Many people kindly think to seek my advice as to how to become an adventurer/explorer - despite my various misadventures! The following is the main meat of a recent reply I gave to a teenager. Other would-be explorers
may find it useful. 15/6/03

It's very hard to give advice, because everyone is different, and there's no qualification for being an "explorer" or adventurer. Of course, most people settle for doing their adventuring in their spare time, because doing difficult trips to remote places simply doesn't pay well, or AT ALL! In effect, you have to find your own way, and see whether your dreams have the resilience to cope with the undoubted difficulties you'll face trying to make a living at the same time.

I chose to go to university, which seems an obvious basic first step. It'll widen your understanding, give you some basis of a skill - to fund (and morally speaking to JUSTIFY) your adventures, you'll need to be able to understand these places, then communicate about them. Exploration nowadays is about pure, specialised science, or about conveying another world through the impact it makes on you - ie a sort of self-exploration. So that's where being a writer comes in. However, if it's pure adventure that you want, ie not true exploration, then of course there are no formal qualifications - you just have to earn the money, go out there and do it. I'm almost unique in being able to film my adventures for TV - partly as I don't use a film crew. Everyone else (Nick Middleton, Ray Mears, and other presenters) have a film crew, but also are not adventurers per se, but investigators/instructors.

After university, I worked in a warehouse to pay for my ventures, and lived with my mum and dad, again to save money. Gradually I got books published, but being a writer is a VERY precarious living. Basically, for almost fifteen years I struggled along, and only when I started making TV programmes - as I say, almost uniquely as an adventurer - did I make a reasonable living. Even now, it's not easy - TV is a very fickle business.

So, there are no easy answers - if there were, everyone would be out there doing adventurers! If you want to do it enough, as I did, then you'll find a way. You must stick to your dream, and make a lot of sacrifices.

As for where to get information, the Expedition Advisory Centre, at the Royal Geographical Society, is there to help people with expedition dreams. Give them a ring - but first, you must have a good idea of what you want to do. And how to get your journey published? Getting a publishers' interest is impossible, pretty well, until you have actually done the journey - and it has to be a journey that stands out from all the thousands, or you'll be lucky to get their interest. My advice is to wait for your return, write up a couple of chapters, and a synopsis at the very least, before approaching them. Having written the whole book would increase your chances of them taking you on.

Best of luck! Don't be discouraged. I felt I NEEDED to be some sort of adventurer, and if you have that desire you will be, whatever the obstacles, in the end.