Your Pole2Pole expedition was interrupted with some projects in between, can you let us know a bit more about these projects?
So I have the Pole2Pole expedition which has so many different facets to it that it becomes difficult to move forward. There are environmental projects which are quite important for us, especially around Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. As always, we also do beach and ocean clean-up projects around the world, where we bring young explorers.
I have to make a living and one way I do that is by doing one or two TV programs where I take celebrities into nature and teach them how to survive. Those programs have worked quite well and have become quite popular; this is basically how I finance most of my expeditions today. As you know sponsorship has become a bit more difficult, so you have to find alternative means of financing. If television is the way to finance what I do, then I have to make space for that.
These projects are relatively short, they normally take only about a week and this allows me to still go out and explore. I will be heading to Papua New Guinea and there I will traverse the islands via traditional transport, I will build myself a canoe out of wood and then paddle like the Papuan people had done to migrate through New Guinea and its surrounding islands. I’ll also focus a little on jungle survival. We’ll also look at the impact humans have had on Papua New Guinea, whilst the place is still predominately protected, there are still a lot of people who would like to exploit it today.
Then I’ll head to Indonesia in South East Asia and continue north to the Himalayas around the Nepal-India border. Sometime next year between March and April, I will try scale two unclimbed mountain summits which are just below 8000m. These climbs are a bit more technical with steep faces and a mixture of rock and ice walls. However, it’ll be easier to acclimatise due to the lower attitude.
From India, I’ll go to Kamchatka in Russia where I will traverse its volcanoes and then go to sail the Bering Strait.
Finally, I really want to do the crossing of the North Pole through to the southern tip of Greenland. With my experience I had crossing Antarctica; I feel I have a good chance of crossing the Arctic. From the Antarctica success, I feel motivated and am inspired to complete the remaining parts of the Pole2Pole expedition.