Sir Ranulph Fiennes has been labelled the world’s greatest living explorer by Guinness World Records. Some of his monumental efforts, such as travelling around the world’s surface vertically, crossing both its poles in the process, have yet to even be attempted by anyone else since his doing so. Yet this inspiring man, both Everest and the North Face of sixties, and cut off his own frostbitten garden shed, has human frailties you wouldn’t expect: a fear of heights and propensity to be lazy. We sit down with the living legend to learn about his life, travels and goals.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes is part of a select group of people to have mounted expeditions to both poles and the summit of Everest
INTERVIEW BY MATT PHILLIPS. PHOTOGRAPH: c GARY SALTER
On your expedition by hovercraft up the White Nile in 1969, you didn’t even stop to see the Pyramids of Giza. Are travel and exploration good bedfellows, or can one get in the way of another?
During that expedition we were all on leave from the army, so the driving force in the back of our minds was that we wanted to cover the entire river, some 2,000-2,500 miles, in the time we had available. We needed to get back on time. To some extent, it was that I was fighting a war in Oman and we were outnumbered; if I turned up late from leave it would look like cowardice. So we had every reason mentally to be in a rush, and therefore we didn’t slow down to appreciate local culture.
When you’re exploring without such constraints, do you take the time to enjoy the surroundings or are you solely focused on the goal ahead?
It depends. If you’re in the Arctic or Antarctic, there is nothing to enjoy except for ice. If there is something other than whiteness, then it is likely not a good thing. In the Arctic it means trouble; other colours could be open water, which you don’t want when you’re man-hauling, or pressure ridges of ice blocks up to 20 metres high getting in the way. In the Antarctic it’s similar: changes of colour usually mean crevasses. So in these environments, you want just whiteness and boringness. That said, when you’re being paid to write a book about it, you want it to be exciting. Even if you have a thesaurus, 100,000 words to describe whiteness is challenging. Of course you don’t want people falling into crevasses and dying on an expedition, but dramatic problems are helpful in filling pages.
What do you think about while moving through the whiteness?
You are constantly ensuring you are on the right bearing. You constantly wonder if you should be going a bit left, a bit right, a bit east instead of north-south to stop damage to the sled runners if you go through sastrugi (grooves in the snow) at the wrong angle.