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18
Oct
What's it like to... be thousands of miles from help?
This is the first in a series of articles that will ask 'What's it like to...'. This week we met Harrogate man Chris Brown, who knows perhaps better than anyone what it means to 'get away from it all'.
Chris Brown would make for an unusual dinner party guest, but you’d be hard pressed to host a dinner party more unusual than the one he went to in 2018. That was when he and a tableful of adventurers dressed in black tie and ballgowns to eat food prepared by a Michelin-starred chef at the world’s highest dinner party on the slopes of Mount Everest to raise money for local Sherpa communities.
It’s just one of a catalogue of exploits that have added spice to his CV in recent years. He’s also swum across the Bosphorus from Asia to Europe, raced BMWs, and holds the Guinness World Record for the most race dives into a swimming pool in one hour. (He managed 130, and ended up with a bleeding forehead and shredded feet, just in case you were thinking of tackling it.)
Chris at the Arctic Pole of Inaccessibility.
And all that has come on top of a business career that at one point saw him become Europe’s biggest importer of casino chips from China, and a sporting career that saw him compete among the world’s best in the triathlon.
Since selling his business in 2022, he’s devoted most of his time and energy – and a sizeable wedge of money – to attempting another claim to fame, and this one’s a biggie: he’s aiming to become the first person ever to visit all eight of the world’s Poles of Inaccessibility.
There are eight of them: the points furthest away from the ocean in North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica, and the points furthest away from the land in the oceans and in the Arctic.
Chris got the idea while on a trip to the South Pole with NASA moon landing veteran Buzz Aldrin. He told the Stray Ferret:
The trip organiser told me there were five south poles, one of them being the Pole of Inaccessibility.
A couple of years later, up Everest, I met someone doing the highest summits on the world’s seven continents.
I put the two together and thought, ‘let’s do the Poles of Inaccessibility’. At the time, in 2018, the most Poles of Inaccessibility anyone had done was three.
Four of the poles ticked off: North America, South America, Australia and Africa.
Last month, Chris reached his seventh, the Arctic pole, so he only has the Eurasian one left.
Chris was born in Middlesbrough, went to King James’s School in Knaresborough, took two degrees (physics and engineering), and then went into business. He exploited the opportunities offered by the internet very early on, and ended up running his successful affiliate marketing business – working mainly with gambling companies – for 35 years.
There is a fair amount of adrenaline involved in running your own company, but when he handed over the controls, he didn’t slow down – he moved up several gears.
Since then, his travels have seen him get into some fairly extreme situations. While on the expedition to the African Pole if Inaccessibility, for example, someone offered to sell him a diamond mine, and another would-be fellow traveller was told he couldn’t take his rocket-propelled grenades onto the helicopter.
Chris said:
It's in the middle of the jungle in the Central African Republic, and any trek between the two nearest villages would take about 48 days, so it’s very remote.
It’s a dangerous area – there's Wagner Group and Islamist guerrillas – so I had to be accompanied by a couple of soldiers and some security advisers from the US. They identified four possible places for our helicopter to land, and kept which one they were going to use secret, even from me, just to avoid the possibility of being ambushed.
We landed at one of the places and were picked up at another – in and out – and the helicopter stayed overhead, just out of range of small-arms fire, while we were on the ground. We were back in the capital, Bangui, by curfew at nightfall.
When Chris reached the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility, he was greeted by a familiar face – left by Russian explorers.
He was hoping to get to the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility a few years ago, but it depended on cooperation between the Russians and Ukrainians – which is currently impossible – so he had to find an alternative way to get there. This year, he caught a boat to the North Pole and managed to persuade the captain to make a 600-mile diversion to the Pole of Inaccessibility.
He also stopped off at the geomagnetic North Pole, which was “quite cool, seeing the compass go haywire”.
Compared with those trips, the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility was, he said, “fairly easy”. That’s saying something, given that the pole, named Point Nemo, is 2,700km away from any land, and 250 miles away from any air routes or shipping lanes. In fact, it’s so remote that sometimes the closest human beings are astronauts aboard the International Space Station when it passes overhead.
Chris Brown and son Mika at Point Nemo, the oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility.
Anyone who’s ever been on holiday knows what it’s like to forget something they needed, or to take something they ever use. But that’s not a feeling Chris has much experience of. If there’s a science to packing, he must have a PhD in it.
He said:
I can’t think of anything like that. You have to think it all through meticulously, so you don’t get there and think, ‘Oh no, I didn’t order a plane!’, or ‘oh shit, I forgot a coat!’.
You think ‘what could possibly go wrong?’. You need to take the time to plan these trips, but once you’ve done a couple of expeditions, it kind of comes naturally.
If somebody said ‘You’re going to the Arctic tomorrow’, I’ve got a bag upstairs ready, and I know that everything I need is in that one bag. That’s my cold-weather gear, and I’ve got another set for jungle stuff.
It’s just as well he is meticulous in his planning. It was his attention to detail that led him to cancel his ticket on the ill-fated Titan submarine dive that killed its five occupants in 2023. (The Sun ran his story: ‘I was booked on doomed Titanic sub’.)
The Eurasian Point of Inaccessibility – the last on his list – is in the Uighur region of China, near the disputed Kyrgyz border, so the wait for permission from the Chinese authorities to go there is proving to be long and frustrating.
Chris does not intend to sit it out waiting at home. With all eight Poles of Inaccessibility ticked off or just about within reach, he is looking for his next challenges, and has come up with a variation on the theme.
He said:
My life is adrenaline-filled, but then I come back to mundane reality. So I’ve created this new thing, ‘Points of Inaccessibility’ – because I was running out of poles!
You can have Poles of Inaccessibility for any land mass, but I thought you don’t really need to measure the distance from the ocean – you could measure it from a country’s borders – and I’ve termed those ‘Points of Inaccessibility’.
Any country I go to now, I go to its Point of Inaccessibility, and you get to see more of the country and the people and how they live than you would do just going to the traditional tourist spots.
The Arctic can be a hostile environment.
He has a trip to the Greenland planned – its Point of Inaccessibility, of course – and there are other side-quests in the pipeline.
He hopes eventually to get into space. That’s about the only trip he could make that would take him to somewhere even more remote than where he’s already been.
He clearly isn’t afraid of being far from company, but just what is it like to be thousands of miles from help?
He said:
Antarctica is bigger than North America – it's 3,000 miles across – so the middle of that is probably the most remote I’ve been.
We think we’re so important. If you imagine the Earth as a snooker ball, humans and all life forms is the layer of grease that’s formed by handling it. That’s all we occupy.
On an insignificant planet in an insignificant solar system, we are... insignificant. And when you’re in these places you feel like nothing.
Thousands of miles of ice, and you’re just this amoeba stood there... with a GPS, going ‘woahh!’.
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