What advice would you give to someone about to embark on their first expedition?
If someone's about to set off on an expedition, I think that the key is to set yourself aside from everyone else. There's always a lot of fluster leading to an expedition -- when you're packing you wonder, have I forgotten this, have I forgotten that, have I gotten the necessary injections, have I got my anti rabies stuff. There's always all that fuss going on -- you're thinking, have I got enough money for this? It's really important to pull yourself away from all that process, that hurly-burly atmosphere, and think to yourself "What do I really want to come back with? Will I mind if I only go halfway through the jungle?" Do I actually need to cross the whole of the Amazon Basin, or do I actually want to experience something extraordinary with my life, rather than just chalking up an athletic feat?" which is what a lot of explorations have become. Maybe I want to discover something about myself. Maybe I want to sit with a shaman in the village and be taken into a totally different world, with the help of his metsuma. Maybe that will be something life-changing, because it's not that easy to carry on a career as an explorer, and that might be your one chance to escape from the normal world, the world that we all live in, back here in the west. That might be your great chance to spend 6 months deep in the forest with a remote people, or in the Arctic. And you would say, what do you really want to come back with? And don't let go of that. Don't come home until you've achieved that, because you have to hang on, you've got to believe in this one thing that you really want because you are going to feel depressed at times. You're going to feel sore, perhaps there'll be blisters, maybe mosquito bites. It can be rough, and you've got to know that you thought, "This is what I want to come home with" to get through those dips, those terrible moments, in order to get that special moment when everything's absolutely right.
