The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
BEN FOGLE MY LIFE IN TRAVEL
The TV presenter on camping with royals in Botswana, scaling Everest with an Olympian and being arrested in Ecuador
MY PASSPORT HAS BEEN STAMPED 100 TIMES in the past 12 months alone. I’ve travelled so prolifically there’s barely a place I haven’t been – Kenya, the Bahamas, Miami, Morocco, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Canada, to name a few. And yes, my children do still recognise me, vaguely. When I travel with my family it’s important that we do stuff together. I’m not the sort to send my children off to a kids’ club. Our next holiday is to the Galapagos Islands.
I SCALED EVEREST WITH VICTORIA PENDLETON in May last year. It was so much more a mental than a physical challenge. Our hairiest moment was getting stuck in a queue between Camp Four and the summit at about 26,000ft. It’s called the “death zone” and the danger is that if you’re static for hours and hours you can die of hypothermia. Unfortunately, Victoria suffered extreme altitude sickness and had to turn back. It was nothing to do with her physicality or mental strength, rather that her body couldn’t adapt to the altitude fast enough.
PRINCE HARRY, THE FUTURE KING OF ENGLAND AND I all went camping in the Okavango Delta. We were travelling around Botswana at the time, looking at the conservation work being done out there. Each evening we slept in tents with lions roaring all around us, but they were both remarkably at ease. I love sharing my travels and I’ve had some fascinating travelling companions over the years. I really believe travel is made the richer being with people. I’M USED TO VISITING MORE REMOTE PLACES like Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helena, The Pitcairn Islands, Svalbard, South Georgia and Antarctica. Through the onshore adventures I’ve curated with Celebrity Cruises, I’m hoping to give guests on board a slightly more immersive, adventurous experience even if the destinations are a little more traditional than my usual haunts.
VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE and I am equally happy bouncing across the African savannah in an old Land Rover as I am staying in a luxury resort in the Maldives. Travel and the wilderness excite me. I LIVED LIKE A STONE-AGE MAN IN WASHINGTON STATE while filming a forthcoming series called New Lives in the Wild in which I live with people in remote places. I spent some time with a woman called Lynx in Washington state, hunting with bows and arrows made of flint that she’d whittled herself, and also with a guy called Todd in the Appalachian Mountains, who wears sheepskins and scavenges bins to survive. BEFORE PLASTIC BECAME FRONT-PAGE NEWS I helped make a film called A Plastic Ocean. We spent three weeks off Sri Lanka on a boat taking biopsies from blue whales. To spend that much time with the greatest creature on earth was just magnificent.
THE SCARIEST THING I’VE EVER DONE was scuba diving with wild crocodiles in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. We were doing a study there to learn more about crocodiles’ underwater behaviour and a cameraman got attacked. He saved himself by sticking the camera in the crocodile’s jaws.
MY WIFE AND I GOT MARRIED IN more so when one of my male companions started crying. I wasn’t holed up with any murderers but it was still extremely scary being stuck in prison in such a faraway place.
‘Prince Harry, the future king of England and
I all went camping in the Okavango Delta’