with a stick, his black eyes flash with anger and you see
the steeliness beneath. ”What drives me on? I don’t want
to be an international laughing stock,” he mutters. Peer
approval matters. Authenticity counts for everything.
Spend more time with Horn and you see more of
that essential steeliness. He’s phenomenally capable
and unfazed by obstacles. He talks of his time at war
in Angola, dealing with gun-running mercenaries
protecting shipping from Somalian pirates, and of
watching men lose their lives in Brazilian sluice mines.
“Gold doesn’t attract good people,” he says. “These
guys would be climbing riverbanks on ladders made of
sticks, carrying bags of sand. The ladder breaks, they fall
to their deaths. Next guy.” He worked for a while as a
diver tasked with sucking gold-laden sediments from the
bottom of an Amazon tributary.
“You’re aware that if you hit a rich sediment, that
the guy manning the compressor on the boat can just
click it off and you’re gone. I always paid my colleagues
more of my share than I needed to.” When asked by his
daughter if they could go back to South America his
brow furrows. “That’s a place for young people,” he says.
The statement brooks no argument. Later that day he
spots a rabbit in the road and as it jinks to escape, he
steers the G-Class towards the embankment, flattening
the invasive species. “Bastards,” he grunts. I suddenly
feel self-consciously soy Melburnian.
From New Zealand, the Pole to Pole expedition travels
to Australia, then up to Papua New Guinea, then up
into Asia where essential repairs will take place on the
battered Pangaea. From there it’s Japan, Kamchatka, the
lonely trek to the North Pole and then south, eventually
landing back in Monaco. Patiently weathering a few days
in New Zealand with a couple of blokes who can’t put
tents up, have an uncanny ability to walk cow shit through
the camp and have yet to master the complexities of a
boarding pass seems to have come as welcome downtime.
Way out on one remote treeless sheep station, we find
an abandoned Nissan Pintara. It’s been rolled, stripped
and peppered with buckshot. “Let’s drive over it with
the G-Class!” he shouts, alive with childlike glee. Our
Mercedes-Benz chaperone’s eyes widen in panic, his
mouth forming a perfectly mute little ‘o’. You can’t
control Mike Horn. He’s a force of nature, probably the
most interesting person I’ve ever interviewed. To him,
we’re just another round of press. As we leave for home,
there’s that big smile, the inspirational quote and the
mole-grip handshake again.
We’ve just accounted for four of the world’s greatest
living explorer’s 30,000 days. He’s experienced more
than his fair share in this one lifetime, so we don’t
feel too guilty about acting as ballast for a bit. The V8
fires up, the G-Class bumps over a bushy median to the
car park exit and Horn’s headed back to the dock at
Dunedin. He’s that naughty kid whose antics you just
can’t help laughing at. You know you shouldn’t. But, hey,
life’s too short to worry about things like that.