CALL OF THE WILD

Erstwhile soldier and full-time adventurer RANULPH FIENNES has been called the world’s greatest living explorer. During a recent visit to Hong Kong, he found the time to chat with samantha leese

IT’S LATE AFTERNOON and, in the sports hall of the Hong Kong Football Club, preparations are noisily under way for the Royal Geographical Society’s annual dinner. A nervous-looking clutch of young men in suits has got wind of the event, during which their hero, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, will speak.

They’re here, as I am, to steal a moment or two with the world’s greatest living explorer before his duties as tonight’s guest of honour take him away for book signing and sound checks. When he walks in, tall and calm in a navy-blue pinstripe suit, there’s an audible hush.

The British adventurer is the only man to have circumnavigated the globe on its polar axis – a three-year odyssey of more than 83,000km that has never been repeated. His biography reads like a James Bond script (he was in the running to play 007 before Roger Moore got the part). After a childhood in South Africa and at Eton, Fiennes underwent SAS training and, in the mid-1960s, became the youngest captain in the British Army.

He went on to fight Marxist terrorists, led an expedition up the length of the Nile, discovered the lost city of Ubar on the Yemeni border, climbed Everest three times and became the first person to run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days – three-and-a-half months after a massive heart attack on the side of the highest mountain on earth.

Fiennes is modest, polite and understatedly funny. He uses words economically – partly, no doubt, because it’s impossible to describe the things he has felt and seen. And partly because, as the author of 19 books, he tells a good story. His 1991 novel, The Feather Men, was last year released as a movie, Killer Elite.

Against the clatter of kitchen equipment and shouting, Fiennes shares his thoughts on heroism, patience and the mini-skirt.

How did your life as an explorer begin?
My father was killed in the Second World War four months before I was born. So when I was little in South Africa, the stories were about my father and grandfather. I wanted to do with my life what my father did – to be commander of the Royal Scots Greys. Obviously, in a pyramidal organisation like a regiment, only one lieutenant will get to the top. Officers who went to Sandhurst are more likely to be promoted. You have to have two A-levels to get to Sandhurst, and at Eton I found it impossible to get them. That time was when the mini-skirt was most prevalent, so concentration was very difficult.

My first expedition was the year before I decided to leave the army. It was the first-ever ascent of the longest river in the world.

Is there one moment that stands out in all your adventures?
In 1982, after travelling for three years around the world, there was a day when another guy and I had been floating on an ice floe for three months. The ship was coming up from Greenland and we’d spent three years getting that far over the North Pole. Things went wrong and they got a hole in the ship and it didn’t quite come up.

There were lots of bears, and the ice floe we were on started getting smaller. After all that, it looked like failure. So when we heard the ship couldn’t reach us, we had to do 18 miles [29km] through ice and thunder in two little canoes with skis that we’d designed.

There was no GPS, so we used a compass. All you can see are big ice walls. It’s like a nightmare. And you think you’re going to get there and the ship moves. On this day, we climbed up 10 metres of ice, and for the first time in eight months of whiteness I saw two black sticks. They were the ship’s masts.

To what do you owe your survival?
Luck.

When did you successfully climb Everest?
In 2009. I’d stopped using European guides and just went with Tundu the Sherpa. As a result we got there eight hours earlier than scheduled. I had a memory blackout, so I’m not quite sure how. We were due to arrive on the summit at midday, and the BBC camera didn’t work at night. We got there two hours before dawn, which means I must have either taken a helicopter or been carried by little Tundu, because it was far faster than I would have expected to do it. Tundu knew you mustn’t stay on top, but I said, “We can’t go back without getting film.” And he said the camera only works when it’s light. So we waited on the top for two hours for the light to come up. By the time [it did], Tundu’s fingers wouldn’t work the camera and he’d lost his voice and we were both very, very cold.

It took a few goes to reach the top.
Yeah, it did. The first time it was a cardiac problem, really. The night that I had the heart attack was the last night, just six hours from the summit. Which was a nuisance because I’d been out there in Tibet for two months. [There was a] Scottish guy who, that night, at the same height, at the same time, on the Nepalese side, got the same heart attack as me. Whereas my wife had made me take glycerine tri-nitrate pills, he didn’t have any, so he died. I passed his body three years later. It was the first time I’d ever taken pills. You know, when you’re in a harness, it’s night, it’s cold and you’ve got a rope and all that, it’s hard to actually find the bottle. And this thing was getting worse, so I was panicking. Eventually I found it.

Later I discovered that the maximum you can take is two, and I took 80.

Who is one of your heroes?
There was one little woman [Gladys Aylward] who was a parlour maid in 1930. She went to church in North London and heard that there was a place called China on the other side of the world, and the poor people in China hadn’t got Christianity...So she went home and told her brother that he must go to this place called China and tell them about Christ. He said, “I’m not going, you go.” So she found a map, which explained that there was a place called Russia in between London and China. It would cost £47 to get there on the Siberian railway.

She spent two years trying to get enough money to pay for a ticket. By the time she was 26 she had £47, so she said goodbye to her parents and didn’t come back for 20 years.

She worked for the Chinese during the Sino-Japanese war in the mountains of northeast China to tell them where their enemies were. Because as a missionary she used to go up to the villages, she knew all the tracks. She saved 200 Chinese children, who then became her family.

What are the lessons you’ve learned through your experiences?
A lot of it is about dealing with people. When people get stressed, they change and you want to try and be patient. Very similar to marriage.

What’s your proudest achievement?