Advice
What are your top tips for survival on an expedition?
Top tips for survival; I'd say, the first thing to do is when you're surviving, something's gone wrong. You're disoriented, you're probably alone, so the first thing is to gather your wits about you. You've got to work out what is in your control to do anything about and what is not, and you've got to forget about the things that you can't do anything about; it's too late to worry about - I don't know, what supplies have been washed away, if you haven't got them, you haven't got them, you've got to work with what you have got in front of you or that is potentially within reach. Second thing you've got to do, having calmed yourself down, made yourself think, if possible make a cup of tea or something to slow yourself down and gather these thoughts together, you've got to think: okay, where am I? You've got to position yourself relative to the rest of the world. Then you can work out where is help - where have I got to get to. The next thing is to work out if anyone is going to come to you; perhaps it's better to wait there and wait for the search party, wait for someone else to worry about you. If that's not going to come you've got to work your way out. I think the single biggest problem I've faced facing a survival situation; I suppose I'm unusual in the world in that I've faced terrible situations alone in most major habitats, what has worried me is not being able to take on the terrible thought of walking a hundred miles through a jungle, or walking all the way out through a desert - I mean it's too much to bear. Very few humans can really just believe in themselves and think, right, I'll just start walking. So it's about belief, and what you've got to do is just believe you can keep on going. So you set yourself a much smaller objective, you don't think, right if I just walk to, you know, to the other end of the planet, you just think of the next hundred meters, and what I've done sometimes is pick up a stick - this was in the Amazon - and notched every hundred paces I've taken on my stick. And I have a survival kit generally, that's another important thing to have, just the basic rudiments for survival. I'll take a compass from my survival kit and I'll walk direct in what I think is the best way out and every hundred meters notch up something on my stick - a little mark. And that's just -- a couple of things. First thing is it's so that you can measure your progress and therefore get a sense of how far you are progressing, and second thing it does it build your confidence - you start looking back at what you have achieved so at last you have something on your side, you know you have made a go of it, for a day, two days, three days you are starting to notch up this achievement, you're starting to feel better about yourself. And once you've got that belief then you're more confident, you start to look around for more opportunities, and above all start to believe that you can survive.
How does being an explorer affect your relationships and personal life?
I think being an adventurer-explorer is devastating to your personal life. I suppose one of the biggest sacrifices I've had to make is my social life - that has ruined relationships, I suppose, through the years. And I suppose I like to think that people I've gotten to know have wanted to be with me because I'm the sort of person I am. But the problem is that the sort of person I am is somebody who wants to go off alone and understand about the world. For me personally, it wouldn't work taking a girlfriend on an expedition, though there are different ways of adapting your expedition to try and incorporate a girlfriend or a boyfriend. But, I'm very, very single minded and I think it's hard for me to think of taking a partner along. I think I'd compromise my objectives. And however willing that person might be to put up with long absences, it's very difficult to commit to someone who is going to be disappearing for six months. It's hard for them, the person left behind, because often early in a relationship, how do you know if you really like the person enough to wait for six months wondering if they're going to survive or not, come back or not. It's very hard. It's hard also for the person going, someone like me, thinking should I really ask this person to wait for me. It's an enormous thing to ask anyone to wait around, say six months. Bear in mind I don't take a satellite phone generally. It's such a big, big thing and it's stopped me really settling down with anyone till very recently. And now I suppose I've lost a lot of the burning desire to go. It's more, I'm more fascinated by these places than driven to go to these places. And so perhaps I've opened myself up and allowed myself to get close to someone.
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.
Who are your heroes or inspirational figures?
My heroes aren't perhaps the standard ones. Someone I always looked up to was Laurens Van Der Post. Laurens Van Der Post has been dismissed as a bit of a – well people say he's made up stuff and so on but for me as a boy I heard stories of this man who went out to live in the Kalahari and he wrote a book called, ‘The Lost World of The Kalahari', which was way ahead of its time - he was talking about bushmen and how they live their lives. He was very poetic and everyone understood he was a bit of a storyteller, but he portrayed these people as simply people and that was a wonderful thing. It helped me think that there were these people out there who would respond to me like an ordinary person and would help me. He's great, but he's tended to be forgotten about now but as a child I thought he was great. And I love the big explorer heroes – Cook, I love James Cook. I was more found of him then Scott or Shackleton, these sort of people who were leading military expositions trying ton conquer places. Cook I didn't see as a conqueror, I saw him as a genuine discover and he was a great humanitarian. He was a genuine man of enlightenment, but it's true that he got rather ratty towards the end of his time and he said one or two things he shouldn't of said about various people, but he had a lovely side to him that I hope ever one would have. He was exploring, as we all know, New Zealand and there was one time when the Maori came out and were challenging him, waving a spear – I haven't got the story exactly right, but certainly as a child I imagined this person with his tattoos, his hacker, sticking out his tongue, quite a scary figure and this man was scared of Cooks' ship and it was a very big thing with its sails and this little rowing boat came to the soar with this man threatening to spear him and he got out of the rowing boat and weighed through the water, showed he had no gun, put out his arms and the man wasn't sure what to do, to kill him or not and Cook hugged him in the traditional greeting and that was quite extraordinary – the other side of the world, the other side of the planet hugged this man in the traditional way showing that he was just like this man – no airs no graces. I thought that was great, probably haven't got the story exactly right, but that was the sort of man he was – he saw so called ‘exotic' people, people he did seem very ‘strange' some times in a lot of ways and even very primitive and very backward in ways but he seemed to see through all that and treat them simply as people and I think that is a wonderful thing.
