Who can fight off Vampire Bats?
HE CAN! HE CAN!
Who can fend off killer bees?
HE CAN! HE CAN!
Who can carry a pipe organ up the Andes Mountains on a lark?
HE CAN! HE CAN!
Who can find a two-nosed dog?
Colonel John Blashford-Snell! HUZZAH!
And the Hell of the thing is, he did!
This guy is like a Victorian-Era Pulp Hero!
Does Doc Savage or Sir Denis Nayland Smith need a sidekick?
Does a dog with two noses smell twice as bad?
One Reply?!? :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
This guy is incredible!
And Dopers are so blase they only can crack one reply?!
“Xingu is said to be intelligent and fond of salty biscuits.”
Ah, the story of my life right there.
Okay, that dog is really wild looking! :eek:
But a man really named Colonel John Blashford-Snell? Almost too good to be true!
Nay, this is one of the very reasons I subscribe to this Board: To find out that people like this actually exist. Huzzah indeed!
That article is just full of great one-liners:
“…sitting by the fire one night, I saw an extraordinary-looking dog that appeared to have two noses. I was sober at the time…”
“Xingu’s best friend is apparently a wild pig called Gregory…”
“He had just produced a litter of puppies with a bitch that had a single nose.”
“Xingu is said to be intelligent and fond of salty biscuits.”
“The explorers also carried with them a church organ from Dorset as a gift to local Bolivians…”
I swear this was a Monty Python skit!
Precisely.
Thanks bosda. I look forward to dropping Double Nose Andean Tiger Hound into conversations. Doesn’t that sound like something Dan Ackroyd would say in Ghostbusters
Double Nose Andean Tiger Hound goes on my list of proposed user names.
John Blashford-Snell not only exists, I have met him. In fact, I almost joined one of his expeditions to the Darien a few years ago.
Since I’ve got a lot of interest in the Darien myself, I’ve read several of the accounts of Blashford-Snell’s expeditions there too. As has been mentioned, he led a British Army group that crossed the roadless Darien Gap by car by hacking out a primitive road in 1972. (Not actually the first, as the article has it, but the second.) A few years later, he also led a trip to the site of the lost Scottish colony on the coast of San Blas at Caledonia Bay.
He came back to Panama a few years ago planning a trip to re-open some of the excavations at Caledonia Bay. I met him when he gave a talk on his plans at the British Ambassador’s residence in Panama City. He’s the kind of guy who talks entirely in anecdotes.
As it turned out, he wasn’t able to go back to Caledonia Bay because the Kuna Indians, whose territory it is, wanted to charge him exorbitant fees. Instead he did a trip to the Pacific coast of Darien. I was invited to go, but because of some missed communications wasn’t able to make it down there in time. It would have been interesting to say the least.
Such a man deserves more than just…John…as a first name. He could be John Something (Edward? Dunstan? Antony?), or several initials like J.Q.K., or call himself Jonathan, Jenkin, or Sinjin (St. John).
If he simply must be John, there’s always the enigmatic spelling “Jno.” (pron. “John”).
Wow! It’s posts like this that make me want to chuck it all and become an adventurer. Then I remember I hate bugs, mud, bugs, missing hot meals, bugs, sleeping on hard ground, large bugs, biting bugs, and, oh yes, bugs.
I can guarantee you would not like the Darien one little bit, then. 