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Directed by deep kailey
Embroidered flocked organza dress, made to order; Snakeskin & plexi heels, £2,645, both by Alexander McQueen
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Skinned alive by ravenous insects? Lips frozen solid? Feet falling off? Really mustn’t grumble! Meet the new generation of British explorers, who are just as tough as their distinguished predecessors, says David Jenkins
Photographed by KATE PETERS Styled by SOPHIE GOODWIN
PHOTOGRAPHS: TOPFOTO, RANULPH FIENNES/ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY. pen hadow wears parka, £669, by woolrich. ed stafford wears COTTON T-SHIRT, £70, BY SATURDAY’S SURF NYC, AT MR PORTER
The call of the wild
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t was getting crowded at the South Pole last December. A bold Prince Harry and his Walking With the Wounded compadres were racing teams from the USA and the Commonwealth through what are definitely ‘the most inhospitable conditions on the planet’; Ben Saunders and his colleague Tarka L’Herpiniere were recreating Captain Scott’s doomed expedition of 1910, completing Scott’s planned route as no one else had ever done; and Professor Chris Turney and the Australasian Antarctic Expedition were about to get very embarrassingly stuck in the ice. Saunders and Turney were blogging – and Prince Harry, it was revealed, was wearing Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream on his face and hands. That’s the problem for today’s young explorer. Every other Sloane has climbed Kilimanjaro. More fund managers than you can shake a stick at have been guided to the North Pole. James Cameron, director of Titanic, has been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 6.8 miles below the sea’s surface, in a submersible he had built. Extreme holidaymakers became the first folk to cross central Madagascar by foot. Adventurers found the Empty Quarter of Arabia fuller and smaller than it used to be when Wilfred Thesiger trekked across it. Google Earth has the world mapped. But luckily there still are uncontacted tribes lurking in Papua New Guinea; still new species to be found; still new and hair-raising journeys to be done. And still people who want to do all this the hard way, often people who are ex-public school, ex-forces, very much the old school of explorer. But whether you pogo one-legged across the Kalahari because you want to add to the sum of human knowledge or because you want to be the first to do it is the burning question. Take Ed Stafford. He’s got an intense stare, a shaven head and a don’t-mess-with-me manner. He’s also the first – and only – person to have walked the Amazon from the source to the sea. It took him two and a half years and the 38-year-old ex-Army captain says, ‘What I did was selfish. Selfish, egotistical and introspective: to achieve something that hadn’t been achieved before, and to do something I’ll look back on and be proud of. That’s exploring. OK, you’re not drawing maps, you’re not collecting botanical specimens – well, we were at one point meant to be collecting mosquito data, but that fell through.’ It was also ‘slightly reckless’ – though, says Stafford, that was one reason why Sir Ranulph Fiennes and the Trans Globe Expedition Trust gave him money: ‘They said, “This is perfect for us,” because they like to support “mad but marvellous expeditions.”’ Stafford is, he says, ‘in a long line of British nutters. But do you know what? I thought, “I’m in my
Ed Stafford
early 30s, I’ve been in Afghanistan getting shot at, I haven’t got a wife, I haven’t got a job, I want to do something great. Something massive.” Because it makes you smile.’ Not that the ex-Uppingham, ex-Newcastle University geography graduate seems to have smiled much. Read his book (and it’s a good read) and most of the time he’s angry, either with his initial partner, who dropped out early on – a fiancée to go home to, rows with Ed, the general ghastliness of the endeavour – or with Cho, the Peruvian evangelical Christian who came on board to guide him for a few days and then stayed the course. You name it, Ed’s in a strop. You can see why: at one juncture, Ed ‘conservatively estimated’ he was getting ‘at least’ 10 mosquito bites a minute. ‘When you multiplied that by the length of an eight-hour walking day, that came to 4,800 bites a day, 33,600 bites a week and a whopping 145,000 bites a month.’ There were indigenous tribes with their arrows trained on Ed, terrifying scrambles on cliffs and nocturnal jungle noise so incessant he had to take sleeping pills (and morphine) to get some shuteye. And when he got home, exhilarated, all anyone wanted to know was: what’s the next big first? So he slunk off to the South of France, brooded and realised that what he wanted was a wife and children; he had nothing left to prove. ‘If you haven’t achieved what you want in terms of self-worth after two and a half years of walking the Amazon, you’re probably not going to. Know what I mean?’ So now he’s got a fiancée – once a dancer, now a property baroness – with a place in Belgravia and two kids of her own. And he’s got a gig that’s an affront to the scientific exploring community: being dropped, naked, onto a deserted island or far-flung spot and mastering his environment for the Discovery Channel. It’s a living, and a lark, but it’s not, Stafford agrees, ‘exploration’.
‘I’M IN A LONG LINE OF BRITISH NUTTERS. I WANT TO DO SOMETHING MASSIVE’
Sir Ranulph Fiennes at Ward Hunt Island, 1986
Captain Scott in Antarctica, 1912
Pen Hadow Tat l e r M AY 2 01 4
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Sebastian Lyle
Meet England’s tastiest food heirs. By Luciana Bellini Photographed by PAL HANSEN
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There’s no other word for it: Sebastian Lyle, 36, is buzzed. He’s more enthusiastic than a Blue Peter presenter and talks so fast you’d think he’d been at the pick ’n’ mix for the past five hours. Which he may well have been, seeing as he’s a fifth-generation Lyle, of the Tate & Lyle sugar dynasty. ‘I do have a sweet tooth,’ he admits. ‘It’s a problem.’ Old Fettesian Sebastian still works for the family – whose treacly Golden Syrup is the oldest recognisable brand in the world – managing their funds through his financial-planning boutique, the Family Office. Alongside a few other families’ finances, including a British supermodel and several dotcom billionaires, he keeps a tight rein on the Lyles’ accounts. ‘My great-grandfather Leonard believed too much money at too young an age was a disaster – and I agree,’ says Sebastian. No trust-fund babies here, then. Leonard also made sure that future generations would no longer have an automatic route into Tate & Lyle after the family’s only black sheep, Oliver Lyle, sank an enormous chunk of money into creating the Invicta sports car, made to rival Bentley and Rolls-Royce at rally racing, in the mid-Twenties. The car won a single race and almost bankrupted the family. No such hare-brained schemes for Sebastian, but he is about to pay out on one whopping new expense: his wife, Liz, is pregnant with their first child. The sugar bowl runneth over!
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