Interview: The Blind Explorer

Miles Hilton-Barber doesn’t really understand the word ‘limit’. It just doesn’t fit into his way of thinking. For most, doing a parachute jump or running a marathon would rank amongst their greatest achievements – and that’s fair enough… Miles, however, has completed 40 skydiving jumps and ran marathons across deserts and the icy plains of Siberia, oh yes and he’s cage diving with Great White Sharks and recently walked to the South Pole. Did I mention that he’s blind..?

I rang Miles on a Monday morning expecting to find him, like the rest of us, waking up from our weekends, perhaps nursing a morning coffee with the daily papers. It didn’t quite work out like that… In a rather ‘I’m down the shops’ tone, Miles told me that he was making a descent down a mountainside…. “Do you want me to call back?” I asked…

“No, no, it’s OK as long as the signal lasts it’s alright… Let’s talk.”

When did you first think about going to the South Pole?

I was doing a run across the Sahara desert and we were looking for something different to do at the end of it. Well, we’d done a ‘hot one’ so we decided – let’s do a ‘cold one’… So let’s head to the South Pole.

That takes quite some organisation doesn’t it?

Yes it does. The big thing that I’ve found in my life is that the important thing once you’ve had a dream, is that you’ve got to plan and then the biggest thing is to make a decision. Once you’ve made a decision. Once you’ve decided to do something then everything falls into place. A lot of people have these dreams but as someone rightly said: “if you wait until you’ve overcome all obstacles, you’ll never attempt anything”. I’m a great believer in that. Once we’ve made a decision, as long as you commit it’ll start to happen.

Did anyone try to talk you out of it?

Yes, it’s a very common thing. I was working for a charity at the time and a lot of my colleagues said “you’re crazy, blind people can’t do that. It’s never been done before.” So again, I find it’s important only to share dreams with people who’ve got a big vision about life. There’ll always be people telling you that you can’t do it.

Where do you draw your confidence and belief from?

What changed my life initially, at the age of fifty, was my brother Geoffrey – also totally blind. He sailed a yacht, solo from Africa to Australia, totally blind, totally alone relying on speech output on his navigational instruments. He was 53 days in the southern Ocean from Durban to Freemantle in Western Australia. That what made me realise that the only thing holding us back is ‘five inches’, that’s the distance between our ears. So he was my inspiration and the more I found out, also the more I wanted to do. It made me realise that I can do other things, so I got more and more confident.

The signal then gave out on us. I called Miles back a little later…

We’re travelling – should have a stable signal now… Just having a break today, nothing special, just taking advantage of the terrain…

How do you keep hold of your positive attitude?

The big thing for positive people to remember is not sharing your dreams with people who are basically negative. There’s a Chinese proverb: “He who says it is impossible should not interrupt he who’s doing it”. I work on the premise that even though something might not have been done before it doesn’t mean to say that it’s any more difficult than if you were the 2nd or 52nd person to do it.

Was the South Pole the toughest adventure you’ve undertaken?

Certainly the loneliest expedition I’ve ever been on and the most desolate in terms of having no support if something goes wrong. But other ones, crossing deserts have been physically more demanding. Sometimes in extreme cold it’s easier to get warm than it is to cool down in extreme heat, so they’re all tough. Certainly from a mental point of view the hardest thing about the South Pole is just day after day and week after week with nothing to see and you can’t talk to anybody and just hauling a sledge.

I had a sited guide with me and we had two other people who were linked with us. So it was just my sited guide and I on the walk.

Does the South Pole expedition rank as your highest achievement?

You know, they’re so varied. I suppose in many ways it would be. Mountaineering is something else that’s also very difficult for a blind person, although other blind people have done it, whereas, I was the first blind person to attempt the South Pole. My most recent endurance test was flying a microlite from London to Sydney, it was sort of different, in that it was partly technology based. Certainly it was quite dangerous at times – flying in extreme storms but again I had a sited co-pilot as a backup. It was the first time a blind pilot had the back up and technology to fly and navigate.

How do you cope with a setback?

I tend not to give up. The trick in life is to realise that bad things can happen to anybody despite the best laid plans of mice and men; things can go astray. The trick is to simply analyse the situation and find another way through. Sometimes when lots of things go wrong at once people think – “Well that’s an indication that you’ve got to stop” but it doesn’t have to. I’ve been on a scuba dive where loads of things went wrong as I was diving but it was still safe. It was enough to just eliminate things as they came up and to continue with the dive. Once you’ve experienced the fact that you can do more than you think you can, the next time you hit what everyone says is a barrier and everyone says that you can’t go on. Actually, it just means that no one else has gone beyond that point before but I think that TS Eliot the poet said that “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” The big thing I say to people is that you’ve got to get out of your comfort zone, get out of your circle into no- man’s land and try things that have never been tried before. That’s the way new things happen in the world and you’ve got to be willing to be that person to do something new. Very often when things go wrong you’ve got to make a decision by yourself to carry on and even though other people say you can’t, you can still choose to carry on and end up doing something that even ‘you’ weren’t sure you could do.

What’s next?

This time next year – all being well, going back to Death Valley to do another run through it in the middle of summer. I did one a few years ago but didn’t do so well. I’ve done four ‘desert ultras’ but this one I didn’t do so well on. I want to go back. I’ve got some unfinished business.

You’ve got 28 hours to cover 135 miles through Death Valley with a climbing altitude gain of over 14,000 feet going over mountain ranges, and such is the time of year when the air temperature coming off the road is about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. So you’re talking about extreme conditions but a great experience.

You seem to think of each of your adventures as having given you something unique…

Yes, if you draw a circle around you which represents everything you’ve done in your life up until today. Every time you do something new, you step outside the circle but you can’t take that new experience and pull it into your circle because there’s no room. It’s full of your past experience. So your circle has to grow to embrace that new experience. So even when I fail- things like climbing Mont Blanc, for instance – we didn’t reach the summit, got caught in a blizzard and five climbers died in the storm around us, so to us success was surviving but it still makes your circle bigger. So even failure and negative experience will still make your circle bigger and make you a wiser person and able to look at life differently as a result.

Any regrets?

I suppose the only regrets I shall have at the end of my life are of the things I haven’t attempted. It’s just as Roosevelt said: It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly… in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

A lot of people would go to the circus and just sit and criticise what’s going on in the ring but I’d much rather be in the ring and fail. At least I’ve attempted something. Possibly the one idea that sums up a lot of my thinking is that the only limits in your life are those you accept yourself…

What kind of message would you like to pass on to Able readers?

The recipe for success in life is simply 4 steps: dream, decide, plan and persevere. So have a dream. The key thing is that many people have dreams but do nothing about them. You’ve got to make it happen. Once you’ve made a decision such as wanting to go to the South Pole, you’ve got to go for it.

At that moment the signal fails and ringing back just puts me onto answerphone. I guess you can’t catch a whirlwind…

www.mileshilton-barber.com