AS TOLD TO
SARAH WARWICK
PHOTO
GETTY
The greatest living explorer talks about polar dangers, sawing off his
own fingertips and his hardest expedition to date
Sir Ranulph Fiennes
I prefer the Antarctic to the Arctic.
It’s got fewer problems because it’s on
land and you’re not trying to move over
what is basically an ocean. In the Arctic,
you can never totally trust the ice.
In a white-out, you can’t see anything.
The only way to know if you’re on the
tracks made by the 25 tonne vehicles in
front of you is by the rucked-up snow
under your skis. Too far left and you’re
on smooth ice, ditto right. If you lose
the roughness, you’ll be lost forever.
To me, diabetes was something that
fat people get.
I hadn’t realised that
huge numbers get it even if they’re not
obese. With me, pre-diabetes affected
an area of the body that had previous
circulation problems [causing frostbite
in his hands while on expedition in
Antarctica earlier this year].
It’s definitely harder to give up eating
chocolate than smoking.
I remember
25 years ago giving up smoking and
wondering why people find it difficult.
But stopping my lifetime habit of
chocolate eating is very annoying.
Normally, the food you take on trips
assumes you don’t have diabetes. The
person I’ve always done excursions
with is Dr Michael Stroud, Britain’s
number-one specialist in stress
nutrition. On one expedition, his rations
were 67% fat. Not long after that I had
a massive heart attack. I blamed him.
When I sawed the ends of my
[frostbitten] fingers off
it was in a
garden shed on Exmoor and my wife
was bringing me cups of tea. I had to go
dwn to the village to buy a micro saw
because the one I had was getting stuck.
My hardest expedition ever
was the
unsupported crossing of the Antarctic.
We set out towing 500lb [226kg] each:
97 days of rations. We were using
8,300 calories a day each – if you run a
marathon you might use 2,000 – and
only eating 5,200, so we became
skeletal and irritable.
It was when I first went on
expeditions
below freezing that I remember looking
at other people as a factor that could
either make or hinder a situation. As the
old saying goes: you only go at the speed
of the slowest sheep.
I’m not very good at sitting on
beaches.
We’ve been on family
holidays, though, to the Grand Canyon
and St Lucia. My granddad was the
Governor General of the Leeward
Islands and he [founded] the Fiennes
Institute [for lepers]. When you have
nice things to do like that and you’re in
the area anyway, it’s much better than
just sitting on the beach.
I got into the last six
who auditioned
for James Bond in 1970, but one of the
others was a bloke called Roger Moore.
My new book talks about
the
evolution of a group of people into
a special force to break records that
humans tried and failed to do 100 years
ago. Unlike my normal books, this book
has tales of horror from the past. We
hope to have learnt lessons from those
who failed, to help us not fail.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ Cold is out now,
published by Simon & Schuster, £20
P L A N E
T A L K I N G
☞
Turn the page for Fiennes’ top European winter holidays
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R E G U L A R S
