expedition cruising
Ranulph Fiennes on the Eiger, Switzerland
Q. In 1982, you and expedition partner Charles Burton became the first to successfully travel from pole to pole using only surface transport. What did this involve? A. It took three years and two days, travelling from Greenwich down to the South Pole, up to the North Pole and back to Greenwich again. For the last three months we floated on a floe of ice that was gradually breaking up, somewhere north of Russia, over 500 miles from land. We had to wait 99 days for our ship to come while we floated, hoping the current would take us in the right direction. The expedition took seven years to plan and we had 1,900 sponsors.
Q. How did you become an explorer? A. I lived in South Africa from the ages of one to 11. My father was killed in the war just before I was born [in 1944], but I was brought up on stories about him as a commanding officer, and that’s what I wanted to do. But I
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Well you want to survive, and sometimes the only way to survive is to carry on . . .
couldn’t go to Sandhurst because you needed A-levels, which I didn’t have as I’d been schooled in South Africa. The only thing I’d done was adventure training in Europe during the Cold War, taking soldiers canoeing, climbing and skiing – that’s where it all began.
Q. What does it look like in the most remote parts of the polar regions? A. Everything is just white, apart from you, your tent and the other bloke. There are no animals; nothing is alive apart from the two of you.
Q. What is it that lures you back? A. When our group hears that there’s
a polar record still to be set by humans, or if we hear the Norwegians are going for a record that neither they nor I have previously considered possible, we have to get our act together very quickly…
Q. What are you going to be talking about on Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth in June? A. I will most likely be focusing on the first journey around Earth vertically and the first completely unsupported crossing of the Antarctic continent. I’ll be describing how we managed to get these expeditions together and how slowly, over 30 years, we gradually got more ambitious until we were able to cope with challenging world records.
Q. Finally, how do you motivate yourself to carry on in the most challenging moments? A. Well you want to survive, and sometimes the only way to survive is to carry on . . .
February 2020 51
PICTURE: GARY SALTER
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