Muscles tensed, head bent, Nabeel Al Bu Saidi pulls the 20-kilogram load behind him through the Wahiba sands in Oman. It's around 40°C, his clothes are sodden with sweat, but he's got another kilometre of trekking up the dune ahead of him. Nabeel has been training in the hot sands for three days for his next, much colder, mission: walking to the South Pole.
If he succeeds it will be the latest in a long list of dreams the 41-year-old adventurer has accomplished and will mean he is the first Arab to have walked to the South Pole, an accolade that he has been working towards for around six months.
When he's not training, Nabeel is busy on another mission to tour 100 schools in the GCC, encouraging students to organise sponsored events to raise funds for the less fortunate, and instilling a sense of compassion in them. "I'd like to use my life to imbue in these kids a spirit of charity and altruism," he says.
Ever the explorer, Nabeel became the first Arab to walk to the North Pole in 2009, and he scaled the highest mountain in Antarctica, Mount Vinson, that same year. He has also rowed across the Atlantic and climbed several mountains including Mount Kilimanjaro.
But after a near-disastrous attempt to scale Mount Everest almost cost him his life, he is now out in the desert training for the body-and-mind battle ahead as he prepares to trek 1,000 kilometres to the South Pole to commemorate 100 years since the first historic trip by Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen.
Filled with a never-say-die attitude, Nabeel, or Nabs as he is called by friends, is a mountaineer, adventurer, philanthropist and motivational speaker. Whether it is climbing the world's tallest peaks or rowing across one of largest oceans on the planet, Nabeel has either been there, done that, or is planning to.
"Why do I do it? The layman would not get my drift; perhaps only those adventurous enough will be able to recognise why one needs to do such things," he says. While he admits it's partly the desire to achieve and the passion to push himself to the limit that makes him undertake such challenges, "the main reason is to project Arabs in a positive light internationally,'' explains Nabeel, who was voted one of the Top 100 Most Influential Arabs in the World in 2009 by Arabian Business.
But his are not egotistical missions - pushing himself to the limit also means raising lots of money for charities in the Middle East.
"In 2009, I organised an event at St Christopher's School in Bahrain where the children climbed 29,000 steps to raise funds for a charity of the school's choice," says Nabeel. "The kids raised $15,000 (Dh55,000). Their efforts inspired me and I have taken it up as a mission to encourage other schools to do something similar. I want people to realise the merits of advocacy and to work together as a community to achieve things for those who are less privileged."
Personal Everest
While he has tasted success in almost all of his endeavours, it is Mount Everest that still eludes him following his failed attempt in March 2010.
Having flown into Kathmandu, Nepal, he began training immediately. Part of the acclimatisation programme included scaling the 6,200 metres of Mount Lobuje, which lies in the shadow of Everest. Nabeel was thrilled after he and a team of 22 international climbers had successfully scaled the peak (he would later learn that he had actually not stood on top of the summit but was about 500 metres short of it) and they were making their way down.
It had been a tiring day, and when the team reached their camp at 5,500 metres, they decided to spend the night there and continue early the next morning.
"I was suffering from a severe cough all through the night, which was straining my ribs and hurting my throat,'' recalls Nabeel. "I was waiting for dawn so we could continue on our way down to base camp where I would get some hot food and drink and maybe a cure for this really awful cough.''
Finally, at around 5.30am, unable to sleep, he slipped out of his sleeping bag and began the slow process of packing up and preparing for the descent.
Emerging from his tent, he checked if all his equipment was in order, then began making his way gingerly over a narrow ledge, when suddenly he heard a sickening crunch.
"The next thing I remember was the pain,'' he says.
Nabeel had stepped on a thin shelf of ice, which broke away. He tried to steady himself on his right foot but twisted his ankle. Struggling to maintain his balance, the pain was so intense that he tottered, and then went plummeting down the mountain. Fortunately, his safety line - a rope that is secured to a point on the rock face to prevent the climber from falling more than a short distance in the event of an accident - caught on an ice anchor and halted his fall.
But he was still hanging by the line five metres down the mountain side. "More than the dangerous situation I was in, it was the pain that was worrying me. It seemed to be shooting through all parts of my body.''
Nabeel began to feel disoriented as well. "I tried hard to clear my mind and realised the reason I was feeling so strange was because I was hanging upside down. To make matters worse, the belt around my waist began to cut into my stomach.''
Luckily, within minutes, he was spotted by two of his team and hauled to safety before being taken to hospital by helicopter.
"I tried to sit up but attempting to move my legs sent waves of pain surging through my body,'' he says. In fact, he'd shattered both his ankles and was advised to rest for three months.
"I was really disappointed I wasn't able to climb the world's tallest peak. But I am going to return to the mountain soon,'' he says.
Reaching new heights
While Nabeel's passion for adventure began only three years ago, he has always been an avid sportsman. Raised in London - "My parents were Zanzibari Omanis. After the revolution in Zanzibar, they both ended up in London, where they met and got married,'' - he played football and rugby and also became a regular at the British Winter Biathlon championships, where he was nicknamed ‘der sultan auf schnee' (the sultan of snow) by the German press.
It was perhaps his background in the military - he joined the British Army as a rifleman with the Light Infantry before being commissioned into the Royal Artillery as an officer - that gave him his taste for action and adventure. So when he left the UK to work in Bahrain, at first for an accountancy firm and then for Gulf Air, it wasn't long before his yearning took hold again.
When he learnt that no Arab had trekked to the magnetic North Pole, he decided to make a dash for it. "In many ways the North Pole challenge was the one that set things in motion," says Nabeel. "I decided to do that because no Arab had stood at the Pole yet, whereas one Kuwaiti and one Saudi national had climbed to the top of Mount Everest.
"More than fitness, which was not a challenge to me as I was already in decent shape thanks to my rugby and football training, it was being able to withstand the cold that was most daunting.''
So in April 2009, after an arduous training session in Oman - which included climbing 100 flights of stairs every day for almost a month - he flew to Resolute Bay in Nunavut, Canada, from where he and a team set off for the 650-kilometre trek to the Pole in aid of the breast cancer campaign in Oman.
"The terrain was brutal and weather conditions adverse, with 70kmph winds and the temperature minus 80°C,'' says Nabeel. But it was all worth it to plant the Omani flag there, he says. His next adrenaline adventures included climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, and the highest mountain in Antarctica, Mount Vinson, one of the seven summits.
A sea change
Last year, Nabeel set another world record by becoming the first Arab to row over 4,600 kilometres across the Atlantic - one of his most difficult challenges ever.
"When you are out there alone at the mercy of the elements many things come to mind," he says. "Getting to the end of my goal is foremost, together with spiritual thoughts, the environment, and realising that we can manage with the most basic stuff.''
That's why he stresses the importance of protecting the environment to children, along with the sense of community.
"It is imperative to raise children with a sense of responsibility and an appetite for community service,'' he says. "While as a kid, I never did anything more fabulous than raising a few hundred pounds for Live Aid in a 24-hour football tournament in school, today's kids are so much more aware. My nephew and niece in Oman have managed, with the help of their school friends, to sponsor a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, while another school in Doha, Qatar, has raised $10,000 towards breast cancer awareness by running a Think Pink campaign."
At the moment Nabeel is promoting a world record attempt with 1,000 students from the Stenden University in Qatar, who will play the game Hide and Seek to raise money for Qatar Red Crescent. The event will be on Friday February 10 (http://www.facebook.com/events/169034203201284/ for details)
Working with children has its own rewards, and Nabeel remembers a wonderful compliment he received recently in an Omani school. "This little girl came up to me and said that after seeing what I did in the film - [a documentary about his trek to the magnetic North Pole] - she was proud of being an Omani. I could see that it came from the heart, and felt really rewarded," he reveals.
Lesson for students
Nabeel, who has made presentations at 20 GCC schools since last November, hopes to generate $1 million in three months for local charities by inspiring the students to organise their own fund-raising efforts.
He has covered schools in Oman and Bahrain and will be visiting schools in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the coming months.
He's also recently launched a coffee-table book titled The Arab Who Took on The Arctic, gathering the funds needed for forthcoming missions with proceeds from the sales of the book. It features a collection of photographs and diary entries from Nabeel's expeditions over the last three years. Over 200 images tell the stories behind his treks to the magnetic North Pole, Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Vinson in Antarctica, as well as his charity cycling challenge from the most southerly to the most northerly points in the UK.
"Ten per cent of the proceeds from the book sales are going to the Oman-based Association of Early Intervention for Children with Special Needs," says Nabeel. He's relying on the rest to sustain him when he is not on his sponsored trips. "Once I finish with the South Pole I'll consider the Seven Summits Challenge to raise more funds for charities that will benefit children with special needs,'' he says. But first, he will conquer Mount Everest!
