The South Pole. Tick. The North Pole. Tick. Australia's Great Victoria Desert. Tick.
Here, there and everywhere. Tick.
Tim Jarvis' list of accomplishments is, like some of his journeys, long.
Jarvis is also a popular public speaker, talking to industry groups, conferences, schools and the public, a role he will revisit as keynote guest for the International Science Festival in Dunedin from July 6-11.
With a master's degree in environmental science and another in environmental law, Jarvis' academic interests intersect with his exploratory impulses, providing a platform for him to talk about issues of sustainability, the environment, "and the changes I have seen".
"Sadly, the way the world is, if you are a scientist like me and you try to get in front of some of the big nasty oil companies of this world and try to pitch an environmental story to them, often you can't do that based on your environmental credentials alone.
"But if you go in with an adventure story, you can try to pitch the environment story by stealth," Jarvis explains by phone from Adelaide, where he is based.
"I am upfront about it. I tell them, `this is what I saw; this is what I believe is happening', and I will leave them to make a judgement about what is causing it. A journey to the North Pole, which involves walking across a thin skin of ice on the surface of the Artic Ocean, will not be possible in 10 years time because the ice is melting.
"As to my original reasons for doing expeditions, it was partly my love of experiencing those wilderness areas. Now, by talking about the adventure of reaching those places by foot or whatever, ironically, that provides me with a great platform to talk about the environment."
Jarvis holds the world record for the fastest unsupported journey to the South Pole and the longest unsupported journey in Antarctica (in 1999) and was awarded the Australian Geographic Society's Spirit of Adventure medal for his 2004 kayak journey across Lake Eyre, Australia's largest salt lake.
In 2006-2007, he retraced explorer Sir Douglas Mawson's polar journey of 1912-13, using the same clothing, equipment and rations as the original expedition, on which both of Mawson's colleagues died.
Jarvis is currently planning his next mission, to retrace polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's "double", which involves sailing a replica 8m-long open-top whaler 1300km across the Southern Ocean from Elephant Island, Antarctica, to South Georgia. Once there, he hopes to climb South Georgia's mountains.
The expedition, titled "The Shackleton Epic" will set sail early next year and use only 1916 technology, food and equipment.
Should you be interested, he is hoping to recruit a New Zealander among his six-strong crew to honour the role captain Frank Worsley played in what Sir Edmund Hillary once described as "the greatest survival story ever told".
However, be warned: to this day, no one has successfully repeated Shackleton's feat.
Jarvis admits the Southern Ocean poses no small danger.
"I think that is fair to say. I find the ocean a very challenging place. The ocean presents a whole new series of problems ... falling overboard, the adequacy of the boat, the inability to move on board with six people is going to be tough.
"You rely on moving to keep warm, to survive."
Jarvis says the polar plateau and oceans are not that different - they are both water, albeit in a different state.
And he knows plenty about water. He offers advice to governments and private organisations around the world - "on everything from agricultural productivity to water management to drought to contaminated land".
"We need to make serious considerations about what we are actually using that energy or water for ... I work in developing countries as much as the developed world.
"In the case of the developing world, it is lack of supply, lack of infrastructure, education, that sort of stuff.
"In the developed world, it is over-consumption."
Any discussion of water must include its flow-on effects, if you'll excuse the pun. Of the world's 6.8 billion residents, 40% lack proper sanitation.
Nearly two-thirds of global health issues are related to water quality, Jarvis says, adding that has implications for education, workers' conditions and productivity.
Depending on where you live, there is also too much or too little of it.
Otago residents affected by the rainfall and subsequent flooding of recent weeks might spare a thought for those living within the Himalayan watershed, where widespread glacial retreat is affecting about 1.5 billion people.
"The Khumbu glacier that Hillary went up in 1953 has reduced by 5km in length - a 25km glacier has reduced by a quarter. Many of those glaciers are in retreat," Jarvis laments.
"The effect of that is you have these great slugs of water being released by that accelerating melt of ice, so you are getting flooding downstream. The Mekong, the Indus, the Ganges ... any of those rivers supplied by Himalayan ice melt in the drier months are getting all their water at once, essentially. And there is not the infrastructure to hold it.
"Long-term, I don't know what is going to happen to those people. They are also getting more extreme monsoonal rains."
Although Jarvis didn't attend last year's Copenhagen Climate Conference ("I had the opportunity to go but I knew it was going to be what it turned out to be - a great logistical nightmare ..."), he is concerned with the issue nonetheless.
While Copenhagen fizzled into a "devastatingly mediocre response", he was attending a Yale fellowship looking at environmental change.
"We are not doing enough. Not only do we need to be reducing the amount of CO2 we contribute, we need to be taking stuff out of the atmosphere. And we are patently not doing that.
"We currently have an excess 500 billion tonnes of CO2 and equivalent gases in the atmosphere.
"As a global collective, all of the world's carbon sinks are capable of sequestering maybe 10 to 12 billion tonnes and we are putting another 30 billion tonnes up every year.
"The wind and weather patterns are caused by differential heating of the Earth's surface by the Sun. If we keep trapping more of the Sun's energy, it is going to give rise to more extreme events. You have basically got more energy in a contained system.
"I think the general trend is that wet areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier. In Australia, weather patterns we would normally see 500km to 1000km north have shifted south. Australia is getting tropical rain once reserved for places like Papua New Guinea. Take the flooding in Brisbane.
"Then we are getting the dry conditions of the central Australian outback moving further south and southeast. In Victoria, we had a couple of hundred lives lost in fires a couple of years ago."
New Zealand, too, has cause for concern, Jarvis says.
"I think New Zealand suffers from too much water or a lack of it. Most societies have developed in accordance with the historical weather patterns they have experienced. New Zealand is no exception. You have developed agriculture suited to the weather you have always had.
"If the weather changes there will be widespread social change - re-education, moving into different crops, not quite knowing what is going to happen with the weather ... all of that stuff is disruptive, both economically and socially."
The result of the synaptic processes that fuse Jarvis' scientific mind to an imagination that prompts forays into our great wildernesses is a world-view both philosophical and pragmatic.
In plumbing the depths of his personality, "trying to make life as meaningful as you can while you are here", Jarvis is accessing a quality he believes is becoming increasingly rare - resourcefulness.
"I suspect if I had been born a hundred years ago I would have fitted in quite well. It was a life that relied on first-hand experience," he says.
"So many of people's opinions - and with all considerable respect to the media - in the modern era are from the web or whatever pops up on their iPhone.
"People are forming opinions based on what they are told to think, rather than having first-hand experiences and actually learning what it takes to make mistakes and overcome problems.
"It is not about being the first to do something; it is about you doing something. That, too, is greatly understated.
"It is one thing to hear someone else doing something. It is quite different if you do it yourself and discover you are quite capable of it.
"I originally went on these trips to test myself. For instance, the South Pole - could I make it unsupported? I enjoy the expeditions because you find yourself in company with a more resourceful part of your personality.
"You find yourself feeling a lot stronger."
Jarvis is married and has a 17-month-old son. It begs the question: are his exploratory ambitions not curtailed because of family responsibilities? He pauses ever so slightly before answering: "I couldn't think of anything worse than not coming back from a trip and not seeing my son grow up.
"My wife has been very reasonable with me, but I try to do the really big trips, involving two or three months, two or three years apart".
Jarvis has completed expeditions using "all the mod-cons", but a conversation with Earnest Shackleton's granddaughter, the Hon Alexandra Shackleton, in which she suggested such journeys might be easier in the modern era, prompted some inner exploration.
"It got me thinking what it would be like to attempt something the old way. You've got to take your hat off to those explorers of old. They travelled in wooden boats but were iron men, as they say.
"The friction of the sled runners on the snow, the chafing of the clothing, the heaviness of the sleeping bag, the gloves which just get sodden and re-freeze ... all of those things exponentially make those expeditions so much harder than anything of the modern era."
There is still plenty of mystery in this world, too, Jarvis maintains.
In one of his own articles, he points out 80% of the world's oceans remain unexplored and 90% of Antarctica's peaks are unclimbed.
Also, the massive variation of species on Earth (expert opinion varies from 5 million to 50 million) suggests there is much to be discovered.
"Certainly, the range is extreme. A large number are not elephants; they are microscopic or insects or small plants.
"There are drugs out there to be discovered, things we can synthesise from plants, things we can learn from animal species."
Jarvis' voice hits a note that suggests this environmental expert believes there is plenty of hope for this planet.
"I think when it comes to the climate-change debate, the majority of people believe it is happening, and we are responsible for it. We have gone from a state of denial about the problem as little as four or five years ago, to a state of despondency now that we realise the enormity [sic] of the problem.
"The problem with both of those mindsets is nobody does anything."
Catch him
Tim Jarvis will speak at the following New Zealand International Science Festival events:
Keynote: Water Water Everywhere?
Saturday, July 10, 7pm, St David St Lecture Theatre.
Drawing on his extensive work in developing countries, Jarvis will discuss the issue of water availability for the 21st century, focusing on the challenges and solutions.
Café Sci: Walking the Tightrope; Balancing Our Economy and the Environment
Friday, July 9, 5.30pm, St David St Lecture Theatre.
Can we balance the need for economic growth while maintaining our "clean green image?"
Jarvis, Chancellor of Lincoln University and organic farmer Tom Lambie, and Nathan Clarke from Waste Solutions, will debate and discuss what the future for New Zealand may hold.
Exploring the South Pole (for children)
Friday, July 9, 10am, Otago Settlers Museum.
How do you survive in Antarctica? What do you eat in sub-freezing temperatures? Are there still penguins living there? Jarvis shares his experiences of this frozen continent. Free workshop, bookings essential as numbers limited.
Healthy Breakfast (for children)
Thursday, July 8, 9am, Otago Settlers Museum.
Join the global explorer for breakfast and find out how much olive oil he needed to drink every morning to keep his energy levels up. Free workshop, bookings essential as numbers limited.
