Travellig With Sir Ranulph Fiennes

The veteran British explorer on confronting fear, the importance of trust and his next submarine challenge.

- Helen Anderson

In 50 years of extreme travel, what are the most striking environmental changes you’ve witnessed?

In Antarctica the snow might be melting but there’s still a mile of it sitting on top of 10,000-foot mountains, so people like us won’t be able to notice the changes. In the Arctic Ocean, however, our group was designing man-hauled sledges in the ’70s. By the 1990s we had to design canoes that could be man-hauled.

From 30 or so expeditions, what’s your most memorable journey?

Well, apart from the heart attacks. In 1979 we embarked on the Transglobe Expedition, the first and only circumnavigation of the Earth along its poles using only surface transport. We sailed south from Greenwich, the basis of world longitude, and returned three years later. Whenever we hit land we’d take the Land Rovers off the ship, drive south, and the ship would collect us and take us first to Africa, then Antarctica, the Yukon, the Northwest Passage and the North Pole. We travelled about 50,000 miles this way.

How do you pack for a three-year journey?

I recently borrowed [fellow expeditioner] Oliver Shepard’s diary from the ’70s. He wrote: “Transglobe was almost over by the time we departed. Every i dotted and every t crossed.” It took seven years to plan and to raise the money to fund the expedition.

Why mount such elaborate expeditions?

Charity and science are huge outcomes of these expeditions. We’ve raised £18.9 million for mainly cancer and heart organisations. And the British scientific community applauds what the scientists on our expeditions have done. The primary reason, though, is to break world records of a physical and geographic nature and to do so before our rivals do – the Canadians and the Norwegians.

What kind of scientific research has been done?