Let's Talk About Treks Trivia Quiz

Answer: Indus

Although Alexander the Great's vast empire (pictured in the photo) did not survive long after his death in 323 BC, his expedition in Asia left an enduring legacy. There was more than just a military aspect to his campaigns, as the Macedonian conqueror brought along historians, architects, surveyors and scientists to record the geography, flora, fauna and ethnic population of the places through which his army traveled. Schooled by Aristotle in his youth, Alexander had a keen interest in scientific investigation. In addition, unlike other famous conquerors of history, he did not try to impose Greek customs on conquered peoples, but fostered cultural and religious exchanges. When he died, he was planning a series of new campaigns in the Arabian Peninsula and the regions around the Caspian Sea.

The scope of Alexander's Asian campaign would be staggering even for our times, considering that he and his army covered a distance of an estimated 5,600 km (3,500 mi) without the benefits of modern technology. They also did not travel in a direct line, which make the length and duration of the journey even more remarkable. Alexander's army, which according to Plutarch counted about 120,000 people (including auxiliary services), traveled south from Bactria (corresponding roughly to northern Afghanistan) through the Hindu Kush range, reaching and crossing the Indus River in the spring of 326 BC.

After the pivotal battle of the river Hydaspes (now Jhelum) in May 326 BC, Alexander pushed east, and managed to reach the river Hyphasis (now Beas) - where his army, exhausted by the heavy monsoon rains, mutinied and refused to go any further. Alexander had a fleet built on the Hydaspes, which sailed down the Indus along the coast of the Indian Ocean, reaching the Persian Gulf. He, however, opted for conducting his return journey inland, crossing the desert region of Gedrosia, where he may have lost up to one-third of his army. His admiral, Nearchus, compiled an extensive record of his observations and discoveries, with plenty of details about India's geography and society.

Answer: mountain sheep

In 1217, 17-year-old Marco Polo left Venice with his father Nicolò and his uncle Maffeo - both wealthy merchants - on a journey to China (then known as Cathay) that would take them through the Middle East and Central Asia. In 1271 they reached Khanbaliq (present-day Beijing), the capital of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, after nearly four years of travels - accurately documented in the book known as "The Travels of Marco Polo" ("Il Milione" in Italian). Though criticized for some noteworthy omissions (such as the lack of mention of the Great Wall), which have led some scholars to doubt the account's authenticity, many of the details contained in the book have been proved more accurate than those appearing in the accounts of other medieval travelers.

The first book of "The Travels of Marco Polo" is dedicated to the account of the Polos' journey to Cathay - which took mostly place overland, along what later became known as the Silk Road. because of the lack of seaworthy ships in the port city of Hormuz (now in Iran). Descriptions of geographical features, flora, fauna, and various ethnic groups encountered by the travelers along their way provide a remarkable amount of information on medieval Asia, debunking many of the legends that previous accounts had disseminated. Among the places mentioned in the book, there are numerous cities, the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts, the region of the Wakhan Corridor (now in Afghanistan), and the high Pamir Mountains, once known as the "Roof of the World".

In the chapter dedicated to the crossing of the Pamir (Ch. 49), Polo mentions some large wild sheep, whose huge horns were used by the locals as eating vessels. These sheep, native to the mountains of Central and western East Asia, are known by the Mongolian name of argali: the largest subspecies, the Pamir argali, is also known as Marco Polo sheep because the Venetian traveler was the first person to describe it.

Marco Polo's book was a major influence on the 14th-century Catalan Atlas, a detail of which - showing the Polo's journey along the Silk Road - appears in the photo.

Answer: Grand Canyon

In the first half of the 16th century, rumours of the fabled Seven Cities of Cíbola - which according to Aztec myth were located north of Mexico, across the desert - started spreading through the Kingdom of New Spain. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a Spanish nobleman who had become governor of Nueva Galicia, a province of New Spain located in western-central Mexico, heard those rumours from the survivors of a previous expedition. In early 1540 he assembled an expedition of his own to look for the cities, traveling north along the west coast of Mexico with a party of over 2,000 people. The painting by Frederic Remington in the photo depicts the expedition's departure.

The Cíbola they found, however, was nothing more than a village (pueblo) of adobe houses built by the indigenous Zuni people. In spite of the disappointment, and the trouble that ensued when the Spaniards tried to force their way into Zuni and Hopi territory, some members of the expedition managed to reach the Colorado River, and were the first Europeans to behold the majestic Grand Canyon. No other Europeans reached the Canyon for over 200 years after that. Heading eastwards, the main body of the expedition reached the Rio Grande in present-day New Mexico, entering into a brutal conflict with the natives. In the spring of 1541 - probably led astray by a native informant, who lured them with talk of a wealthy nation, Quivira, far to the east - the Coronado expedition crossed the steppe known as Llano Estacado (now shared by New Mexico and Texas), where they encountered large herds of bison.

At some point, Coronado decided to continue his journey east with a smaller group of followers. They eventually reached the Arkansas River in the territory of present-day central Kansas, encountering several native tribes in the area, but no riches whatsoever. Disappointed, Coronado returned to New Spain, and remained in Mexico City until his death in 1554. Though, like all Spanish conquistadors, he was a controversial character (especially in his treatment of natives), his expedition is viewed as one of the greatest overland expeditions in history. To commemorate this endeavour, the Coronado National Memorial was established in 1952 in Arizona, on the Mexico-US border.

Answer: Vitus Bering

The huge initiative known as Great Northern Expedition was part of Peter the Great's efforts to modernize Russia, which officially became an empire in 1721. Peter, however, passed away in 1725, and the expedition was carried out by his successors. Completely financed by the Russian state, this very costly enterprise involved over 3,000 people, and lasted about 10 years (1733-1743). The leader and main organizer was Danish-born cartographer and explorer Vitus Bering, who had already been appointed by Peter as the leader of the First Kamchatka Expedition (1725-1731) - also partly conducted overland - which provided evidence of a strait separating Asia from North America. That strait and the marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean immediately south of it now bear Bering's name. The map in the photo illustrates the first expedition's route through Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Though much of the Great Northern Expedition was conducted by sea, a group of 19 scientists, members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (founded by Peter the Great in 1724), traveled overland through Siberia, investigating the geographical, geological, botanical, zoological, and ethnological aspects of that immense region. Each of the scientists had a different specialization and his own precise commission; they were also provided with measuring instruments. Setting off from St Petersburg, the group used horses and riverboats to reach Tobolsk, the capital of the Siberian Governatorate, in January 1734. From there they traveled deeper into Siberia, surveying the area around Lake Baikal, and conducting extensive research.

In the summer of 1741, Bering and the crew of his ship discovered Alaska, eventually landing on Kayak Island; their landing site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978. Sadly, the ship was wrecked by a storm on the way back to Russia, and the crew were stranded on the island that now bears Bering's name. Bering and other members of the crew died there in the winter of 1741. In spite of this tragic outcome, the Great Northern Expedition gathered a huge amount of scientific knowledge about the sparsely populated lands of the Russian East, and led to the Russian settlement of Alaska just a few years later.

Answer: Chimborazo

The American expedition to which Alexander von Humboldt owes much of his fame was authorized by King Charles IV of Spain, who had a keen interest in gathering scientific knowledge about the natural environment of his colonies in the New World. In the last two decades of the 18th centuries - when the Spanish Enlightenment was in full swing - the Spanish Crown had commissioned other scientific expeditions to the Americas and Asia. Though Humboldt had enough financial resources of his own to fund an expedition, his first attempt to organize a voyage from France was unsuccessful, mainly due to political reasons. With his friend and collaborator, French botanist Aimé Bonpland, in June 1799 Humboldt sailed to Venezuela, where their five-year expedition through the American continent would begin.

While in Venezuela, Humboldt and Bonpland explored the course of the Orinoco River, meeting several native tribes whose life they documented. After three months in Cuba, they returned to mainland South America, and traveled south from Bogotá to Quito in Ecuador, crossing the snow-covered Cordillera Real. During their stay in Quito Humboldt, Bonpland and their party climbed Pichincha, the active volcano on whose eastern slopes the Ecuadorian capital is located, then tackled the ascent of the much higher Chimborazo. Though they did not manage to complete the ascent due to altitude sickness, they managed to reach an altitude of 5,878 m (19,286 ft) - a world record for Westerners at the time. More trekking awaited Humboldt and Bonpland in Mexico, where they journeyed by mule train from Acapulco to Mexico City. The expedition ended in 1804 in the United States, where Humboldt met President Thomas Jefferson.

Among the many achievements of Humboldt and Bonpland's expedition there was the publication of multiple volumes of lavishly illustrated scientific findings, which laid the foundations for the modern disciplines of physical geography, plant geography, and meteorology. The amount of detailed knowledge - all based on first-hand observations - contained in those volumes is staggering. The expedition also inspired a number of 19th-century artists: the one in the photo, by German painter Friedrich Georg Weitsch, is an imaginary depiction of Humboldt and Bonpland near the foot of the Chimborazo.

Answer: Oregon

Commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, the Corps of Discovery expedition had the primary goal of finding the most practical route across the western half of North America, and establish US sovereignty before European powers could stake their claims on those vast territories. Meriwether Lewis, an Army captain with extensive experience as a frontiersman, was selected personally by Jefferson to lead the expedition; Lewis recruited his close friend William Clark to share command. Though scientific exploration was a secondary objective of the expedition, Lewis and Clark brought back a huge amount of information on the geology, flora and fauna of those remote regions, as well as accurate maps of the land, and records of the numerous native tribes they encountered during their journey - including original artifacts. They were, however, unsuccessful in finding a continuous waterway leading to the Pacific Ocean - which was Jefferson's main objective.

The Corps is believed to have included as many as 45 members, only one of whom (Sergeant Charles Floyd) died during the expedition. They traveled by boat up the Missouri River, spending the winter of 1804-1805 at Fort Mandan (North Dakota), until they reached the river's headwaters in present-day Montana. The westward journey took the best part of 1805, and they finally sighted the Pacific Ocean on 7 November 1805. Driven by bad weather and lack of food, they moved their camp to the south side of the Columbia River, in Oregon Country, where they built Fort Clatsop. During the winter they spent there, Lewis wrote extensively about the flora of that region, in particular its great forests. The Corps began their return journey on 23 March 1806, reaching St Louis on 23 September of the same year.

The structure in the photo is a replica of Fort Clatsop built in 2006. The original building decayed in the region's wet climate, and was rebuilt in 1955 for the 150th anniversary of the expedition. Damaged by fire in October 2005, the fort was once again rebuilt by a group of volunteers, and is now operated by the US National Park Service. Fort Clatsop is located near the port city of Astoria (Oregon), the first permanent American settlement built west of the Rocky Mountains.

Answer: the sources of the Nile

With its immense length and primary role in the development of the Ancient Egyptian civilization, the Nile River has been an object of wonder and curiosity since classical antiquity. The source of one of the mighty river's two main branches, the Blue Nile - located at Lake Tana, in the Ethiopian Highlands - were first reached and described by an European (Spanish Jesuit Pedro Páez) in 1618, though his account was only published in full in the early 20th century. However, the source of the White Nile - the longest of the two branches - remained elusive for centuries, in spite of repeated attempts to locate it that were foiled by natural barriers.

The first European explorer to claim discovery of the source of the Nile was British officer John Hanning Speke, who first reached Lake Victoria in July 1858 during the long and arduous expedition conducted with British explorer Richard Francis Burton in search of the lakes rumoured to exist at the heart of the African continent. As the map in the photo shows, in the mid-19th century most of Central Africa was an unknown quantity. The two explorers journeyed for hundreds of miles from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika, falling gravely ill from a variety of tropical diseases. Speke returned to Lake Victoria in July 1862, and, while traveling around its western side, came upon the Ripon Falls, where the Nile flowed out of the lake. Speke's discovery was confirmed in 1875-1876 by Henry Morton Stanley's first trans-African expedition, during which the Welsh-American explorer crossed Central Africa from east to west. Scottish explorer David Livingstone, on the other hand, in spite of his extensive journeys through Central and Southern Africa between 1851 and 1873, was unable to locate the source of the Nile, though he identified one of the Congo's main tributaries, the Lualaba.

All these expeditions, fraught with innumerable hardships, were instrumental in expanding Western knowledge of Africa, eventually ushering the era of the "Scramble for Africa" - the colonization of most of the continent by various European powers. While the explorers mentioned in this question were driven by genuine scientific (or religious, as in the case of Livingstone) motivations, those who followed in their footsteps often had profit rather than progress as their ultimate aim.

Answer: camels

The first attempts by Europeans to venture into the interior of Australia were limited to areas not far from the coast. In 1813, the first successful crossing of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales (part of the Great Dividing Range running parallel to the continent's east coast) by an expedition led by Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth resulted in the establishment of Bathurst, the first colonial inland settlement. The subsequent discovery of the continent's major rivers, which all flowed westwards, gave rise to a theory concerning the existence of a vast inland sea west of the mountains into which all these rivers flowed. Many explorers ventured into what is now South Australia looking for this body of water, facing great hardship.

Australia's vast, inhospitable outback remained largely unexplored until the competition to chart a route for the Australian Overland Telegraph Line encouraged various cross-continental expeditions - the best-known of which was the expedition conducted by Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills in 1860-1861 from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The two explorers were among the first to use camels in their ill-fated expedition, as the climate of the outback was too harsh for horses. These animals were imported from the British colonies of south-central Asia along with their drivers - who became colloquially known as "Afghans" or "Ghans". Many of these men eventually settled in those arid regions, establishing camel-breeding stations and rest stops (caravanserai). The photo shows the tombstone of one of these cameleers at Bourke Cemetery (NSW).

As a result, Australia has the world's largest population of feral one-humped camels (dromedaries) - the descendants of the camels that were imported over 100 years ago to help Australians conquer the outback. With the advent of motorized transport, however, camels became obsolete, and many were released into the wild - where they obviously thrived. Like other non-native animals, they are now viewed as a nuisance by many of the local communities.

Answer: Arabian Peninsula

Empty Quarter is the English translation of the Arabic name Rub' al Khali, the world's largest sand desert. Part of the larger Arabian Desert, it is located in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, covering almost one-third of it. This sparsely-populated wasteland, with its hyper-arid climate and scorching daytime temperatures (50 ºC/122 ºF and above being far from uncommon in the summer season), has been crossed by non-resident explorers a few times since the first documented journey by British explorer Bertram Thomas in 1930. Between 1946 and 1950, another British explorer and military officer, Wilfred Thesiger, crossed the desert mostly on foot, mapping the area and documenting his experience in the book "Arabian Sands" (1959).

The expedition of Flight D of the US Air Force 7th Air Rescue Squadron came hot on the heels of Thesiger's, though motivated less by love of adventure than by the practical purpose of collecting information for an Air Force publication on desert survival. Rather than journeying on foot or camel back, the members of this mission relied on trucks to move across the harsh terrain. The expedition, conducted in June 1950, lasted 31 days: it left from the Dhahran Airfield in Saudi Arabia, near the Persian Gulf coast, and reached central Yemen before turning back. During the trip, wildlife specimens were collected and sent back to the US to be evaluated in terms of the their potential danger or usefulness for survival in that harsh environment. Not surprisingly, the participants in the mission came to the conclusion that the best survival strategy for aircrews was to avoid becoming stranded in the Rub' al Khali altogether.

Fifty years passed before any Westerners dared again to cross the forbidding expanse of the Rub' al Khali. Since Jamie Clarke's 1999 expedition, there have been a number of expeditions - scientific or otherwise - often conducted on foot.

Answer: Edmund Hillary

First sighted in January 1820 by a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellighshausen, Antarctica - also known as the White Continent - became the object of a number of expeditions in the following decades. However, none of these expeditions managed to penetrate the continent's interior, and their discoveries consisted mainly of lands around its coastline. The situation changed towards the end of the 19th century, when the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration began. Over a period of about 30 years, 17 major explorations were launched from ten countries - achieving noteworthy scientific results, but also claiming many lives. On 14 December 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole - while the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917, led by Ernest Shackleton, did not even manage to land on the continent.

For a few decades after Shackleton's expedition, Antarctic exploration was mainly conducted by air. In the 1950s, however, thanks to the financial support of a number of Commonwealth countries, as well as private and public donations, an expedition was organized with the aim of crossing the White Continent via the South Pole. Led by British explorer Vivian Fuchs, the expedition availed itself of the expertise of Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealand mountaineer who had successfully climbed Mount Everest with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on 29 May 1953. Hillary was in charge of Scott Base, the final destination of Fuchs' overland journey, located at McMurdo Sound, the world's southernmost navigable body of water. The expedition was meticulously prepared before Fuchs departed from Shackleton Base on in November 1957 with a 12-man team traveling in six vehicles. The group reached their destination on 2 March 1958, having crossed a previously unexplored expanse of snow and ice (3,473 km/2,158 mi) in 99 days.

Fuchs was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for this outstanding accomplishment. The bronze medal that was issued by the Royal Geographical Society to commemorate the event shows Fuchs' profile on the obverse, and the continent of Antarctica with the expedition's itinerary on the reverse.