was often distracted from its hungry work by the attention lavished on it by my sister and me. In our otherwise normal Sydney suburb this animal seemed to us quite exotic.

But it was always the dogs I loved best, with their unswerving devotion and affection, and their endearing habit of accompanying me everywhere I went on my bicycle. My closeness to them taught me to pay attention to all the animals around me, not just those with a collar. Showing early signs of the wildlife nut I would become, I wanted a relationship with the possums and frogmouths in the yard at night as well as my dogs.

Then, when I was sixteen, I went to Japan for a year. During that time a series of near-biblical plagues overtook our city of Okayama, a couple of hours north-east of Hiroshima. First came praying mantises, which begat a plague of frogs that emerged en masse from the city’s open drains in pursuit of the bounty of insects. Close behind them came the snakes. For the town this was a nightmare, but I was delighted. My host family’s cat was the only one to share my enthusiasm; she caught the snakes alive and dumped them proudly at the bare feet of whichever startled family member was at home. ‘Piitaa!’ would come the cry, and I would sally from my room, scoop up the snake and take it back outside. ‘Sayonara,’ I would farewell each snake. ‘Hiss,’ the snake would reply, if at all.

I always wanted to be around wild animals, but saw no practical way to do it. The path to law school that was expected of me by my parents was as personally appealing as the snakes had been to the residents of Okayama, so when I returned to Australia I dropped out of high school. I worked for a harbour cruise company for two years, then decided to travel for at least a year, to somewhere that had an abundance of wildlife. Maybe then I would go to law school.

I had two places in mind, both inspired by the nature documentaries I loved on television. Either Africa or South America would allow me to spend the time that I craved with animals. So in late 1993, a few days before my nineteenth birthday, I used the most rigorous and scientific method I could think of to decide between these destinations, and tossed a coin.

Africa came up heads that day, and the coin-flip changed my life. Within two weeks I was on a plane to Zimbabwe. I thought I would stay in Africa for a year, but my passion for wildlife shone through while I was visiting a safari camp, and I was offered a job behind the bar. Over the next seven years I worked my way up and became a safari guide, a camp manager, and ultimately a teacher of guides for one of the largest safari companies on the continent. In that time I had some of the best experiences with animals that anyone could wish for. I witnessed an elephant giving birth, was charged by lions, had a leopard walk into my tent, and made friends with a family of cheetahs who would allow me to lie down beside them. In fact I had enough experiences that I was able to write two books about them.

Somehow through all of this I retained the nagging doubt that I was cheating at life and that at some point I would need to get a real job. The sort that grown-ups had.

‘You’re a fool,’ one of my colleagues told me when I said I was leaving to head back to the real world of nine to five.

‘You’re good at this,’ some of the kinder ones said.

But it was time to be a normal adult.

I have no idea why I thought I’d be good at that.

On my return to Sydney from Africa in late 2001 I felt too old for law school and applied for an array of different jobs instead, fielding interview questions such as: ‘And what skills do you think you can bring us?’ In truth I felt I had little to offer the mainstream office world. ‘Um, I can stare down a charging elephant,’ I’d joke on occasion. After a somewhat startled pause the inevitable response to this would be along the lines of, ‘Interesting, yes, but not something we value here at McDonald’s.’

After enduring countless rejections and dropping several rungs on the ladder of self-respect, I eventually got a job—which turned into a series of jobs—that at least paid the rent.

I also fell in love and felt certain enough about the relationship to get engaged. In the next few years we accumulated the things adults do, mainly furniture and debt. For the first time I owned more than I could carry on my back, and even if I didn’t like the sensation, I believed I was doing what I was supposed to.

I was on a work trip to the Philippines six years after meeting my fiancée when I realised that the life we had together didn’t feel right to me. One day I was walking down the street in Cebu and was hit with a sudden shot of wary adrenalin, as though if I wasn’t alert there could be trouble. It was invigorating. It felt like being back in Africa. It felt like being slapped awake from a long sleepwalk. It felt like coming home. Only then did I realise that I’d been turning grey from the inside out, and had become the cliché of the dissatisfied worker bee. I’d spent most of the last seven years waiting for five o’clock, hanging out for Friday, going on holiday only to stress out because I couldn’t relax fast enough. Perhaps some adults aren’t meant to be in one place. It is like being left-handed: no matter how good you become at using your right hand, your nature still insists you are something else. Nomads are the same.

While some people allow the hollowness of their lives to consume them until they are at zero, so blank they merely exist, others rebel. Some men find solace in sports. Some have affairs. Others dress as a woman and insist on being addressed as Gertrude. My way of breaking the shackles is to go looking for animals. As a teenager I had travelled to escape my life; now I wanted to do it to have one. ‘I think you’re being a fool,’ my fiancée said with more sadness than harshness when I told her I wanted to travel open-endedly again, with her this time, working part-time as a safari guide. ‘We’ve built a life here!’ She indicated the apartment we lived in, and our possessions within it.

‘I want experiences,’ I answered softly, ‘not stuff.’

‘Stuff? This isn’t stuff! It’s security!’

But what felt like security to her felt like a prison to me. She wouldn’t come with me and I couldn’t stay. It was the hardest decision of my life, but we broke up and, taking little more than some clothes, I left.

Over the years I had often wondered what would have happened if the coin that sent me to Africa had landed tails-up that day. So in late 2009, sixteen years later and hopefully an equivalent number of years wiser, I made my way to Santiago, Chile, ready to seek out the continent’s best, weirdest and maddest wilderness experiences. This time around, though, I was no longer a teenager and was wary of further injuring my weakened knees and sorely abused back (almost ten years’ driving off road has compressed my spine; I’m sure I’m an inch shorter than I was before). But the continent holds challenges—dense rainforests, high mountains, waterless deserts, vast and lonely steppes, as well as dangerous animals like jaguars, pumas and bushmaster snakes—that I wanted to seek out.