Going On Expeditions
Do you get nervous before an expedition?
Generally, I don't get nervous before I go because I've done preparation. Nowadays especially, I've learned survival skills. I can cope with the Amazon, New Guinea, Borneo, and the Arctic, and so on. So I've gone extra fast, I could acknowledge. Also, because I go alone, I tread slowly. I work out a sort of backup plan, as it were. I do a bit of networking. I go to the area and I talk to frontiersmen, talk to indigenous people and just get to know how things are. So that it's a step by step approach. I think if you are feeling fearful back here, well it's quite natural. You are taking on a big thing. But you have to reassure yourself and say, "There's no danger today or tomorrow. I'll just take things one day at a time." That's how I've done my expeditions, not really thinking about the end objective which is some scary feat I'm trying to pull off and how I am preparing for that and gradually feel more and more at home in this place that I'm familiar with.
How long does an expedition last?
For me expeditions last about six months. Maybe three months, three months minimum I should think. Because I am building up local knowledge and doing it really at the pace that the local people do things. So it is quite a slow process.
Do you always do expeditions alone?
I always go alone, because I feel that I've found a way of doing it. I've found a way that works for me. It started because I didn't have any money, and I simply thought, in this very naive way, that if I go off on the Amazon, or the Orinoco, and live with locals, they'll teach me how to catch fishes, and shoot birds with their bows and arrows - incredibly naive. But it sort of worked. My principle was: the locals don't have any money, I don't have any money, and I can sort of live with them. I'll do my best to help them and they'll help me. In a sort of clumsy way that system began to work. I began to accumulate skills and so on, and it became a sort of way of doing it. At the same time I realized that, going alone, I was starting to learn genuinely new things. If you go to a place taking Western companions, taking lots of backup, then you are very likely to be bringing the world with you. And you're sort of supported by that network that's very familiar to you, and you won't open yourself up emotionally. And to me, personally, exploration is about that moment of vulnerability. It's about opening yourself up, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, so that you can experience that place, and not actually put an impact on that place. So it's not about that planting the flag bit. It's not about going where no one's ever gone before. It's about opening yourself up, allowing the place to make its mark on you. Otherwise, I think that I wouldn't be able to justify calling myself an explorer, because I simply would be a tourist. I'd just be wandering around the world and not really immersing myself in a place. But it's the fact that I've got into another world, and I am vulnerable, and probably won't get out unless I understand that world.
Do you ever have any back up in cast things go wrong?
My backup is probably not what anyone else would choose to take or certainly not the familiar way. I don't use a GPS. I have done, actually, but generally I don't navigate with a GPS. Sometimes I have one in a survival kit that I take, but I try not to use one. I don't use a satellite phone, if I can help it. Sometimes I've been made to, by the BBC, or someone, but I generally don't use that. So I'm not quite a technophobe, but it's just part of my philosophy that if you call yourself an explorer, you should do things on your own terms. If you're scared, for example, to climb Everest without a phone, without this and that, then perhaps don't climb Everest. Climb Mt. Snowden, or something a little bit less challenging. So I think that you should, rather than just trying to conquer the place with all these extra aids, you should try and lower your expectations, because to me you're sheltered from the real place, the reality. So I don't take all these gadgets. To me, a compass, a map, a survival kit which has a range of things, like distress flares and waterproof matches, antibiotics, and so on. So I carry that around with me all the time and my backup becomes, essentially, the environment itself, the Amazon, which is a shelter, is a place of medicine, is food, and of course the local people, who I've plugged into, and their knowledge. They become my backup team, as it were.
What is the most amazing thing you've ever seen?
I don't know, there tend to be little moments, that just startle out of the blue, you're tired, I remember walking
What is the most dangerous situation you've ever been in?
Someone kindly wrote to me and said oh you're like a cat who's used up six of his nine lives, and I thought oh that's a bit of an exaggeration, because of course I've obviously have told my venture stories, and I've had an exciting life so I can totally sort of but I haven't worked it out. And that is about right. I suppose between my dog my first expedition was bad, it was a total failure, but that's sort of clouded in my memory, as sort of confused and loss and I had two stints of malaria, and so on so I don't really remember that very distinctly. What always stays in my mind though is a different occasion, went back to that Amazon 10 years later and was shot at. These people sort of port de mayo river and I suppose about 6 months before Pablo Escobar was killed, the big drugs baron. So I suspect he was lying low in the lowlands as part of the cartel in Columbia in the Amazon. Whether he was there himself I don't know but these two people clearly his, well he used the word the slang word ‘tranqueta', which is almost like hitman. These were I suppose hitman or I don't know one way or another. I didn't stop and ask them actually they just shot at me. I thought it wasn't because I was English, but I just thought I wouldn't ask them but I'd just paddle away, and I paddled away from these two people and the first shot missed me and I was waiting to be killed and I paddled away fast - as you could imagine. They just didn't turn out to be very competent hitmen. I mean they couldn't paddle a canoe and kill somebody at the same time, so that was the end of that; I got away around the riverbed. That just seems one of these, well I imagine it was a memorable moment but the wise end was particularly that I was so utterly exposed and so utterly unexpectedly I had got to know the forest. I knew I could survive more or less in it alone which is an unusual thing in the West, and yet suddenly I was absolutely helpless because these people weren't my people. They were not local people who I found generally friendly. I mean indigenous people they've always welcomed me but this was not the case at all because the Amazon is also full of opportunist and these people were out there for what they could get and well I was stopping them.
Has nearly dying affected you in anyway?
I don't think so really. I think that my expeditions have been more perilous than most people's because of not having companions who could help me out and so on, and probably because I'm less competent than... I don't know things have just gone wrong. It hasn't really stopped me because I've spent so long away. The expeditions for six months at a time, again and again and again for 25 years of doing it and there are probably only about a half dozen times. One occasion did make me think again. It's most odd because it wasn't a dramatic moment, not someone shooting at me, not gold miners chasing me with knives as in other occasions, not guides abandoning me that's happened. It was me jumping down from a hut. I was in Siberut, which is an island off of Sumatra. It was a jungly place, I was living with the local people the Mentawai. I jumped down from their hut onto the ground. A simple enough act, I would do everyday and the locals would do it everyday. But as I jumped in my paratrooper boots down to the ground from this platform, I realized that someone, some idiot had put a spear into the ground with the point upwards, which is not what you do. As I jumped this spear went right past my eye. I had just jumped and I hadn't seen it because it was pointed vertically upwards, so there wasn't much to see and it went right past my eye. It missed me and I wasn't event touched, but I thought, my god the randomness of that. That could have so easily killed me through my eye, not even my eye but into my head could've killed me instantly. That made me think like anything, because it wasn't some baddie, some gold miner or some drug dealer, it was just some little instant that could've killed me. That was very shocking to me because it made me sit down and think that wow this could happen. So that scared me. I used to just think I was immortal I suppose. I could just set off and I'd be okay. I just somehow believed in myself, but now I supposed because I'm getting older and because I've just had a child unbelievably, I'm suddenly feeling a little bit more hesitant and I don't think I will take the risk that I got used to taking in the past. I went to Afghanistan very recently and I didn't even like it. I just suddenly felt a terrible feeling, a premonition. I thought something was going to happen. Either I'm going to get blown up in Kabul, or I'm going to get kidnapped. I actually had two soldiers, two people looking after me and various security experts saying everything was going to be fine. But this extraordinary feeling and premonition, and I think was purely because for the first time I am responsible for someone else, a child.
Have frightening situations ever put you off doing another expedition?
No. I suppose I have been put off in part. I've had to take stock, and I do know I've done foolish things. My very last big expedition, when I went across the Bering Strait with a dog team, I lost the dogs somewhere out there in the Bering Straits. It was pack ice -- you have to imagine this maze of ice -- pack ice crunched together in great blocks and blocks. I lost my dogs. And it was okay in the end, but I realized I'd sort of done a naughty thing. I had broken the rules. I was just so determined not to go home without having pushed myself as far as I could go personally, so I just went for it. And I do have this impulsiveness in my psyche that I have to control, but it's also what powers me sometimes, this willfulness that I have. And I thought to myself that I wouldn't do this again. And I certainly wouldn't do my first expeditions again, when I crossed the Amazon basin, and so on. I was very lucky to have got away with it. I don't have that belief in my luck that I had as a young man.
What is your favourite place you've been to?
Maybe Mongolia. I love the open skies. Physically, Mongolia is the most extraordinary place. Huge skies. It's a very dry environment. Very high, actually, Mongolia. It's on a little plateau, almost. And it's a glorious place, and the fact that almost half the population is still nomadic is very exciting to me. You get a feeling as you ride or walk through that land that you're amongst friends, other people who are also moving around, just like you. So you have this sort of bond. And there's this wonderful open-hearted hospitality in Mongolia. You pass a ger, which is a felt tent, what some people call a yurt. They don't up there -- they hate the word -- they call it a ger. You're offered this hospitality, and it's like a super social security system, and the locals all rely on each other. They're spread very, very thinly over this vast country. It's the size of Western Europe. And it's wonderful to be introduced from one person to another over the course of, well in my case I suppose five or six months.
What's the worst place you have been to?
For me, physically, the Arctic is the worst, up in Siberia. I found it terrible. It was this terrible winter, was it in living memory. It was minus thirty, it was minus fifty of occasion, that sort of thing. I found that a total nightmare. I'm no good in the cold. I'm almost two meters tall - six foot four - and so I think being long and thin, I'm just the wrong shape. I'm better off walking through some desert, almost like a Masai or Dinka, who are my sort of height. So I think I'm the wrong shape. Again, that expedition was wonderful in the end, because that dog team that I set out to try and train did actually come round to my point of view. They did actually start working with me and trusting me. And so out of that frightfulness came a sort of wonderful thing. So looking back, sometimes the worst places turn out to be the best. I'm sure you've all had this: you know how bad experiences can be, but you feel this utter sense of relief when it's done, and you feel that much more excited about the world because you've got through it somehow.
How many places have you visited?
I don't really count most of my travels as explorations, to be absolutely honest. I've done a lot of programs for the telly, which I still think of as not exploration. People wonder why I'm called the explorer, sometimes, because they forget that I've written five or six books about early expeditions when I was utterly remote. But I suppose -- gee, I've popped all over the place, everywhere from Haiti to Mongolia, and I don't know -- I suppose I've done ten major expeditions, and about five minor ones. And they've generally been to the jungles around the world and the deserty places, and I've rattled through the South American countries, if you like, but it's not very exciting. Everyone's been to Peru, nowadays. Well, I suppose there've been ten countries in South America and so on that I've been to.
How long will you continue to be an explorer?
I don't know. I think things will evolve. I've always felt that writing is part of the process. It is my way of communicating what I've done and I image that will become the major part instead of equal parts. So, for me it is a cause and effect thing. You go away and you reflect on your experience and you write the book and the book is part of the adventure. I don't move on until I have finished the book but increasingly I think I will just write and not need the experience. There's a lot in my head that I've got stored up. So, I think I'm weary of the adventures now. I don't think it is necessary for me to risk my life and I don't seem to have a desire to push myself to the limit as much. I don't know the answer to that. I will keep on going until I drop dead doing something creative, something that will make me exert myself but I suppose explorers don't really retire. They keep on doing something or another. Who knows?
What, for you, makes an expeditions succesful?
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.
What do you hope to achieve from each expedition you go on?
My objective each time is, I suppose, to come back with knowledge of the place that is more than simply the perceived knowledge. I don't do much background reading, I prepare as best as I can. But essentially it's about going to a place immersing myself in that place and then exposing myself to that place, in other words not just being pampered or protected in the village but just testing myself by going on a mission like head off by myself through the forest through the desert and all my expeditions follow that formula of going to local people and then heading off alone. And then I come back feeling a sense of having coped somehow in that world and therefore being able to communicate that experience isolated from my culture not propped up by the GPS not propped up by satellite phone. But having actually perceived and even thrived in a place that would certainly kill people before I set off.
Have you ever regretted any expedition you have been on?
I haven't really regretted my expeditions, any of them...no, I think there is always something I've learned. Even ones that haven't gone all that smoothly. I went to Sumatra years ago to try and track down an orange pendek, which is a little ape man that was meant to live in the forest there and was largely mythical and local people believed in it so I thought let's try and investigate. I never got to the bottom of that. I still don't know whether this thing is real or not and scientists have claimed they've found footprints of it and it may still exist out there. But I never got to the bottom and I felt maybe I should have persevered and come up with something more. I wrote a book called "Hunting the Gugu" because this thing was called the Gugu. I thought it was slightly unfinished work because I hadn't come to a conclusion about it. But it wasn't...no, it wasn't something I really regretted, I just felt perhaps I could've got further, could've hung on in there somehow and come back with more than I had.
How long are you home for between expeditions?
I'm home for quite a lot of the time. Actually, two-thirds of my time at least because the book and the expedition are part and parcel. I simply can't move on until I have it all down on paper. I think it's largely because I go off alone. I've got all of this stuff in my head and if you're not with a companion, what do you do with all these thoughts and all these anxieties and so on one way you can deal with it is to get it all out there out of your system and share it. So often, I'm just back here in Britain writing my books. I suppose a third of my time I'm away gathering new material.
Do you know a lot of other explorers?
Yes there is. The Royal Geographical Society I suppose is the center of exploration. I'm not a great club person, I'm very bad... I'm not all that much of a loner either, but I tend to think of exploration as sort of work and it's too intense for me. I do love chatting to explorers. One of them rang today, Penn Hatter who is a fellow explorer. So I love chatting to them but I'm not tightly in their world. Partly because I'm more literary I think than most, and I'm sort of more interested in writers and so on. But I'm above all I suppose I'm slightly different. I don't, I'm not an expeditioner, I don't have the usual conventional backup and so on, the sponsorship and so on so I'm a little bit of an oddity maybe. But yes, the Travellers' Club as well, the Travellers... and yeah, I don't know, I tend to meet them on chat shows and giving motivational speeches or something like that. So I sort of bump into all of them...
What do you eat on an expedition?
Food on an expedition varies enormously. There are the inevitables, the horror stories about having to eat insects, having to eat my dog, and these sorts of things. But these are survival moments; they're not typical at all. In fact, I'm not a great one for thinking about survival in that when you're thinking about survival is when things have gone wrong, and you've got a different strategy. Generally on my exploration I'm trying to make the Amazon or the New Guinea like a home, and so the word survival shouldn't be cropping up. This should be a resource. It's only when things get bad that it actually enters your mind. But no, I'm eating whatever the locals eat. And generally, it's quite dull, to be honest. There's a lot of -- in the Amazon -- a lot of fish, and so. A lot of basic carbohydrate type food. But, anything. Monkeys.
How did you come to eat a dog?
Eating my dog to survive - it wasn't a normal, everyday occurrence. This was not a dog from Hampshire where I came from. It was not a dog like a Golden Labrador. We're talking about a dog that I picked up crossing the Amazon Basin, up in the north, northeast Amazon. It was an Indian hunting dog, and I felt a bit sorry for it. Its feet were a bit infected, and I put some disinfectant on them, looked after it, and the dog sort of adopted me. And I had ideas that I'd build it up a little bit and I'd give it to someone. So the dog was a sort of passenger with me, and I got to know it. I found myself with some gold miners. It's a long and complicated story, and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of it. But these people didn't want me there. Had they found gold? I don't know. Maybe they were bank robbers. It's extraordinary, but the Amazon is full of bank robbers. It sounds so weird to say it. But if you think about it, if you rob a bank, it's a brilliant place to go. You set off into the middle of the Amazon with your fishing line and your bank proceeds, your cash, your dosh, and you just sort of hide in the forest, in the Amazon. You'd stay there for a year or two, just fishing. So that's what a lot of people do. Anyway, there were these people out there. They were gold miners, and they told me to go away. They had knives, and they kept on threatening me. I thought “I'm getting really uncomfortable here”, and I couldn't just leave. I had a big canoe and two guides with me. Anyway, one night I heard them say, let's go and slit his throat in Portuguese. I had no way of knowing whether they were just trying to scare me or not. But I just thought “I've got to make a run for this.” It just wasn't looking good, and I thought “I've just got to go”. I jumped into the canoe with the dog. I think the dog was in the canoe, actually. But anyway, off we went. The canoe capsized, and I found myself on the river bank down river quite a long way with nothing. There I was on the river bank. The dog had actually been washed away as well. Later on it came and found me, came up through the forest and found me. But I walked out of the forest. I walked and walked and walked, and I was getting weaker, and the dog was getting weaker. It just wasn't looking very good at all. I had a little primitive survival kit. But this was my first ever expedition. I was 22 when I set off, and I wasn't really very sure what I was doing at all in the forest. But days went by, weeks went by, malaria started kicking in. I just wasn't making any progress at all. I think it was only 65 miles to the outside world, but I just didn't seem to be able to do it. And I remember lying on the forest floor thinking, I've got to do something if I'm going to see my mom and dad again, because as I said, 22 is quite young. I felt it was too young to die anyway. And I just thought “I've got to do something.” And the dog was the only resource that I had. I thought “if I eat the dog, that will give me energy, and then I'll be able to get out of here”. I think it was the act. I've sort of gotten wound up about this over the years, and for years I didn't even talk about this. They've got it in newspapers, but I didn't really go through the details of it, and I wasn't able to reflect very well. I think it was the act of doing something so treacherous to a companion. This was a dog that I had sort of rescued, and I was killing it. It seemed very wrong. I don't know. It eroded my morale somehow, and it sort of tortured me that I had done it when I did do it. The actual details I don't remember very well. I think I have blanked them out. But, for years, it was very hard for me to come to terms with it, because I sort of felt I had done something wrong to my friend. And I was weighing out, should I have done it or not, and it's sort of common sense that you should try perhaps and get back for your mom and dad more than for a dog. But nonetheless, this dog had become my mate. We were doing this together, walking out through the forest. So I found it quite hard to look back at it in a way. Knowing I had done this thing, I was certainly very, very clear that it was my last chance. There was nothing more for me to call on. No other resource, and that it was now or never. So I walked and walked and walked, more determined than ever and stumbled into someone's back field, I suppose. It was a maize field, and I sort of stumbled through the field and collapse at a hut out there in the forest, on the edge of the forest. And this bloke took me in and looked after me for three days.
Where do you sleep when on an expedition?
In a rainforest, I'd sleep in a hammock, generally, but when I'm doing my apprenticeship, as it were, because I always start by living with remote people, I'd be in their house, usually a communal barn-like building, and, again, be in hammocks, and so on. So, on the road, walking alone through the forest, again, hammocks. I have been in tents, although it's hard -- the humidity is so great, it's better not to be in a tent. But it keeps out certain creepy crawlies and things, snakes, and so on. It can be good to be in a tent. In deserts, I just sleep under the stars. I don't think I've ever properly used a tent in the desert. Some people think they're great. I just love being out in the open in the desert. You've got to be ready, when the temperature gets way below zero; you've got to be ready to cover yourself. So you have a very thick sleeping bag, often. Arctic -- I've only used tents, ever, on the ground. People always forget the cold comes up from under you. You've got to insulate yourself, whether you use leaves or what they call carry-mats. You've got to have some sort of insulated layer to somehow build the temperature up, the insulation up from the ground.
How did you communicate?
Communication is, of course, absolutely key especially if you're like me who goes off alone and tries to pull of a journey. Obviously, I try and learn the national language which isn't all that easy. I'm not a particularly good linguist, but like anything it helps if you've got time on your side, that's part of the thing, and also an ability to immerse yourself. If you're not with a friend who's like you from captain's bush or from somewhere from home and you're alone it's amazing in the course of three months I'd say anyone can learn any language, but you've got to be alone. You've got to be immersed in that place. It helps me of course having a practical task, a very clear objective that I have to learn survivals skills in the Amazon or New Guinea or in Namibia, say with the "Himba" people. And so, I'd have a clear idea of what I needed to do and often I'd just be with children who I find much more open than adults. I'd say teach me this or teach me that and their parents would say he's just some mad foreigner but he wants to learn about walking alone in the forest which of course they wouldn't do by themselves. So, I'd be taught by the young especially but also people who were very familiar with tasks and understood the need to survive themselves.
