"Something you love, something you're interested in, something you've never heard of"
Day Five – How to … Survive Exploring the Extremes
One of the things I love about this Festival challenge is the surprise of it. Taking my seat in The Salon among the Tuesday-morning Cheltenham audience, I surmise that I'm probably not alone in having never scaled a mountain or lived in the wilderness.
But that's before Fiona Thornewill, the fastest person ever to trek to the South Pole, takes to the stage dressed in killer heels, a glamorous fur waistcoat and beautifully groomed hair and makeup. Her companion for the morning, Festival Explorer-in-Residence Dominic Faulkner, fits in pretty well to the Cheltenham scene too, with chinos, open necked shirt and blazer. So appearances can clearly be deceptive.
Despite the incredible feats they are discussing today; a solo polar expedition and an epic climb of Everest (starting at the very bottom, 5000 miles away at the Dead Sea) both seem incredibly 'normal' and even self deprecating when needed. Fiona describes one teacher's assessment of her as interested in nothing but, "boys, makeup and parties" and Dominic admits that he did comparatively little preparation for his epic climb, laughing that, “you can peak too soon”.
Joking aside though, there’s no mistaking how determined they are. Both are keen to point out that they feel privileged but not 'lucky; to have seen and done what they have and that they've worked fantastically hard to make it happen.
Their stories are unbelievably inspiring, and all the more so for being told not through the glossy medium of television, but by someone sitting in front of you. When Fiona describes crossing a bottomless pit of a crevasse on a narrow snow bridge, or Dominic talks about how the death of a fellow climber gave life and adventure a new perspective for him, the audience are gripped.
The talk ends by discussing whether it matters that there are seemingly so few “firsts” left to do in the world of exploration. Dominic sums it up: he’d been obsessed with being the first to do the ‘longest climb’ but that the experience itself, and the perspective he gained from it, made him realise how naïve that was. What he thinks is important is getting out there and doing it and belives it's unexplored until you've seen it for yourself.
Inspiring stuff.
Laura Brand
Membership Scheme Manager
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