Leo Houlding shares his passion for tech, his disdain for chargers and his Australian travel bucket list at the Adventure Travel Show 2015.

If modern British adventure has a face, it looks a lot like Leo Houlding. At 34 he is already a veteran of a score of epic ascents including Everest, but specialises in free climbing the most technical peaks and biggest walls in the world. He has led extreme expeditions to the world’s most spectacular and demanding peaks, in some of the most hostile environments imaginable.
He’s climbed Everest for an IMAX movie, hosts his own adventure TV shows for CBBC and the Discovery Channel, and won a famous victory against Jeremy Clarkson in an epic Top Gear challenge.

What are your feelings about technology? Do you love it, loathe it or feel excited by the possibilities it presents?
Double edged sword. Tech is awesome, Google and Google Earth are the single most valuable resource for expedition planning. GPS navigation and sat comms have revolutionised adventure and given us the opportunity to share the wonder of wild places in real time. Digital photography and film making have opened new doors for documenting expeditions to previously unattainable production value levels.

The flip side is that part of the appeal of wild places is being off-line. It is good to be out of touch with social media and in touch with nature sometimes. Part of the reason for pursuing adventure is to live in the present moment, not be concerned about capturing the moment for future prosperity.

What items of technology do you use?
Depends on the mission. My recent big expeditions have all been filmed with high production values and have therefore been tech heavy. In a remote field camp in Antarctica we had cinema-quality cameras, high speed internet over BGAN satellite, and 100s of terabytes of data on powerful laptops, all powered exclusively by solar and lithium ion batteries. A GPS unit and a back-up (a GPS watch) are absolutely critical – in fact they’re a legal requirement for Antarctica travel. My iPod and Kindle are my almost essential personal items.

For other adventures, you can carry a library’s worth of maps of the whole world on an iPhone. Apps can track and calculate distances, elevation gains, times, speeds, calories burnt, steps taken and more.

My favourite tech has to be modern digital compact cameras. You can take 1000s of billboard quality images on a device that fits in your pocket.

And other times I take absolutely no tech whatsoever, as climbers say “a rope, a rack and the pack on your back.”

What are the drawbacks of travel tech?
Technically, the primary drawbacks are keeping everything charged – the irritating array of different chargers that must be carried and the lack of a universal DC charging solution that often necessitate painfully inefficient inversion to 240V AC and back to DC. Why can’t all devices charge on high current USB?

Philosophically, the draw backs are that we are reaching a stage where “if it didn’t happen on camera, it didn’t happen” and the insatiable appetite for immediate information means a story is old before it is even complete.

Is there some item on your wish list that manufacturers haven’t created yet?
The universal DC charging solution for all devices.

If you could create an Australian Bucket List, what places/experiences would be on it?

  • Climb the Totem Pole, Tasmania
  • Sky dive from a helicopter on Great Barrier Reef sand bar
  • Get barrelled on a deserted tropical wave
  • Wrestle a crocodile

What are your thoughts about travel tech (or crocodile wrestling)? Tell us your traveller’s tales here.

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