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LIVE 24-SEVEN “ 14 WE CAME AROUND A CORNER AND THE RIVER JUST


DROPPED AWAY WITH A 100 METRE WATERFALL THAT NO ONE HAD EVER SEEN BEFORE AND WE WERE, AS PEOPLE, THE FIRST TO EVER LAY EYES ON IT AND OUR TEAM WAS JUST SPEECHLESS!


one expedition for five weeks up in the Artic and then have not much time before I was on a completely different expedition in the middle of the desert. It was just like that the whole year, bouncing from one to the next and very little time to recover and very little time to be at home and I’d just become a dad this last year and that was really, really tough.


Steve, your new series and book, Expedition, takes even your appetite for the daring and the pursuit of exploration to new levels! Quite wrongly, people assume that in our day and age we've explored what our planet has to offer, but that's not true, is it? No, you're right and I'm hoping that this series will provide some evidence for that, because it has long been my greatest disappointment that the world has been explored in a whole different generation and I would never get an opportunity, but over the course of the last year we've found so many things, not just that we’ve had the opportunity to explore, but also enormous potential for lots lots more. You know, standing on top of a mountain at the top of the Artic and looking out over other mountains and every other mountain we could see was not only empty of people, but had also never, ever been climbed before. Coming to the end of a river in the Himalayas – the first descent – and seeing that there was probably more than 60 miles of more river below that again that had never been done. It just left me thinking that there is so much more out there left to do.


What were the biggest challenges of this particular series? I think for me the biggest challenge overall was that over the course of a year we did 10 of these expeditions; normally I would probably do one a year, so the grind of it, the amount it took out of me physically, mentally and emotionally was cumulative! I’d have


Do you have a sense of the importance of what you're doing in that moment? Do you feel the magnitude of the discovery – those world firsts? How does it impact on you when you’re in that moment? It’s absolutely enormous Katie! There is an element to this and I’m so, so glad to hear your reaction to this and enthusiasm, because for us this has been such a massive undertaking, but all of us are people for whom this means everything, it’s the kind of thing we’ve always wanted to do and been doing since we were kids and I guess we don’t have any real idea of how the general public are going to react to these finds – whether they’ll think they’re important and exciting or they’ll kind of shrug their shoulders and not be interested. I guess the next few weeks, as the programmes start to go out and people start to read the book, is going to be quite a watershed moment for me finding out if other people are as excited by it as we are! There is one moment I’ll never forget; we were on expedition in the rainforest in Suriname on a river that we’d been on for several weeks that doesn’t have a name or even occur on the very best of maps and we knew we had a lot of hikes to do before we got back to known territory. We came around a corner and the river just dropped away with a 100 metre waterfall that no one had ever seen before and we were, as people, the first to ever lay eyes on it and our team was just speechless! We were simply beside ourselves and to us it felt like the most extraordinary achievement and the most unbelievable surprise and I just guess I hope other people feel the same [laughing in awe].


How much preparation do you have to do for the shows, or have you geared your life's activities around being prepared for all eventualities, because you seem to handle every situation, you don’t make light of it or dishonour it, but you look ‘equipped’ for it, if that makes sense? [laughing] It totally does make sense. I guess I have been gearing everything in my life towards this for the last 20 years or so. I started kicking this as a project in 1998 and I hadn’t managed to convince anyone since then that it was something even really possible. I have a team of specialists. I’ll pick someone who is the best expedition kayaker, a world champion in kayaking was our lead kayaker in the Himalayas descent, or I’ll pick out the best climbers in the world. For me it about maintaining a really strong base level of fitness and knowledge from which you can bounce from one of these expeditions to the next and the rest of it is just experience of just managing to make sure you are comfortable in the environments that we’re in, so that is as


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