‘Who the hell is Mike Horn?’ would probably be the same question you would be asking if you got an invitation to spend a couple of hours on a yacht with this intrepid explorer. Yet, when I stood aboard the Pangaea off the coast of Port Dickson, with the wind whipping saltwater into my face, listening to Mike Horn speak about his adventures, another question replaced the former – how the hell could anyone not know Mike Horn?

If you do a quick Google search on the man, you’ll see why some have pegged him as the world’s greatest modernday explorer. His list of accomplishments looks similar to that of Marco Polo, Captain James Cook and Sir Edmund Hillary, combined! He has swum the entire length of the Amazon (using a hydrospeed), hunting for food to survive and resting along the dangerous riverbanks at night. He was the first man to circumnavigate the globe around the equator, alone and without motorised transport. He was the first human being to complete a 20,000km journey circumnavigating the Arctic Circle using only a boat (also unmotorised), kayak, ski kite and on foot, which lasted two years; and he reached two peaks higher than 8,000m in the Himalayan mountains without the use of any oxygen.

Mike Horn preparing his Pole2Pole Expedition in Canada

The real reason, however, that I am so enamoured of his gusto for the next big adventure and his passion for pushing the limits of his own body is the fact that, before all this, he was already a self-made millionaire. As the story goes, Horn got rich selling cabbages in South Africa in his early 20s. “I thought I would have more freedom with money, but I really had less,” says Horn. So, he made the decision to give away everything he owned to his family and friends – everything except a plane ticket to Zurich and USD50 in his pocket. He says: “It was only after giving everything away that I felt truly free.”

In some ways, Horn says he didn’t become an explorer; he was born one. In an anecdote he shares with The Business Times, he says that, when he was younger, he and his two sisters were all given bicycles. “I wanted to ride it 300km to see my cousins but my sister, who was given the same bike, rode it around the house and never left home with it; and she became a well-known judge in South Africa. My other sister did not even get on the bike because she was always drawing and she’s now a fine artist restoring paintings in London.”

Horn, arguably, has seen more of our planet than any other human being. And if through his travels, he has developed an urgent need to preserve it, it’s hard to think that the rest of us need to be doing anything else but. “Explore. Learn. Act” is a guiding principle for Horn, one that sees him imparting the lessons of his experiences to anyone who would listen. More specifically, he is passionate about sharing his knowledge with the younger generation, “helping to educate and inform them about the beauty and significance of what is now ‘their’ planet and to help preserve its magnificence for generations to come.”

Mike Horn with the G-Class on the way to K2 on May / June 2015

Horn’s latest project is the Pole2Pole expedition, which sees him circumnavigate the globe once again, this time via the North and South Poles, to gain an insight into culture and nature in rarely explored regions. The expedition will take him from Europe to Africa and then on to the Antarctic, Oceania, Asia, the Arctic, North America and finally back to Europe. The distance he has to travel is close to 40,000km and will take him two years. This time, though, Horn is getting some help from motorised vehicles, namely the Mercedes-Benz G-Class. And as the German marque is also a sponsor of the Pangaea, it also gets two purpose-built engines to help with the tricky parts of the journey.

Although an explorer’s life is one of solitude, it’s surprising and incredibly heart-warming to learn that Horn is also a family man. This Pole2Pole expedition almost didn’t happen because, in 2015, Horn lost his wife Cathy to cancer. Horn says: “Before my wife passed away, I told her ‘If I could die for you, I would’, and her response was, ‘Of all the people I have known, you are someone that really knows how to live. So, I don’t want you to die for me; I want you to live for me’.” After she passed, Horn decided that his place was in Switzerland, at home with his daughters Jessica and Annika. However, it was they who told him to continue on. Cathy was the one that handled all the planning for logistics, support and promotion, tasks that are now taken on by Horn’s daughters.

Mike Horn with the G-Class on the way to K2 on May / June 2015

The Pangaea’s stop off the coast of Port Dickson in the Straits of Malacca was part of a detour while on the way to Hong Kong for a replacement to a damaged part of the yacht. And after spending about two hours with a man I now think represents the pinnacle of the human spirit and one that has an extraordinary commitment to living life to the fullest, I left the Pangaea the same way I arrived – on a rubber dinghy through choppy water. Now that I had personally answered the question, ‘Who the hell is Mike Horn?’, the more appropriate question for me to be asking would be, ‘Where in the world is Mike Horn?’

THE PANGAEA

The name Pangaea is derived from the ancient Greek word meaning one world. Over 22,000 hours were needed to design a ship that could just as easily navigate through the tropics and small rivers as it could through the polar regions. The entire ship was designed to leave the least amount of carbon footprint possible. The project was co-sponsored by Mercedes-Benz and, so, the two engines onboard the vessel were specially made to be more ecofriendly and used only as a necessary alternative to the 35m mast with 600 sq m of sailcloth. The boat is also equipped with large nets to collect bottles and plastic bags from the waters. If you think the Pangaea looks a little weathered, it is because the hull was deliberately left unpainted. The Pangaea has to sometimes break through thin layers of ice and, therefore, it was a concern that if painted, flecks of paint from the hull could break off and be toxic to the environment.

TEXT DANIEL GOH
IMAGES MERCEDES-BENZ