Into Egypt:
Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the world’s greatest living explorer, talks to Kerry Harvey about his latest TV project – a documentary series in which he links up with his actor cousin Joseph Fiennes to retrace a 1969 hovercraft trip along the Nile river.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes teams up with actor Joseph Fiennes to explore the Nile.
When you’re talking to the man dubbed the world’s greatest living explorer you don’t expect the topic to be teeth.
However, Sir Ranulph Fiennes can’t help sharing his fascination with the dental work of the mummies he met while exploring ancient Egyptian tombs for a new television series.
Egypt With The World’s Greatest Explorer is a three-part documentary in which British baronet and his actor cousin Joseph Fiennes (currently starring in The Handmaid’s Tale) retrace Sir Ranulph’s famous 1969 hovercraft expedition along the Nile river.
The pair travel the same route – by four-wheel-drive vehicle this time – facing deadly animals and traversing the dunes of the Sahara desert, overnighting inside the Great Pyramid and tracing snake-infested tomb-raider tunnels to find mummified bodies.
In the first episode, they crawl through narrow, scorpion-infested underground tunnels to reach a newly discovered ancient tomb at Minya. The mummies had been embalmed in such a way that their mouths remained open.
“So they’re all there in the sarcophagus boxes smiling at you and I noticed that all of them had completely white teeth after 2500 years. They must have had good dentists,” Sir Ranulph says.
It is just one of the memorable moments the 75 year old shares with Joe, 48, who is a newcomer to his uncle’s world.
Feats like walking unaided to the North Pole, discovering a lost city in Oman and leading the only expedition to circumnavigate the globe by land via both poles has
led The Guinness Book Of Records to dub him the world’s greatest living explorer.
“I never came up with that,” Sir Ranulph says, adding the book’s publishers gave him that label when it released its Hall Of Fame members in 1984.
“It was based on the greatest number of records in each category and I had the greatest number of exploration records.”
So how does he describe himself on forms that ask for ‘occupation’?
“With what my passport has said for more than 40 years – and what I am – travel writer,” he says, adding he has published 25 books, many about his travels through regions most tourists give a wide berth.
Sir Ranulph is not one to retrace his steps but when his cousin Joe suggested reprising one of his expeditions for a TV series, he couldn’t say no.
“It was his idea to do something again but when he talked to the film people they obviously thought some of them would be very difficult to redo or in dangerous places, so they narrowed it down to that particular one,” he says, adding he knew little about his new travelling companion.
“I’m not knowledgeable about any particular actors or actresses so I didn’t have any preconceived notions. I had met him once at a family do ... I knew he was a nice, easygoing bloke.”
Sir Ranulph was still in the army in 1969 when he and his then companions – mainly fellow soldiers – decided to travel the Nile, from the sea to its source at Lake Victoria, in a flotilla of small hovercraft.
Time constraints meant they didn’t venture too much off the water, thereby bypassing most of Egypt’s ancient attractions.
“We only did it when we could which was when we had army leave of absence, a maximum time of seven weeks, so we had to get back to our regiment,” he says, adding he was on secondment in the Middle-East at the time, trying to stop the flow of Russian arms across the border in Yemen.
“The thought of being late back was not on, so our cultural interest was abominable. We were very barbarian in not looking at the wonderful pyramid-type things, so a chance 50 years later to actually see all the lovely stuff that I’d missed was wonderful.”
Sir Ranulph is keen to work with Joe again and has a project in mind.
In 1971, he was one of a group of British explorers who travelled from the Yukon – through the wilds of Canada – to the USA border.
“It was over 2000 miles on nine interlocking rivers,” he says. “I put it to him (Joe) and he didn’t look overjoyed. I don’t think water is his thing or he might have been just looking dubious.”