Not only did I survive leaving Durban airport via gate 13 on Friday the 13th, but I also emerged unscathed this afternoon from speaking to an audience of 400+ with my flies undone…
The last few days have been bonkers, but I'm chilling out and being a tourist for the weekend, starting with a visit to Soweto tomorrow.
Last up, I mentioned Mike Horn and Børge Ousland's forthcoming winter North Pole expedition a while back. It seems Mike has a new website up and Børge has a new blog on the go (powered by WordPress, no less), replete with RSS feeds, permalinks and all that jazz. Top banana.
— Filed under Miscellany
An interview I did with Nic Askew recently is film of the week at Monday9am.tv. (Amusingly, I'm typing this from a clunky PC with no speakers behind the reception desk of a hotel, so I've no idea what it sounds like…)
— Filed under Aside
Fact for the day: the term 'old blighty' (meaning 'Britain', if you haven't heard it before) comes from a Hindi word bilayati, or foreign. The British introduced a few strange things to India in the late nineteenth century, notably the tomato (bilayati baingan) and soda-water (bilayati pani, or foreign water) and after being corrupted by British troops to 'blighty', the term stuck.
Anyhow, in seven hours time, I'm jumping on a Virgin flight to South Africa, where I'm doing a load of presentations for the Standard Bank. On the 16th I fly from Joburg to Florida (where I'm speaking for GE), via the Cape Verde Islands, back to South Africa on the 20th, to the UK on the 27th and on to Berlin for another talk the day after that.
In all, I'm flying 17 times in the next 22 days, which is rather shocking – to offset both carbon and conscience, I'm buying ten trees from the Carbon Neutral Company.
Once I'd finished packing this morning, I took one last chance make the most of the weather we're having before jetting off to SA…
— Filed under Miscellany
This is really exciting. Two of the people I genuinely look up to in the expediton world, Børge Ousland and Mike Horn are setting out to reach the North Pole unsupported from the coast of Russia, starting next week (15 Jan).
This is, to my knowledge, the first ever winter attempt on the Pole – it's going to dark, or at least near-dark for much of the time they're up there and the temperatures are going to be incredibly low. The upshot of this, of course, is that the Arctic Ocean is going to be more ice than sea at this time of year, meaning they're less likely to be scuppered by the huge areas of open water that I came across during my 2004 expedition. With that said, I'd imagine the darkness and cold are going to be brutally opressive.
The idea of making a complete solo and unsupported ski crossing of the Arctic Ocean is still in the back of my mind, and starting much earlier in the season seems to me the best way of counteracting the rapid climate change that's going on in the high Arctic. It's going to be fascinating to see how Mike and Børge get on.
For now, there's a little information on Mike's website. I'll let you know when I hear more…
— Filed under Other expeditions
The University of California, Santa Barbara are publishing a 1910 speech by Shackleton entitled 'My South Polar Expedition' in mp3 format. (The original recording was on an Edison wax cylinder.)
'We were marching along, the three of us harnessed to one sledge, in very bad light. Our last pony was being led by another man with 500lbs of stores. All of a sudden we heard a shout of help from the man behind. We looked round and saw him supporting himself by his elbows on the edge of a chasm. There was no sign of the pony and the sledge was jammed with its bow in the crevasse. We rushed back and helped the man out and then hauled the sledge out. Then we lay down to have a look but nothing but a black gulf lay below…
— Filed under Miscellany