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car. He was arrested.
    For his efforts that night, Fiennes was expelled from the SAS and demoted from captain to second lieutenant. He rejoined the Scots Greys and became engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Virginia “Ginny” Pepper, before traveling with his regiment to Oman in Arabia. He took part in active fighting there and won the Sultan’s Medal for bravery. At the same time, he was looking ahead to a life after the army, hoping to make his later career with exploration and record breaking. On leave, he made preparations for an expedition to follow the Nile from the mouth, near Alexandria, to the source, two thousand miles south. He assembled a group of like-minded adventurers and used Land Rovers and hovercrafts to reach the source successfully, following in the footsteps of earlier adventurers such as Richard Francis Burton. The Nile trip would be the first of many such expeditions.
    After his tour in the army ended, he needed to earn money, and a chance came with an advance to write a book on the Nile expedition. Fiennes wrote it in six weeks, while his fiancée researched the history. It was his first experience of publishing. His plan was to make a livingthrough expeditions and writing about them. However, his drive to travel and explore meant that he and Ginny separated for a time, as he did not seem ready to marry.
    Alone again, Fiennes joined the R Squadron of the Territorial Army, who acted as reinforcements for the SAS in time of war. The physical tests were the same as for the SAS, and he passed the grueling ordeal. At the same time, he set about assembling a team for an expedition to Norway. The plan was to free-fall and parachute from a small Cessna plane onto Europe’s highest glacier. The Sunday Times referred to it as “the World’s Toughest Jump” and paid to cover the event.
    Fiennes was first out of the plane and quickly reached terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour before pulling his rip cord and making a safe landing in the drop zone. The rest of the team came down in two runs, and from a safe base they began to climb and survey the area. A storm came in and almost killed them, but they survived to get down. His career as a renowned explorer had begun in earnest. Ten days after his return to England, he married Ginny.
    In the early 1970s he was asked to audition for the part of James Bond. Producer Cubby Broccoli said Fiennes had a face and hands like a farmer and chose Roger Moore instead. It’s interesting to speculate how different the films would have been with Fiennes as the hero. Instead, he took part in unmapped river expeditions across British Columbia, where he survived rapids and moose stew. The BBC accompanied him to make a documentary, and although this meant he didn’t have to find sponsors, he was unhappy with the final programs, as they portrayed him as both cruel and incompetent. Yet the audiences were eight million for each episode, and he actually found sponsors easier to find afterward.
    To supplement his income, Fiennes began to give lectures. He wrote about the Canadian experience and for years planned what would become one of his most famous exploits, the attempt to circumnavigate the world around both poles. The Transglobe Expedition of 52,000 miles would last from 1979 to 1982 and lead to Fiennes and Charlie Burton being the first men to reach both poles overland.
    In most lives, that single achievement would have been enough to make him what Guinness World Records once called “the greatest living explorer.” Yet other, more astonishing events were still to come. Fiennes continued to write, uniquely qualified to produce a book about Robert Falcon Scott’s tragic race to the South Pole. His life had brought him fame, and he traveled around the world to give lectures. He took a job for a time with Occidental Petroleum, but it was always with an eye to planning the next great expedition.
    In 1992 he discovered the lost city of