I don’t mind chopping my fingers off -but I can’t cope with mosquitoes

He’s gone solo to the North Pole, climbed Everest and brutally dealt with frostbite. In fact there’s only one thing Ranulph Fiennes finds REALLY tough...

‘We were sucked backwards… and a heavy object rammed my chest’

Around The World In 80 Years Ranulph Fiennes Hodder & Stoughton €36.50

Explorers love a nickname, the kind of travel-light moniker you can shout over a ravine or down a line to a distant embassy. Especially an abbreviated school playground sort of nickname. On Captain Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition there was a Birdie, Taff and Cherry. More recently, Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, widely considered the greatest living explorer, is known to pals simply as Ran.

As Ran turns 80, numerous admirers have contributed to the celebratory volume, Around

The World In 80 Years, a compilation of chapters collected from Fiennes’ own books, which are interspersed with fawning tributes from his outdoorsy friends (Monty Don notes their shared love of dogs, and Bear Grylls, weirdly, brags about himself ).

Fiennes was born in southeast England in 1944, four months after his father was killed by a German landmine in Italy. This harsh beginning, followed by a childhood in South Africa, boarding at Eton and then service in the British Army formed the foundations of a future explorer.

In 1970, he married Ginny Pepper, who accompanied her husband on expeditions and also acted as his communications officer. They spent their honeymoon at the Everest Base Camp in Tibet.

This volume spans a dozen locations, from the icescapes of Norway and the Poles to the rock faces of the Eiger and Everest, settings for scrapes of various kinds. Some, such as Fiennes’ Transglobe Expedition, the ‘first surface circumpolar journey around the Earth’, are group efforts with huge logistical support, while others are more solitary endeavours (he ran the Marathon de Sables in Morocco – the ‘toughest foot race in the world’ – in his 70s).

Obviously, it’s not always a doddle. In 1971 he headed a four-man team on a navigation of British Columbia by river from the Yukon to Vancouver. ‘We were sucked inexorably backwards to where the river rushed under the sieve of logs,’ he writes. ‘Someone screamed and a heavy object rammed my chest.’ There were 3,000km to go. Remarkably, they completed the journey. As befitting an author who has written volumes on extremes of heat and cold, Fiennes is good at conjuring the impact of climatic patterns. Driving across the Sahara from Algiers to Abidjan in 1979, he observes, with characteristic understatement, that ‘everyone was a bit touchy by dusk when, almost to order, the mosquitoes began their familiar whine’.

In 2000, during a solo unaided attempt to reach the North Pole, Fiennes felt the other end of the meteorological cane. Taking off his mitt to untangle a rope, within minutes he got frostbite on the fingers of his left hand. ‘I was told it would take at least five months for the undamaged stumps to heal enough so they could amputate the frostbitten ends. But after four months, I could stand it no longer, so I bought a fretsaw and cut off the dead, purple ends myself.’

Ginny Fiennes died in 2004. ‘Ginny told me that if she should die before me, I was to remarry as soon as possible,’ writes Fiennes. And so, a year later he married Louise Millington. The couple now have a daughter. There is something both inspiring and chilling about Fiennes’ constant forward motion. In his foreword, he notes that he is often asked if he feels guilty about risking his life when he has a family at home. ‘Explorers rarely die,’ is his reply. ‘

Fiennes expands on the help and expertise of those who have accompanied him on trips. What is less clear is how the nature of his job has changed during his time planting flags and breaking records. It is hazy what being an ‘explorer’ actually means in today’s satellite scanned world.

This book is not psychologically revealing – its focus remains on place and the objective at hand, rather than the inner workings of a highly pragmatic mind – but it certainly delivers in (mis)adventures.

Fiennes’ rattling prose, which makes light of drama and drops in a classical reference every now and then, is extremely readable.

It could also be read as a warning. Anyone considering an explorer’s life should read his account of descending into an Arabian well shaft in search of the lost city of Ubar. ‘The smell of rotting flesh was overpowering and emanated from the bloated bodies of dead foxes,’ he recalls.

‘I tried to keep my thoughts off the glistening carpet of insect life that crawled, leapt and slithered in that foul-smelling hole.’

Even Indiana Jones would reconsider his career options.