The highest priority item on my bucket list for most of my life was to visit Egypt. In 2013, I was able to make that dream come true, and it was everything I had ever imagined it to be. Egypt was so deeply stuck at the number one spot on my bucket list and the most important traveling I would ever do that I never really considered what was next. The desire to visit Egypt was so all-consuming that it wasn’t until I was floating down the Nile, ten days into a two-week Egyptian vacation, sitting poolside on the top deck of a river cruise, that I began to think about what was next.
Many of my bucket list items are directly related to my interest in anthropology. Egypt, of course, is at the top of the list but I also visited Ethiopia to see the fertile crescent, Chichen Itza to see Aztec ruins, and Nantucket to explore the history of whaling in the United States. As I was drifting down the Nile, listening to the afternoon call to prayers resonating from the loudspeakers installed in the towers of mosques, I started to think about the importance of the Nile to Egyptian civilization. Really, the importance of fresh water to all civilization. To this day, fresh water can only be found in springs, lakes, and rivers, and many populations continue to center around sources of fresh water. Permanent settlements had to be near one in order to thrive, and for several reasons the earliest civilizations thrived around rivers.
Some of these rivers maintained smaller cities due to their geography or climate, such as the Indus River and the Danube. But many of these rivers were the stepping stones leading to some of the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen, like the Thames and the Nile. And all these rivers helped shape the history of humanity in more ways than we will ever truly understand.
While it would be incredibly difficult to travel the length of each river and view all the civilization each one has produced, it would be feasible to at least visit each river, and thus the bucket list item was added: Travel by boat on all the world’s major rivers.
Now, this led to a definitional problem… what qualifies as a “major river”.
My definition was one of culture, not size, so I ignored some of the larger rivers in terms of flow, width, depth, or other geographic factors, such as the Congo, Zambezi, Mackenzie-Peace, Yukon, Lena, and Ob, among others. I based my list on rivers that were well known throughout the world, spawned major civilizations, were more rivers than lakes (which excluded rivers like the Hudson) and/or still supporting major populations.
Why didn’t I include other major rivers such as the Yellow River, Rhine, Zambezi, Volga, Ural, Colorado, Murray-Darling, etc…? I’m not made of time and money. The blog is called Five Figure Lifestyle, not Traveling for the Exuberantly Wealthy. I had to draw the line somewhere, so I drew it at a somewhat arbitrary point, which resulted in a list that seemed difficult but attainable and included cultures that were especially interesting to me.
With these criteria, I narrowed the list down to the following rivers and river systems:
- Amazon, Madeira & several other major tributaries
- Danube
- Tigris & Euphrates
- Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna, Padma
- Indus
- Mississippi, Missouri & Ohio
- Niger
- Nile
- Seine
- Thames
- Yangsee, Yuan, Han, Jialing
I’ve floated down the Mississippi on a steamboat during an excursion from a Student Council conference. The Mississippi was settled by early Native Americans. Its consistent flooding makes it one of the most fertile river basins in the country. Its length creates millions of acres of farmland to help feed the United States and the world. Terminating in the port city of New Orleans, the Mississippi still serves as a shipping route to get goods to and from the interior of the United States; its tributaries touch 32 out of the 50 United States.
I spent four days and four nights on the Nile aboard a river cruise, stopping daily to explore temples and cities along the river. The Nile may be the most drastic example of a river’s importance to a civilization. With the Sahara Desert to the West and the salty, desolate Red Sea to the East, the only thing keeping people alive in Egypt has always been the Nile. Civilization has been continuous for many thousands of years in this area–all the way from the Blue Nile’s headwaters at Lake Victoria to Cairo to the enormous, fertile delta region and finally to Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea.
I crossed the Thames several times via water taxi. It may sound a bit mundane, but travel via boat has always been a critical use of these major world rivers, so commuting to work using one of them seemed very appropriate. While it is a small river in the grand scheme of rivers, its importance cannot be passed over. The Thames was the sustaining source of fresh water that allowed the British Monarchy to come to power and sustain such a powerful city for centuries.
Three down… only eight more to go!
