'I am a person that gets afraid easily,' says Mike Horn. This is an unexpected admission for a man who is built like a bulldozer and was the first explorer to walk to the South and North poles in darkness, despite the loss of several fingertips to frostbite. But his revelation has context, for it's part of a code of living that has seen Horn survive piranha-infested swamps and jungles full of gun-toting insurgents.
'You need fear as an explorer,' the 43-year- old says, taking sips from a cup of tea on board Pangaea, the yacht that is at the heart of his latest expedition. 'If you become afraid, it warns you that you are going into unknown territory, so being afraid is not weakness. As an explorer, being afraid gives you the possibility of coming back alive.'
Horn has come back, in some cases barely, from the toughest challenges any explorer can face. In 1997, he made a six-month solo trip across South America. He trekked to the source of the Amazon and then descended the 7,000 kilometres to the sea on a boogie board with no supplies; living solely on what he could forage. He has also broken the record for crossing the Atlantic in a mono-hull yacht, survived an avalanche in the Himalayas that swept other climbers to their deaths, surfed down the Mont Blanc glacier on a bodyboard and circumnavigated the equator (his Latitude Zero expedition) and the Arctic Circle (Expedition Arktos) without any motorised transport.
'I've lived very close to death,' says Horn, the deep lines on his face illuminated by a wintry sun that's sprinkling Sydney Harbour with silvery light. 'But a miss is as good as a mile. Either you're dead or alive. I would rather be dead than experience a living death. But I don't have a death wish. The strongest will I have is to survive. I'm not afraid of losing, because I know nature can beat me every time. And losing means I lose my life.'
Horn touches the ends of his fingers as he speaks. The tips are missing, a legacy of his first attempt to walk solo and unassisted to the North Pole. So does it hurt, skiing for just over 60 days - the time it took him to conquer the pole in 2006 - with no sunlight, in temperatures that range from a frigid minus 30 degrees Celsius to an almost unearthly minus 60 degrees?
'It's painful, it's really, really painful,' he says of experiencing 97 degrees below the body's normal core temperature. 'You control the level, which is always in the red. To put it less poetically I'd say [on the ice] I'm always in the s**t. But pain tells me that everything's still there. I'm afraid when I stop feeling pain, when I start feeling comfortable, that's when there's a problem.'
Friends and rivals say Horn is the world's most versatile and courageous solo explorer but for the current phase of his career he is travelling with 144 young people, mostly teenagers. Over the course of four years and 18 stages (Horn calls them 'projects'), eight young sailors at a time will be living on board Pangaea, the largest polar exploration sailboat ever built.