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Yet for his younger cousin, who brought him to
Egypt to film a TV show, the experience was stirring.
"I constantly felt I was in an Indiana Jones set. I keep
(saying): 'Oh no, not snakes'!" actor Joseph Fiennes told
Reuters of the scene in "Fiennes Return to the Nile", a
three-part documentary airing on the National Geographic channel
this month.
The program marks the 50th anniversary of an expedition that
Ranulph, now 74, made up the River Nile and explores whether his
actor cousin is cut from the same cloth as the man sometimes
known as the greatest living explorer.
The show is at times like an upper-crust version of car show
"Top Gear", with the two Englishmen charging over desert sand
dunes in a four-wheel-drive, trading banter in a Cairo traffic
jam or learning how to charm deadly snakes.
But if the viewer is in any doubt of Ranulph's bona fides as an
intrepid adventurer, at one point he uses a workbench and a
rusty saw to demonstrate how he cut off his own frostbitten
fingertips after an ill-fated walk to the North Pole.
For good measure, he shows off what look like tiny cigar stubs
but are actually his severed digits. "There's four," he tells
Joseph. "I don't know what happened to the other one."
Joseph, 48, known for "The Handmaid's Tale" and the title role
in the Oscar-winning "Shakespeare in Love", compared his
unflappable elder cousin to the slower but ultimately victorious
character in the Aesop fable "The Tortoise and the Hare".
"I was just racing off and gallivanting up here and into this
tunnel and down a pyramid there and actually getting very
exhausted at the end of the day," he told Reuters.
"Ran just has this ability to keep the energy on a very even
keel."
If the program is a success, Ranulph would be keen to take his
cousin on another adventure.
"I'm not quite so sure that he's terribly keen on my idea but
there you go," he said, as Joseph gritted his teeth and replied:
"As long as it's not ice and water, I'm okay."
(Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
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