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ABC News
a day ago
- ABC News
The forgotten adventurer who kayaked 50,000km around the world
When German Oskar Speck came ashore on tiny Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, he was greeted by three Australian policemen and the cold shock of arrest. It was September 1939, and the kayaker had just spent seven years paddling from Germany to Australia, an astonishing 50,000-kilometre journey down rivers and across oceans in his collapsible kayak. But instead of receiving a hero's welcome, he was arrested and sent to Victoria, where he was interned at a wartime camp in Tatura. The world had changed since Speck had begun his voyage in 1932. Just three weeks before his arrival, his country, led by Adolf Hitler, had invaded Poland and was now at war with France and Britain. But why did Speck spend years navigating long stretches of rough ocean water on a kayak made for leisurely river paddling? And what happened to him after he was arrested? Born in 1907 in a village near Hamburg, Speck's life following World War I was difficult. He'd been forced to leave school at 14 and began working at a time when Germany was grappling with the harsh penalties imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Along with millions of other Germans, Speck soon found himself unemployed. In a 1987 interview with SBS journalist Margot Cuthill, he described this period as "catastrophic". But lured with the promise of work in the copper mines of Cyprus, he came up with a solution that combined his interests in geology and kayaking. "I owned a collapsible boat and was a member of a boating club," he told Cuthill. Despite not knowing how to swim, Speck packed his kayak, drove to the southern German city of Ulm and began paddling the Danube River towards the then-Yugoslavian border. Speck's kayak was nothing like the modern fibreglass kayaks that are common today. Made from laminated rubber and canvas, its light wooden frame allowed it to be taken apart for travel on the train or the bus. It was named Sonnenschein — German for sunshine. Speck paddled through Austria and Hungary, passing cities like Vienna and Budapest before reaching the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. "Then the Danube started to get boring and I had heard that nobody had ever sailed down the Vardar in Macedonia before. So, I decided to paddle to Skopje in Macedonia and become the first," he told Cuthill. He eventually reached the port city of Thessaloniki in Greece. Here he learned that "faltboots" — folding boats like the one he was using — were "not built for the sea". "Take just one wave wrong and your boat will spin sideways. You'll turn over and be swamped. Your first capsize on the open ocean will be your last," Speck told the Australasian Post in 1956. But he learned new skills that would help him sail and paddle the kayak in ocean waters as opposed to the river. He was forced to hug the coast so he could sleep on land each night, which meant enduring long open-water crossings between islands that sometimes lasted 34 hours. By the time Speck reached Cyprus, his original idea of working in the copper mines had lost its appeal. "I wanted much more to make a kayak voyage that would go down in history. It was about now that I first said to myself, 'Why not Australia'?" he told the Australasian Post. Meanwhile, Back home in Germany, Hitler was busy brutally establishing his dictatorship. According to Penny Cuthbert, curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Speck then completed his first extended ocean crossing, paddling two days across open water without sleep until he reached Syria. He applied for permission to travel through the Suez Canal but was denied. So he folded up his kayak and caught a bus to the Euphrates River instead. Once there, he paddled through the Syrian city of Raqqa, Iraq's capital Baghdad and the southern port town of Basra. According to Vanity Fair, on the Euphrates and along the Persian Gulf, the river's shoreline was "so barren that just finding food and water became a serious problem". For 14 days he didn't see a single person and survived on dates growing on the riverside's trees. At one point, gale winds forced him onto a tiny island for a week. His only company was a decomposing corpse that had washed ashore. Then his boat was stolen. "Somebody must have seen me landing, pulled my boat into the water and disappeared. "There I sat, wearing only my shorts, no passport, no money, no luggage, no boat, nothing," he told Cuthill. The culprits turned out to be the police themselves, who led him back to his boat after Speck offered to pay them a substantial bribe. A sponsorship with the Pioneer Folding Boat Company meant Speck had access to replacement crafts throughout his journey. He also had a little bit of financial help from his family. But Speck mostly lived on his wits, raising money by giving talks and writing articles. When he reached the Persian Gulf, he hugged the coast of Iran but a bad case of malaria forced him to pause his voyage. As soon as he felt better, he set off for today's Pakistan, rounding the southernmost cape of India before going around Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and through the Bay of Bengal. Life on the water had become an "endless monotony of paddling", and Speck's body longed for sleep. But when he would stop for the night, it took a long time before he could unlock his hands, which were welded into their gripping posture on the paddle. His kayak was originally a two-seater but had been modified to a six-seater, so he had to use a special technique to store his clothes, maps, food and water. But what exactly did he eat? According to Cuthill, most villagers were happy to welcome him by slaughtering a chicken in his honour. On board he carried coconuts, tins of sardines and meat, as well as tinned condensed milk, which he would sip as he paddled. By the time Burma (today's Myanmar) appeared on the horizon in April 1936, Speck had been paddling for four years. His family was tired of sending him money. They wanted him to come back to work in the new Germany, now industrialising and rearming as a totalitarian Nazi state. In a letter back home, Speck retorted that making the longest solo kayak paddle in history was doing enough for the new Germany. "It would have worked out for him so well to go back," Cuthill tells ABC Radio National's Rewind. "He would have been celebrated, there would have been books made about him, he would have been [Joseph] Goebbels' little pet. "He didn't go back." Some photos show Speck flying a swastika on his kayak, a symbol used by Nazis and their sympathisers but Margot Cuthill says it wasn't because Speck was a Nazi. In September 1935, the Nazi flag became the only national flag in Germany, so he sailed under a German flag. After paddling through Burma, Thailand and then the Malay Peninsula to Singapore, Speck travelled through Indonesia, island by island. Over the course of his journey, he'd been given great hospitality from local villagers, but suddenly something went terribly wrong. On the island of Lakor he was attacked by locals armed with knives and machetes. According to Cuthbert, he tried to defend himself with an unloaded pistol, but was overwhelmed and eventually tied up with buffalo hide, his boat and possessions plundered. Despite being beaten until he was semi-conscious, Speck managed to escape, reaching his boat and paddling all the way back to Surabaya in East Java for medical attention. But when he was well enough to resume his journey, the Dutch East Indies authorities wouldn't allow him to travel the southern coast of New Guinea, instead forcing him to go the long way around. In September 1939, Speck finally rounded the eastern tip of New Guinea after braving huge surf, sharks and crocodiles. Bill O'Donnell, who was 10 years old at the time, was looking out of his school window on Samurai Island when he saw Speck arrive aboard his kayak. "He stayed with us that night, had dinner. During the evening, Dad tuned into Germany on the shortwave radio and it was the first time I ever heard Hitler make a speech," he says "He was carrying on in full voice and Oscar Speck apparently wasn't terribly interested. And then we farewelled him at about 7am the following morning off the beach." Speck soon after arrived in Daru only to be told that World War II had begun and that he was now an enemy. He was ordered to proceed to Thursday Island, located north of Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland. Authorities felt it only fair to let him continue into the Torres Strait so that he could finish his voyage in Australian waters. So from Daru, he was able to get to the island of Saibai. Once there, he was greeted by three Australian police officers who congratulated him on his trip and then placed him under arrest. Australia by then was at war with Germany. "They were very friendly and very polite and everything, but I was declared a prisoner of war," Speck told Cuthill. He was transported via Thursday Island to the Tatura internment camp in Victoria. The Australian government arrested citizens born in enemy countries, even if they had done nothing wrong, and housed them in camps like the one in Tatura. Speck managed to escape Tatura by hiding in a tool chest that was being taken out of the camp but he was eventually apprehended in a Melbourne suburb. His punishment was 28 days in solitary confinement and a transfer to the Loveday internment camp in South Australia. Built in 1941 near the South Australian town of Cobdogla, halfway between Adelaide and Mildura, Loveday was the largest internment camp in Australia. The facility produced vegetables and fruit, and had a working poultry farm and piggery. It also maintained a poppy crop for opium production. Speck spent three years at Loveday but was finally released in January 1946, shortly after Germany's defeat and the end of World War II. At Loveday he had learned how to cut opal and within days of his release from the camp he was mining opal at Lightning Ridge. He stayed in Australia, and went on to become a successful opal dealer. Speck never married or had children. In his last letter to his sister Greta many years later, he wrote: "I am satisfied. Recognition or no recognition. "We have a strange situation, one of the most difficult world records to this day and it will still be in a hundred years and wholly unknown. But I am satisfied. The war interfered much more with millions of fates. Why shouldn't I be satisfied?" In March 1993, Speck died at the age of 86, after a long illness. He was buried in Point Clare Cemetery in New South Wales.
News.com.au
2 days ago
- News.com.au
Swiss 'Mountain Tinder' sparks high-altitude attraction
Cathy and Patrick relish describing how they found each other: through a message left on a Swiss mountaintop. "It was just a beautiful way to meet," said Cathy Rotzetter during a recent hike in the Pre-Alps of the western Swiss canton of Fribourg. Sick of online dating sites, the 58-year-old said she was thrilled to discover an analogue alternative, with a Swiss twist: "Mountain Tinder". Last October, she clambered up to the Wandflue peak, at an altitude of 2,133 metres (6,998 feet), and jotted down her information in the red notebook she found there. Rotzetter recalled the message as she sat in a mountain pasture, her arm laced around Patrick, with the Wandflue towering behind them. "I wrote that I liked relaxed hikes, and also to have a drink afterwards," she told AFP with a laugh. Patrick, who is also 58 and who declined to give his surname, found the message a week later, and was charmed. - Started as a joke - Mountain Tinder is the brain-child of Thibaud Monney, a 29-year-old avid hiker who told AFP the whole thing started in 2023 as "a joke". During a climb up the Dent de Broc, overlooking the picturesque Lake of Gruyere, he realised he missed having someone to share the view with. On a whim, he jotted down his feelings in a leather-bound visitor's book. The books are traditionally found on peaks across Fribourg. "I wrote that I had climbed up for the sunset, and next time there would be two of us," he said. Monney, who provides woodwork vocational training for disabled people, said that when he shared the story with colleagues they jokingly suggested he place dedicated "Tinder" notebooks on mountaintops. "It has worked well," he said during a recent hike to the La Vudalla peak. "A number of couples have been created," he said, thumbing through the red notebook he had stashed alongside the traditional visitor's book in a metal letterbox mounted on a large wooden cross. In all, Monney said he has placed notebooks on seven Fribourg peaks, swapping them out for new ones as they fill up. The idea has also spread, with people in other Swiss cantons and as far away as Argentina telling him they have started Mountain Tinder notebooks. - Nature 'a good filter' - Monney said he felt "proud" when hearing from couples who met through the notebooks. It is nice, he said, "to make someone happy". The notebook on La Vudalla is filling up fast. "Passionate about mountains, skiing and climbing," one message reads, while another is seeking someone who "likes sports, metal and tattooed women". "The idea is very simple," Monney said. "If you contact someone, that person has also reached the peak, and probably likes nature and mountains. You already have something in common." Rotzetter agreed. "The shared love of nature... is a good filter," she said. Her first date with Patrick last winter was a long scenic walk, ending with a picnic. Rotzetter said she loved that Patrick brought along food and drink for her, and noticed that he kept pace with her. "I wasn't looking for someone I had to run after," she said, adding that walking makes for a perfect first date and provides good insight into the other person's character. "You can see if they adapt their pace... or if they charge ahead." Patrick added: "It is very revealing." - Mountain 'algorithm' - Monney said he preferred his system to the online dating apps he stopped using a decade ago. "I didn't like the idea of choosing a person based on a picture and swiping left or right," he said. Others have congratulated him for liberating dating from algorithmic dictates. With Mountain Tinder, he said, "you have to reach the peak. That's the only algorithm". The peaks also naturally filter for age and physical ability. La Vudalla, at an altitude of 1,669 metres, is one of the easier peaks to reach, allowing older or less fit people to leave messages there. But Monney said only the fittest will make the technically difficult climb up the 2,376-metre Vanil de l'Ecri across the valley. He has himself found love, not by leaving messages but still thanks to his notebooks. "She saw me on television" speaking about Mountain Tinder and "got in touch", Monney said of his partner. "Now I am happy." nl/rjm/tw/tc
News.com.au
4 days ago
- News.com.au
Massive surge in Aussies heading to this remote part of the world
Australian travellers keen to get off the beaten path are heading to a new part of the world. Aussie tour operators tell demand has surged for travel in Mongolia and 'The Stans,' which includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. These five countries are also considered the region of Central Asia. For small group travel operator Intrepid Travel, bookings among Australia and New Zealand customers for Kazakhstan in particular are up a whopping 1550 per cent compared to pre-Covid. Mongolia is up 206 per cent and Uzbekistan bookings have risen 137 per cent — from 2019 to 2025. Brett Mitchell, Intrepid Travel's ANZ managing director, said the surge in bookings can be attributed to both increased demand and the company expanding its offerings in the region. More widely, bookings to Northern and Central Asia have reached an all-time high for the company, growing 66 per cent year-on-year. It has prompted Intrepid Travel to launch six new itineraries to make the destinations even more appealing and more accessible. 'Over the past three years, the region has seen a strong resurgence in travel, driven by increasing demand for off-the-beaten path adventures,' Mr Mitchell said. 'We have been proactively expanding our footprint in the region to meet this demand and our new locally-led experiences take travellers right into the heart of these destinations, whether that's staying with reindeer herders in Mongolia's remote taiga or trekking the foothills of Kyrgyzstan's Tien Shan mountains.' David Smyth, whose company Forward Travel specialises in tailor-made itineraries to unique destinations, said he too had noticed a growing interest and requests for trips to The Stans and Mongolia. 'Many of our travellers look beyond the usual destinations, and with the current uncertainty in the Middle East, many are choosing to hold off on plans in that region until things settle and become more certain,' Mr Smyth said, who facilitates travel to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Australian government strongly advises against visiting. (Read more on the travel advice levels for The Stans further below). 'A large number of our clients are seasoned travellers and for those who've already explored Latin America or Africa for example, Central Asia is emerging as a fascinating and fresh alternative. It offers that rare sense of discovery people are increasingly looking for.' He said a recent uptick in interest had come particularly from Australians in their late 40s and older. 'They're drawn by the region's cultural depth, historic significance, and the opportunity to explore places that still feel largely undiscovered, those forgotten lands between China and Europe,' he said. Mr Smyth added: 'There remains a sense of mystery about these countries, Turkmenistan in particular, which only recently began opening up after years of isolation, continues to intrigue.' He said the 'spectacular and dramatic landscapes' drew travellers to The Stans, while Mongolia had its traditional festivals and 'deep historical roots as the land of Genghis Khan and the Gobi Desert'. 'It's one of those rare destinations where mass tourism hasn't yet taken hold, making it especially attractive to those with an adventurous spirit,' he said. Bunnik Tours' joint-CEO Dennis Bunnik also described a 'significant uplift' in bookings for the company's tour of The Stans. Bookings are up 40 per cent on last year, prompting Bunnik Tours to add extra departure dates next year. 'Demand isn't slowing down either,' Mr Bunnik told 'Asia 2026 only went on sale a few weeks ago and we've already seen strong interest in the 5-Stans. 'These numbers tell us what travellers want right now: unique, meaningful adventures that go beyond the typical tourist trail.' Mr Bunnik said the region was 'remote' and 'logistically complex to navigate solo', making small group tours popular among Australian travellers. 'There's a growing awareness among travellers that if you wait too long to visit certain destinations, you risk missing out on seeing them as they truly are,' he said. 'The 5-Stans are still wonderfully authentic — rich in tradition and relatively untouched by large-scale tourism, but that window won't last forever. If it's on your list, go now.' Australian comedy duo The Inspired Unemployed last week launched their new travel company ARRIVAL while on a motorbike trip in Kyrgyzstan. 'This is just insane, waking up to f***ing that,' Matt Ford said in one video filmed from a tent by a river with horses in view. Another clip of horses was captioned, 'this place isn't real'. The new company is marketed as offering trips going 'off-piste' with experiences away from tourist hotspots. Australia advises against travelling to some areas The Australian Government has different travel advice levels for The Stans ranging from level one, 'exercise normal safety precautions,' to the highest level of four, 'do not travel'. Kazakhstan is deemed the safest of the five countries to visit at level one. Kyrgyzstan (officially the Kyrgyz Republic), Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have an overall advice level of two ('exercise a high degree of caution'). However, some specific areas of these countries are at level three or four. Notably, Australia warns against travelling near the border of Afghanistan. As for Mongolia, the entire country is at advice level one.
