A Taste of Adventure: Excerpts from the Real-Life Jungle Adventure Memoir Dancing with Death

By Jean-Philippe Soulé

Excerpts from the real-life jungle adventure memoir Dancing with Death illustrated with 24 colorful photographs.

This short eBook includes two sample readings from the award-winning adventure-travel memoir Dancing with Death. The excerpted "Prologue" explains the book's origins; and the feature excerpt "On the Verge of Extinction" offers a glimpse into the lives of the last Pech Indigenous people of La Moskitia, Honduras.

 

A FEW EDITORIAL REVIEWS (DANCING WITH DEATH):

 

"Thrilling adventure, soulful insights and crisp, fast-paced writing."

— IndieReader

 

"What the power of human will can accomplish is inspiring, emotional, and empowering."

— The Book Review Directory

 

"A fast-paced story that will grip you and inspire you. Highly recommended."

— The Wishing Shelf

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jean-Philippe Soulé
• Release date: May 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780984344864

Jean-Philippe Soulé

If there was only one word to describe Jean-Philippe, it would be passionate. Passion for people, travel, culture, mountains, oceans, jungles, adventure, and life. Inspired by Jacques Cousteau and other grand explorers before him, Jean-Philippe spent his childhood in the beautiful outdoors pushing physical boundaries before joining the elite French Special Forces Mountain Commandos in 1985 and ultimately leaving his native France to travel the world. This quest morphed him from a starry-eyed child to a recognized explorer, but only at the cost of abandoning the conditioning of the modern world and daring to do the impossible: a lesson he hopes encourages others who refuse to listen when told “they can’t.” Today, through his Live Your Adventure memoir series, Jean-Philippe inspires people to embrace their dreams and live life to the fullest. Jean-Philippe is currently working on new real-life adventure memoirs. Find out more about Jean-Philippe and all his books and view his award-winning photos at www.jpsoule.com

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Copyright © Jean-Philippe Soulé 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

ISBN: 978-0-9843448-6-4

www.jpsoule.com

A Taste of Adventure

Contents

DANCING WITH DEATH: PROLOGUE

ON THE VERGE OF EXTINCTION

MORE BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This short eBook includes two sample readings from the award-winning adventure-travel memoir Dancing with Death. The excerpted Prologue explains the book's origins; and the feature excerpt On the Verge of Extinction offers a glimpse into the lives of the last Pech Indigenous people of La Moskitia, Honduras.

DANGING WITH DEATH

Dancing with Death

PROLOGUE

A Paddle into the Past with an Eye to the Future

—Jean-Philippe

As this journey unfolded, it became an experience that we just couldn’t keep to ourselves, so both Luke and I regularly wrote journal entries and stories that we posted on our website. To share the essence of this expedition and to better illustrate our different personalities, experiences and opinions, we’ve opted to weave Luke’s best entries intermittently with mine in the order that the events unfolded. Here, the journals are presented to you in the present tense, while some special feature stories are written in the past tense. This co-authored approach represents our finishing this expedition together as partners—a critical challenge from the moment of our very first paddle strokes in Baja California.

break

Email sent to John Caveman Gray from Sapporo, Japan, November 20, 1997:

Dear Caveman,

I have been a silent member of the sea kayaking mailing list for eight months and it is clear that you are one of the most knowledgeable people on the list, as well as the one everybody turns to with seamanship questions. I’d like to seek your guidance.

For the last two years, I have been planning the Central American Sea Kayak Expedition 2000 (CASKE2000), a three-year, 3,000-mile paddle that will take us across seven countries from Baja California to Panama, alternating between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

It is a two-man expedition, and both Luke and I are world-class athletes who have competed at the highest levels—Luke in cross-country skiing and myself in mountaineering. We really need your help because I have never even sat in a kayak and Luke has only had a half-dozen experiences on the Great Lakes. Currently working in Japan, we cannot afford kayak lessons, but we need the skills and expertise to survive whatever the ocean might throw at us. You seem to be the most qualified experienced instructor and we are keen students. We hope to stay in Thailand for training from April 1st until the end of June, then launch on October 1st, 1998.

We have a marginal budget and would like to ask you to be our first sponsor. Because you are a leader in ecotourism and conservation, I know that you will find the mission behind our expedition compelling.

The CASKE2000 goal is to experience and write about the culture and lifestyle of the native peoples we will meet. We know that the lifestyles and skills of Indigenous peoples are one of the keys to the preservation of our earth’s precious ecosystems so, as we learn how they live from the land and the sea, we’ll become self-sufficient ourselves. We plan to document the way they live and the influence of development on their environments and lives, and then use a variety of media to make people aware of their humanitarian, environmental and cultural preservation issues.

We chose sea kayaking as a low-impact way to penetrate untouched jungles and their