His expeditions have raised £16 million; he'd like to even that off to at least £20 million before he hangs up his boots. LAURENCE MACKINmeets a lifelong hero, explorer and travel writer Ranulph Fiennes
THE WORLD’S GREATEST living explorer is on the phone, and I’m doing my best not to listen in. In beautiful sunshine last Saturday morning outside Ballyrafter House Hotel in Lismore, Co Waterford, Ranulph Fiennes is trying to organise his next expedition, before he prepares to speak at the Immrama festival for travel writers. He might be sharing a bill with such luminaries as Jan Morris, Pico Iyer and Tim Severin, but that evening, at a hall in the local school, there is little doubt who tops the bill. He might be 66, but hard, tough, country men want to be him; and women, ahem, women want to have their book signed by him.
But back to his next expedition, which he is semi-refusing to discuss. “I just spent half the night talking to the guy who is doing the polar ship, who’s the same bloke who did the Transglobe ship, and he was just telling me that he’s got all the blokes that are still alive [from the Transglobe expedition] back from New Zealand, Fiji, all over the place, to man this ship for two years.”
Like anyone who has found the vehicle of their dreams, Sir Ranulph hasn’t got the cash to buy the ship he wants. What that boat is actually going to do, he won’t tell me. “Well, I will if you’ll give me a million quid.” I’ve got a fiver. “I’m sorry,” he says, quite definitively. Then he almost lets the cat out of the bag, about which, more later.
The reason for his secrecy, is “the – I won’t use a nasty adjective – Norwegians”. No adjective, but the glower in his voice is unmistakable. “If we are about to do something, twice over 36 years we’ve found the Norwegians are first.”
But back to the money. Fiennes is focused, but not for selfish reasons. He may have made his living out of exploration – “I hate the word adventurer, professionally I’m a travel writer, which has been in my passport for 30 years” – but the majority of the cash raised has gone to various charities. Over the years, his team has raised £16 million and, before he hangs up his various boots, he’d like to hit £20 million. “We’ve quite a long way to go. I might be a couple of feet into the grave by the time we reach that figure.”
How he has got as far as he has is remarkable. On his Transglobe expedition, between 1979 and 1982, he and two companions set out to travel around the world on its polar axis, using only surface transport, becoming the first men to visit both poles by land, after 52,000 miles. In 1992, he discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman. In 2003, mere months after a heart attack, he completed seven marathons in seven days in seven continents. And then, in 2009, on his third attempt, he reached the summit of Everest at the age of 65.
Along with being the world’s greatest living explorer, it seems he is also the world’s greatest blagger. Each expedition comes with a host of sponsors giving their services or products for free, from ships and servicing works, to insurance and fuel. And then there’s the crew. “There’s 52 in our group – eight have died – most of whom have been in the group for 39 years, and none of them have ever been paid a penny.
“Nobody will pay you a penny for organising the expedition, which is the case I’m in now because I need a large sum of money; people keep talking about that dreadful word recession in terms of excusing themselves from not saying yes.” Worse than the Norwegians, that lot.
If Fiennes is single-minded about his job, he is also unromantic. Whereas some tie themselves behind a desk to make ends meet, Fiennes slaves for months on end in the most inhospitable places on Earth – and all to pay the gas bill.
After a stint in the British army – during which he was turfed out of the SAS for attempting to blow up a dam built in a pretty English village by Disney during the filming of Dr Dolittle– he found himself "without any money, and I was around 26; no A-levels, which in those days were quite important; and married, so what could we do? The only way I had anything from my army experience was all the adventure-training exercises from the cold war in Germany. The soldiers started to beat each other up because they got bored, because the Soviets never attacked. To keep them from doing that, one would ski, go orienteering. I had been in charge of big expeditions up rivers and climbing and all sorts of stuff. The wife and I decided to turn that into an expedition. I didn't know anything about snow other than European skiing."
But how do you select people with whom you could potentially spend years in the confines of a tent? “The sort of person that we are really after is placid. They don’t get hugely excited when we reach the pole and become the first humans to do it; or they’ve fallen down a crevasse and they’re starving, and they don’t get particularly disappointed; they are even-keel people.
“You want to make sure that nobody is going to be suing you for any reason. You used to take it as a gentleman’s word. Now, if you are going to go into an area that might take six months, they need to realise that if they get sick, they are going to put up with whatever medical services are there; if they die, they are going to be buried there. And the other way round, if their nearest and dearest is dying of cancer, they are not going to get out. That’s the level of commitment they’ve got to accept upfront.”
Fiennes’s latest book is not about exploration, but about his own family. In Mad Dogs and Englishmen, he traces his family’s extraordinary history: many were closely connected to the British royal family; one was executed by Henry VIII; another is depicted on the Bayeux tapestry; and another Fiennes led the first crusade that captured Jerusalem. A lot to live up to, then.
His first wife, Ginny Pepper (they met when he was 12), was heavily involved in the planning of many of his expeditions (she was the first woman to receive the Polar Medal). Indeed, during his public talk at Immrama, Fiennes tells how when everyone else wanted to give up on the Transglobe expedition, Ginny insisted he carry on. Without her help, it seems very few of his adventures would have been possible. “When you come back from a trip, you have to thank the sponsors, write the book, hopefully get a lot of lectures, and that is okay if you have an understanding family. Things get different if you have children” – Fiennes pauses for perhaps the first time in the interview – “so if, early on, I had had children we might not have ended up doing very much.”
Now, Fiennes has a four-year-old daughter by his second wife, Louise Millington, whom he met after Ginny died of cancer in 2004. So would he be happy to let his daughter follow in his peripatetic and perilous footsteps when she grows up?
“That’s hypothetical, but I hope I would let her do whatever she wanted to do whenever she wanted to do it, if it wasn’t to do with drugs and crime, but anything of [an adventurous] nature I would be all for her doing, definitely.” There is no avoiding the hesitancy of a parent in his tone.
Fiennes is wary of hypotheticals and is loath to philosophise about what he does. He’ll analyse the trips down to the most particular degree; but when it comes to the emotional impact, he is inscrutable, and any question on the more intangible elements of what motivates him are quickly steered on to firmer, rational ground: “Hypotheses; I’m no good at that; philosophy seems to me to be a sort of hypothesis, would you agree?”
His answers are unflinching, and while he doesn’t revel in the hardships of his various escapades, he certainly doesn’t shy away from the gory details. On polar expeditions, the most testing thing is the “huge long sameness where crotch rot [which is every bit as horrible as it sounds] and gangrenous feet are constantly hurting. The food wasn’t ever satisfying after you got hungry. Then when you had the cup of tea, which was the highlight of the day, it was sweet, so the latest tooth filling to have fallen out in the cold would start hurting.
“You get so you’d really want to stop,” he admits. Stopping, though, was out of the question. “The only thing about stopping was that if you stopped through your body being weak you’d never forget that, so you desperately wanted the other bloke to break his leg, or something.” The humour is tinder-dry; the intent is absolute.
Fiennes’s latest expedition was on Mount Everest last year. Given that this was his third attempt, and he had already had a heart attack, the sponsors were nervous about advertising their involvement. A BBC crew followed the trip but was forbidden from broadcasting any material until the trip was deemed a success or a failure. The cameraman fell ill from the altitude, so the BBC team and Fiennes’s Sherpa, Lhakpa Thundu, gamely taught themselves how to use “18 yak loads of equipment”.
“We got up to the place where there was a body from the night before, a Swiss climber, and then there was my Sherpa’s dad, who had died eight years before, when we got to that last ledge. [It isn’t possible to remove those who die on Everest, and the freezing conditions preserve the bodies]. I remember looking up and you couldn’t work out whether the little lights were other climbers or stars. It just looked forever. That’s the last thought I remember until we reached the top.”
They reached the summit ahead of schedule, so much so that there wasn’t sufficient light to film. “Waiting on top is a very bad idea. After 15 minutes, Thundu’s fingers weren’t working. But the bigger fear was going back to the BBC and Marie Curie having got there and not got any film. So we sort of huddled up there and thought, we better die up here rather than face that lot.”
Luckily, a colleague of Fiennes’s was also summiting that day and “took a photo, which he sold to the BBC, to add insult to injury”. The resulting film and fundraising efforts meant that “four months ago we eventually gave Marie Curie a £6.4 million cheque just from that. It worked out well but it very nearly didn’t.”
The margin of success on these extraordinary trips seems to be so thin as to beggar belief. “There’s a lot of luck,” says Fiennes bluntly, “but you obviously try to plan it that you’re not relying on luck; when you get a lucky break, you want to be aware to grab it.”
That said, has the age of exploration been killed off by the advent of easy long-haul travel, satellite imagery and GPS?
“According to National Geographic there’s a very large percentage of the world’s deep ocean floors where they think there are forms of life that would be very interesting and informative, but as yet I don’t think they’ve got the right equipment, and looking at the BP situation you can see the equipment is not really very advanced,” he says. What has changed is speciality. In exploration, “There is plenty of room for young folk but not jacks of all trades like in my day. They need to be specialists to still pioneer.”
Other than that, Fiennes says the only trip he still wants to do is the one he won’t tell me anything about. But several days later, an email drops into my inbox that lets this particularly adventurous cat out of the bag. I decide not to reveal the information it contains here, though.
After all, we wouldn’t want the Norwegians to know about it and get there first.
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: An Expedition Round My Family, by Ranulph Fiennes, is published by Hodder and Stoughton, £20
Ranulph Fiennes
WHAT HE HAS DONE
Transglobe Expedition, 1979-1982
Together with Charles Burton, he travelled around the world on its polar axis using only surface transport. They became the first people to have visited both poles by land.
LOST CITY OF UBAR, 1992
Discovered this ancient city in Oman.
ANTARCTICA, 1992
Became the first person to cross Antarctica unaided with Dr Mike Stroud. The trip took 2,170km.
NORTH POLE, 2000
Fiennes attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole, but had to abandon the attempt after his sleds fell through weak ice. He sustained severe frostbite on his left hand and subsequently cut the fingertips off, in his garden shed, with a microblade.
MARATHONS, 2003
Completed seven marathons, in seven days, on seven continents with Mike Stroud, a few months after having a double heart bypass following a heart attack.
EIGER, 2007
In March 2007, Fiennes climbed the infamous North Face of the Eiger to cure himself of a morbid fear of heights. Despite this, he is still afraid of heights.
EVEREST, 2009
In May 2009, Fiennes summited Everest on his third attempt.
SOMEWHERE COLD, 2012
He’s not saying.
