But even with his wealth of experience on the subject, Sir Ranulph is still unsure whether the adventuring spirit is born or made. "It's very difficult to know whether that sort of thing comes in the blood or whether a person may simply read a book about some person in history who changed things and it's this that lights their touchpaper," he says.
So much planning goes into an expedition, he says, that it can often seem like there are just too many obstacles to success. "It's asking companies to suddenly decide to dole out large sums of money, and lots of people to shift their opinion, and getting permission to go to lots of places where normally governments wouldn't let you go," he says.
Sir Ranulph believes he ended up as an adventurer by default. "It's quite usual for people to end up in jobs because of a chance meeting, or a failure to do something they wanted to, and they do something else and that leads to another job and they end up being a company director," he says.
"In my case I found it impossible to get the necessary two A-Levels to go to Sandhurst, without which I couldn't do the career that I wanted to do, which was to become a regular army officer. So I was only able to stay in the army for eight years and when I left I needed to make a living. So I used the only thing that the army had taught me, which was teaching soldiers canoeing and climbing and skiing. The only way of making a living out of that was basically to do expeditions."
While he concedes that what he does may be perceived as risky, he's at pains to point out the extent he goes to to minimise risk. "If an expedition fails, it's a waste of time; so it must be planned in such a way that it's likely to succeed. You risk failure because you might fall into a crevasse whereas if you went round, you'd be more likely to succeed. You make sure you don't take people with fault lines that will affect everyone else and increase the chance of something unpleasant happening. You don't want people who rely on the buddy-buddy system, you want self-contained people who look after their own problems, and you don't take equipment that is liable to be faulty in a place where you can't replace it. Risks are to be avoided at all costs on these trips and the fact that there are many that you can't avoid is unfortunate, but you do what you can."
