INTERVIEW HELEN ANDERSON. PHOTOGRAPHY GETTY IMAGES.
How I travel
Important lessons?It’s always a good idea,
especially beyond the age of 60, if your
travelling companion is someone you
really, really trust in extreme conditions.
Mike Stroud is an amazing guy – and
he’s a doctor.Which landscapes are the most powerful
for you?The mountains of Dhofar in
Oman are the most wonderful, second
only to Table Mountain in Cape Town,
where I grew up.
In Dhofar [where
Fiennes spent several
years in the British
Army fighting Marxist
insurgents] it was
life and death to get
to know the terrain as
well as the enemy did.And in the polar regions?
No single landscape sticks
in my mind. It’s all white.
I do remember a place called Polarbjorn
Buchte, where we unloaded our cargo for
the Antarctic sector of the Transglobe. The
idea was that the ship went on to
Christchurch and waited for us there until
we sent a Morse-codemessage saying we’d
made the first complete crossing of
Antarctica, and
then they’d try to return and collect us.
This is where we landed to do that, with
all sorts of excitement trying to unload
4,000 items and the crew panicking that
we’d hit the ice. [They successfully made
the 1,450-kilometre Antarctic crossing,
via the South Pole, and sailed on to New
Zealand and Sydney.]Does the world seem smaller now?Many
more people are going up Everest – the
joke is everyone’s granny is up there now.
But, no, the world doesn’t feel smaller. At
the moment I’m the only human to have
crossed Antarctica and the Arctic and
climbed the highest mountain. But I’m
quite sure that within a month or a year or
two there’ll be someone else who’ll do it.You overcame your fear of spiders by “confrontation”.
Have you overcome your fear of heights?I’ve always had
vertigo, though not on Everest – if you look down you
can see white shoulders, but not black drops. The bloke
who was helping me suggested I climb the Eiger [in
Switzerland], and we trained for two or three years before
trying it. I thought he’d got rid of the fear but then a
couple of years later at home the guttering was full of
leaves, and I got a ladder and about halfway up I realised
I was getting a bad attack.Are you still attempting to climb the Seven Summits?
I didn’t have a problem when I climbed Everest from
the Nepal side as an old-age pensioner [he reached the
summit on his third attempt, aged 65; he’s now 75], but
in late 2016 I climbed the highest mountain in Antarctica
and began to feel odd. And on the next mountain,
which was the easiest yet [Aconcagua
in Argentina], I couldn’t take it above
16,000 feet. It gets you quite quickly
when you get to a certain age. Ed Hillary
found he couldn’t have done Everest
a few years after he became the first
person to reach the summit.What motivates you?Oh, a thousand
different things. We like to look at any
remaining polar challenges. Unlike
mountains – where the competition is
equally fierce – there are only two poles,
so the records are increasingly difficult. For instance,
nobody has crossed Antarctica during the polar winter.
Three years ago we mounted an expedition to do that and
almost succeeded – but not quite. We managed to get to
the top of the plateau in winter, which is the difficult bit,
so it’s a shame that we ran into a huge crevasse field that
the satellites hadn’t shown.What’s your next project?I’ve been asked to walk along
the seabed from Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela
was imprisoned, to Cape Town, with some South African
friends who are raising a couple of million pounds for
the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. I’ve recently got
my international diving certificate.What kind of travel makes you happy?Having raised
£18.9 million for charities, before I cop it I want to make
it £20 million. It’s a kind of mathematical obsession.●The joke is
everyone’s
granny is going
up Everest. But,
no, the world
doesn’t feel
smaller.An Evening with the World’s Greatest
Living Explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes,
will be held in Perth on 29 March,
Hobart on 30 March, Melbourne on
31 March and Sydney on 1 April,
ranulphfiennesliveonstage.comA singular
life
1967 Scales
Jostedalsbreen
Glacier in Norway.
1969 Leads the
first hovercraft
expedition
along the Nile.
1979-82Leads
the Transglobe
Expedition,
the first global
circumnavigation
along the polar axis
by surface travel.
1991 Co-leads a team
that discovers the
lost city of Ubar
in Oman.
1992-93Crosses the
Antarctic continent
unsupported,
the longest such
polar journey in
history at the time.
2000 Suffers
frostbite to four
fingertips and
a thumb while
travelling solo
to the North Pole.
He later amputates
the fingers in his
garden shed.
2003 Runs seven
marathons in
seven days on
seven continents.
2007 Climbs the
north face of
the Eiger.
2009 Reaches the
summit of Everest.
2015 Runs the ultra
Marathon des
Sables in the
Sahara Desert.
2016 Climbs the
highest mountain
in Europe (Mount
Elbrus, Russia),
and Antarctica
(Vinson Massif).GOURMET TRAVELLER 31