Mental or physical challenge

Text 1: Across the Salt Plain, by Edward Langstone

An original travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

We entered the salt plain on the morning of the 9th, with eleven camels, four men and water for nine days, which our guide assured us was enough for a crossing of six. By noon the ground had turned from brown to white, and the glare off the crust was so fierce that we tied muslin over our eyes and rode half blind. There was no shade anywhere but under the camels, and the camels, very sensibly, would not stand still to provide it.

On the fourth day two of the water skins were found to have leaked in the night, and we were put upon half allowance. I shall not attempt to describe thirst to any reader who has not known it. It is not a feeling in the throat but in the whole body; the tongue swells, the skin cracks, the mind fixes upon water so entirely that one cannot follow a sentence to its end. Harding began to see lakes on the horizon and to argue, quite reasonably and quite insanely, that we were riding away from them. Our tempers grew so short that a dispute about the loading of a camel nearly came to blows.

We reached the wells at Bir Hamra on the eighth evening, with a pint of water left between us. I have been asked since what was the worst of it, and I always answer, the thirst. And yet when I lie awake I do not remember the thirst so much as a moment on the sixth day when I looked at the white plain going on for ever in every direction and thought, quite calmly, that we would die there, and found that I did not much care. That indifference frightens me more now than anything the desert did to my body.

Text 2: Rowing for Chocolate, by Kirsty Doig

An original contemporary memoir.

In the winter of 2019 I rowed alone across the Atlantic, from the Canary Islands to Antigua, in a seven-metre boat with a cabin the size of a coffin. It took me sixty-one days. People expect me to talk about the storms, and there were storms: twice the boat capsized and righted itself with me inside, thrown about like a sock in a washing machine. My hands blistered and then split. Salt sores covered every part of me that touched the seat. By week three I had lost eight kilograms.

But the body is surprisingly good at enduring. You give it food and sleep in small amounts and it keeps going. The mind is less obliging. Around day twenty, the sheer sameness began to break me. Two hours rowing, two hours sleeping, the same grey waves, the same horizon, the same creak of the oarlocks, day after day after day. My satellite phone allowed one short call a week, and I began to dread those calls, because hearing my sister’s voice reminded me how far away everything was.

On day thirty-four I stopped rowing for no reason and sat in the cockpit for six hours, staring at nothing, unable to make myself pick up the oars. That frightened me more than any storm. What got me moving again was not strength but a tiny trick: I promised myself a square of chocolate for every hundred strokes. By the end I was rowing for chocolate, for the next hour, for the next stroke. The Atlantic is a physical challenge for about a week. After that, it is a conversation with yourself that you cannot walk away from.

‘Both texts show that the hardest challenges of an expedition are mental rather than physical.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the challenges each writer faced
• explain how far you agree that the mental challenges were harder than the physical ones for both writers
• compare the ways the writers present their struggles and how they survived them.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.