the north and then across 800 miles of treacherous ocean to South Georgia Island. He then hiked with two others for 36 hours across the island’s uncharted interior to a whaling station with another three months to go before he could safely reach the crew left on Elephant Island.

He later wrote, “We had suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory… We had reached the naked soul of man.”

2. Lost in the Amazon

“I was obsessed with the idea of exploration,” Yossi Ghinsberg told CNN Traveller magazine on the recent release of his book Lost in the Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Adventure and Survival.

It describes how in 1981, Israeli-born Ghinsberg and three companions set off into the depths of the Bolivian Amazon. When they realizedThat Crashed on the Mountains.

5. Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Amputating your arm with a blunt knife is a task the average person would find virtually inconceivable. But on May 1, 2003, it was the only option left to Aron Ralston after an 800-pound boulder fell on his arm, pinning it to a canyon wall.

After five days, the little food and water he had was gone and it was unlikely anyone would find him in the remote canyon in Utah.

In his book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, he describes how he managed to literally break free, first using the boulder to leverage his arm until the bones snapped and then sawing away at muscle and tendon with his pocket knife. He then had to