Question:
Which expedition are you most proud of?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
I think probably locating the lost city of Ubar in the early 1990s, after about 26 years on and off trying to locate it. I'd done about seven big expeditions in the course of that, but the first six didn't find it. The city was on Ptolemy's map in 150 AD, and it was called Omanum Emporum - the Marketplace of Oman - so it was liable to be important. At the time of the Roman Empire, frankincense was actually more valuable than gold, and southern Oman was the only place in the world it could be got from. It was in great demand throughout the Roman Empire for religious reasons, so the city upon which it depended was pretty much bound to be a big place. You can see from pictures that there were sometimes 2,000 camels in a single caravan, and you needed at least one man per five loaded camels, so that's about 500 men. That requires an awful lot of water from a departure point through one of the biggest, driest deserts in the world. It would have been quite a big place. According to legend it had been buried under the sand by God, rather like the Christian Sodom. The pictures showed it with golden pillars and so on. It's referred to in the Koran as 'the city of the pillars'. There were a lot of clues but nothing definite.

Question:
What's the hardest thing you've ever done?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
Mounting the Transglobe Expedition was quite hard. The very fact that it took seven years of full-time work - me, my wife and our group - means that it must have been hard, because we didn't want it to take seven years! Before we left we'd got 1,900 sponsors. If you tot it up, there was £29 million-worth of equipment necessary to do that journey, and it's never been done since - or before.

Question:
What does it feel like to stand at the North Pole?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
Nowadays it's a tourist destination, like Mount Everest, so nobody need ask the question; they can go and do it. But back in the 1970s a couple of us became the first humans to reach both Poles. The second Pole we got to was the North Pole, and we felt very happy when we got there - apart from the fact that the journey wasn't completed, because we still had to cross the ice from the North Pole down to Greenland and back to the start point at Greenwich!

Question:
What's the most scared you've ever been?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
I think in south Oman, (Dhofar), in the 1960s, when I realised that we (being me and about 19 Arab soldiers) were cut off by the Communists in a place called Wadi Nahiz. There were no other members of the Sultan's army, and there were about 700 armed Marxist terrorists in that area. We weren't in radio contact with anybody. There were no helicopters or vehicles. It was at dawn that we realised the situation we were in. Our only friend was night, darkness. It was a very frightening day.

Question:
How do you deal with fear?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
You try hard to think of the particulars. Whatever it is you are frightened of, you think, 'Well, I'm frightened of such and such happening; I must try to find a way of stopping it happening if I possibly can.' Then when you think you might have found a way, you work out in meticulous detail how you're going to carry it through. The process of thinking all about it helps. If you feel frightened because you've fallen off a mountain, then of course you can't do that, because there's not really very much you can do to stop yourself hitting the ground. That sort of fear, particularly if it's a long drop, is not one that I'd like to run into.

Question:
What do you do for fun?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
I do endurance races - things like the Eco-challenge and even the smaller endurance races. There are quite a few of us who do them.
 
Question:
What is your advice for young people who want to become explorers?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
For a start, if they are in Europe, they could sign up with WEXAS and get Traveller magazine. Or they could pay the annual subscription to the Royal Geographic Society in London, which is very reasonable, in which case they would be able to get the advice of the Expeditions Advisory Centre. This has amazing computer data on expeditions that want an individual with a particular skill, like cooking, or photography, or communications - which is a frightening word, but it's really not too difficult setting up a radio. Certainly cooking and photography are things that anybody wanting to go on expeditions can quite easily get some experience at, and once they've got a bit of experience they can apply to an advert with honesty, saying that they are a cook or they are a photographer, and then get going. Once they've been on one expedition, they can use it in their CV to say that they've got experience. They need to put their foot in the water that way.

Question:
Where in the world is left to explore?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
The problem is knowing what people mean by the word 'explore'. I've done 32 years of expeditions, only one of which was as a true explorer, as opposed to what I call myself - an expedition leader. That was back in the 1970s, when we travelled across a vast area of Antarctica where no human being had ever been. We were the first people to see this huge area and indeed to map it. That is exploration.

The polar regions are left to explore. If you're trying to do expeditions to be first - like the first man on Mount Everest or, as we did in the 1990s, the first two people to cross the Antarctic continent without support - then you can't be involved with the Poles, because they've both been done, backwards and forwards, by somebody. They've been done by a female; about 12 years ago Ann Bancroft reached both Poles without support. You could try to be the youngest person to go to a Pole, or the oldest person. That's another way of doing it. That's if your field is priority of objective.

If you're a mountaineer, on the other hand, there are still a great number of very terrifying unclimbed places, most of them 'Communist' mountains which were barred to Western climbers for a long time. That's why they're still available.

If you're a sailor, it is rather like the Poles: it's all been done. So you've got to do it again, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being the 4,000th person to climb Mount Everest. It's still a great personal achievement, and that's really what it's all about - exploring your own ability.

On the other hand, in that not-so-select band of -ologists - botanists, geologists, zoologists - lots of young people now have the opportunity to pioneer and explore in their own field. To use the example of the Brazilian jungle, young botanists could go to the middle of that jungle, and although a botanist might even have been there 30 years ago - so they're not a pioneer in that sense - they're still true explorers, because they can bring out information which the previous person could never have dreamt of doing, because we've now got high-tech instruments and methods of looking for, say, unseen insects. They can find knowledge through high-tech ability, which they couldn't before.

This is true in almost every field of research, so there's enormous room for pioneering and exploration of a scientific nature. The sea hasn't been looked at except for five per cent. Ninety-five per cent of the oceans haven't been explored. I'm not picking that percentage out of a hat; I was told that by Sylvia Earl, the great diver from New York.

Question:
What luxury do you pack in your rucksack?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
Unless it's a Polar expedition, I always pack - which isn't strictly necessary, but I take it anyway - a big tube of Antisthan, because I hate itching. On expeditions and activities, I've found that travelling from A to B in jungles, particularly in places like Brunei, normally means holding on to some form of flora - a passing liana or whatever - especially if it's monsoon and slippery. Almost invariably you get fire ants going down your shirt or in between your trousers and your skin, and they bite. It's as itchy as hell. Then there are nettles and things. Life becomes an awful lot pleasanter if you've got some Antisthan.

I also take a multi-bladed knife at all times. Even in the UK, I don't go anywhere without a small torch and a multi-bladed knife. I suppose you could call them luxuries, I don't know.

I used to take a very small book - a sort of mini-book - a bible or an atlas or whatever, which you could learn things from and which didn't weigh much. But then in the mid 1980s I was doing an expedition with Mike Stroud. Mike had the job of laying out equipment and cutting out anything that wasn't absolutely vital, and he was very cruel in terms of my little book. Things like toothbrushes also went.

Question:
What's your next challenge?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
I'm trying very hard to keep my place in one of the two British Eco-challenge endurance teams, which is becoming increasingly a challenge because I'm 23 years older than the other three members of the team. I admire all of them. They are very, very physically fit and tough people, so I have to force myself to train very hard to try to keep up with them.

Question:
Who inspires you?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
Expedition-wise I was very much inspired in the 1960s by Wally Herbert. On a general note, although my father was killed four months before I was born, my mother told me all about him, and certainly until I was well into my twenties I tried to imitate his career army-wise. He certainly inspired me until my mid-twenties. But he was born in a time of war, and I was basically born in a time of peace, so it wasn't really the same.

Question:
What can we learn from the wilderness?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
That's a question the answer to which could fill a book, even if you knew which kind of wilderness you were talking about - whether it was a Polar wilderness, or a hot desert wilderness, or a jungle wilderness. All those places can be described as wild. The German for wilderness, which is 'Öde', means more a place that's deserted, i.e. a wasteland; whereas the English word 'wilderness' some people think of as wasteland and other people think of as any wild area, so it's rather difficult to know which of the two the question is going for.

If we're talking about wild, remote areas, if you're on an expedition where you're really up against time to try to, for instance, cross the Antarctic continent during the hundred days when it's travelable, then you really, unfortunately, don't have all that much time or the state of mind to appreciate the wilderness and the beauty of the surroundings. In some cases you're even driven mentally to not appreciating the beauty, because when everything in the Antarctic plateau, for instance is white, and therefore not beautiful because it's just whiteness, you are inclined to feel a lot more secure than when you start seeing beautiful shapes like mountain-tops and crevasses, because then you know you're heading for likely trouble.

The same is really true in the Arctic Ocean up by the North Pole. If it's white and even and flat and boring, that's going to be good travel, but if you start getting very impressive skies with huge black areas reflecting sea up ahead, or you can see vast jagged shapes, you're going to have to work harder to pull your sledges over them. That sort of expedition leads you to appreciate lack of beauty or the finer sides of the wilderness.

If you're going on an expedition where you're doing research from a tent, and the research allows you some time to potter, to really appreciate the views and to sit and think, use that time and possibly the quietness of the soul that you might get from a great, wide, peaceful place, then you have time to start thinking - 'Did someone create it?' Or - 'Am I able to do anything to stop pollution: maybe not here, but at least back at home?'

Question:
What constitutes being manly?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
If the word 'manly' means 'macho', does it apply in this question only to men, or can it apply to women who are very physically fit and might want to go on endurance races, might want to enter the Survivor programme on TV at the moment, might want to do what people describe as manly things, but which I would probably call 'active' things rather than 'manly' things, because women are just as able to do them with the right training? It's really in the eye of the beholder what 'manly' is or isn't. I think to be a surgeon might be described as a 'heroic' activity, whether you're male or female. You don't have to be Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible to be manly; you can be a policeman on the beat - that's certainly a highly courageous thing to do. You don't have to beat people up; you can be intellectually manly. I think it's really anything that's opposite to being a softie.