Prodgers’ Adventures

I had several reasons for undertaking this journey. Firstly, I was anxious to visit Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, and I wanted very much to get up close to one of the highest mountains in the world, the Peak of Sorata. Then there was the long and interesting march through the tropical forest to Paroma, the capital of Challana, and getting back again, a thing which no white man had done since 1845. Last, but not quite least, there was the £10,000.

Prodgers’ Adventures is a blog version of two books of thrilling travel yarns by forgotten Edwardian adventurer Cecil Herbert Prodgers, set in Bolivia, Chile and Peru, featuring annotated entries of around a thousand words each. The first volume, Adventures in Bolivia (1922), is available elsewhere online, but the other versions are full of scanning errors, and the PDFs are hefty in size. This version has been cleaned up and cross-checked against the original hardback. The second book, Adventures in Peru (1924), has never appeared before online, and is exclusive to Prodgers’ Adventures. There’s also a Twitter feed with occasional retweets of interesting Boliviana.

If you love reading about the Andes, Amazon, and armchair adventures, join our man Cecil as he faces danger from pumas, jaguars, piranha and candiru. Start here for the background to the project, here for the first book’s preface or here for the man’s own words.