What, for you, makes an expeditions succesful?

What, for you, makes an expeditions succesful?

Benedict Allen (Explorer) gives expert video advice on: Do you get nervous before an expedition?; How long does an expedition last?; How do you decide what expedition to do next? and more...

For me it is about, I do set myself a clear objective. I think one of the differences between a traveler and an explorer is that a traveler sort of wanders. For me it is a very, very clear process. I go in, I learn about a place and then I test myself because as guides have often said to me, look we walk you through the forest for weeks and weeks, but how will you ever know what you have learned unless you go for doing it yourself. And that is something I have remembered time and time again. I remember on my last big expedition my objective superficially was to cross the Bering straight with my dogs, train a dog team. We were going to cross this pack of ice fifty miles. Would have been the most wonderful thing to have done. I would have been one of the few people perhaps the only person in history to do it alone with dogs. I did not manage to do that but I still a came home feeling I succeeded somehow because to me it is not really all about an objective. That is just sort of something to hang a peg on really for an expedition. The objective to me is really all about the exploration bit of it, not that sort of adventure personal challenge element. The exploration was learning about the place and understanding it in a new way. The dogs enabled me to do that. There I was alone, able to control them, and this of course was all based on knowledge of indigenous people who had given me the dogs and trained me initially, So these were Chukchis, the reindeer herders. So I was coming back alive with my dogs and I made a sort of promise to my dogs that I would get them safely home. And we did get all home together in fact. And that to me was the greatest achievement. You have got to know when to turn back on an expedition and I suppose sometimes I regret not having got to America, the other side of the Bering straight, but essentially that is just my ego. What the ego should have been about and was at the core all about, was learning about the place. And I had to come back feeling at home in this environment which is potentially very dangerous indeed.