“I always wondered if I’d be quick enough to load and fire. Because polar bears are very quick.”

It’s more than three decades since Dingle, who turns 80 at the end of this month, made a historic circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle.

The round trip, undertaken in two stages over a total of 400 days, was completed in June, 1993. Back then, it earned him membership of the US-based Circumnavigators Club. This weekend, that same club will bestow its highest honour on Dingle, naming him a member of the Order of Magellan.

Since 1961, fewer than 50 individuals have entered the Order (named after the legendary Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan). Members include astronaut Neil Armstrong, oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl and New Zealand mountaineers Sir Edmund Hillary and his son, Peter Hillary.

Dingle is currently in Florida to receive the award but, a month before his departure, he sat at a dining table in Auckland, and shared his acceptance speech – and slide show – with the Herald.

“I was starting to run out of things to do,” recalls the adventurer whose pioneering feats have filled books and documentaries and, ultimately, led to the formation of the Dingle Foundation which he operates with his third wife, Lady Jo-anne Wilkinson – the woman he went on to marry after she joined him for the final leg of the Arctic journey.

It was 1989, when, sitting in a hot tub in Waihi reading an atlas, he had a thought: “You don’t know anything about the polar regions – that’s kind of crazy. I wonder if I could do a circumnavigation of the Arctic? I thought it would be much more interesting than the Antarctic because there are people dotted around the Arctic – and very interesting people …”

The first thing you notice when Dingle speaks is his voice. Almost 20 years ago, he developed spasmodic dysphonia – a disorder that affects the muscles in the larynx, causing his speech to sound hoarse and pitchy.

“People tend to think I’ve got throat cancer and probably not too long to live. If I have a cold, my voice is perfect. Generally, they can fix it with Botox but, in this case, it completely takes my voice away.

“Wine helps,” he says wryly. How about whiskey, counters the Herald photographer? (Dingle lives in an urban tramping hut – potbelly stove, plywood-lined roof and living spaces that segue into each other – and there’s a Dingle-branded bottle sitting next to the television).

“Makes me go a bit crazy,” says the adventurer whose Wikipedia page notes more than 200 mountaineering and adventures firsts. “Too much Celt in me, I’m afraid.”

Dingle was born in Gisborne. A skinny, shy child (“I had no confidence as a little kid. I was scared of almost everything”) who says his life changed when he was 11 years old and a teacher told him he had an aptitude for art.

“For the first time, the lights went on.”

Confidence builds confidence. He realised, he says, “actually, the dark is nothing to be afraid of. There’s nothing in the bush that’s going to hurt you. The last one was a fear of snakes. That was weird. As a kid, I used to search the end of my bed to make sure there were no snakes in it”.

An adult Dingle would drift down the Amazon River, sleeping in the jungle, and reassuring his travel companions that once the campfire was lit, snakes would be more afraid of humans. In Europe, preparing to climb the north face of the Matterhorn, he heard a sinister “ssssss”.

“Jesus. Is that what I think it might be? And I look around and in a hole there is a nest of vipers, probably 100 vipers … I picked up a rock and I went back and I stood over them with the rock and I said to myself, ‘I could kill these snakes, but I don’t want to’. And now I’m in control.”

He was a teenager who thought he’d become an artist (and he does still paint) but then he read about a mountain runner and thought he could beat his record.

“And to my utter surprise, I became a good mountain runner and then a good mountaineer.”

When you learn how to set goals, says Dingle, the goals become more advanced.

“Eventually, I could set almost any goal to do something that was thought to be impossible, and I would achieve it. And I’d feel good and go on to the next one.”

He can’t, he says with zero braggadocio, think of any goal he’s set that he’s failed at.

“I failed at relationships … it’s easy to get distracted there. But I couldn’t write as a kid and now I’ve written 14 books and this one [2006’s Dingle: Discovering the Sense in Adventure] won a Montana Book Award. That was astonishing to me, for a boy who got about 50% in School C English.”

Life is a series of turning points. Twenty days into a 100-day traverse of the Southern Alps, companion Jill Tremain told him “life is a cup to be filled, not a measure to be drained”.

This is where he will start his Order of Magellan acceptance speech in Naples, Florida.

“I went, ‘what the f*** does that mean?’ And she explained, probably over about a two-week period, ‘actually, you’re quite a selfish person. You do things that are good for you – usually climbing mountains by their hardest route – and you won’t fill your cup until you do things that are good for other people’.”

The pair finished the traverse. Dingle notched up another first, and then he borrowed a large amount of money and established an Outdoor Pursuits Centre [now called Hillary Outdoors].

“I kind of knew what I was doing. I was young, rough, 26 at the time I started to plan it. But it taught me a huge amount about young people”.

Dingle believes time in the outdoors can change a person.

In 1988, he infamously took six violent young offenders on a Government-sanctioned journey from Picton to Auckland, to raise awareness about alternatives to prison. Currently, the Graeme Dingle Foundation delivers programmes to nearly 30,000 young New Zealanders annually, offering life skills, mentoring, career development and wilderness experiences.

“We established a programme that became quite famous called Project K,” he says.

“It has had extraordinary success with kids who have essentially given up. They are not doing well at school, they don’t have hopes for the future. And this programme starts within 20 days in the wilderness and that’s very strategic, because we know that if you take people out of their comfort zone for at least 20 days, you can change their behaviour.

“So, for example, we take away their cellphones. That’s really important, because they have to learn to communicate with other people, to communicate when they’re under stress, to help each other when they’re struggling. There is a whole gamut of really important life skills that are learned. Like working in a team, like standing alone when you need to stand alone, and to go on when it’s hurting.”

And back to that slide show. A young Dingle “scarcely a man, struggling to grow a beard”. The E-Type Jaguar he bought when he went to work as a marketing director for Bill Hall (whose company Hallmark would eventually become synonymous with Woolrest sleepers). Climbing on the Great Wall of China and the ocean-to-the-sky expedition with Sir Edmund Hillary – jet boats up the Ganges, the banks lined with people anticipating the adventurers’ imminent death.

In the Arctic, Dingle helps rescue stricken sailors from the ice and learns that the soft mukluk boots a local woman sews him will protect his feet far more than the boots that promise survival in minus 45 degrees. He buys reindeer skin to sleep on. A selfie, taken when the outside temperature is around minus 40C, shows the game, he says, is to do what the locals do.

“This is a selfie, at about minus 40 degrees,” he says, pausing at an image of himself with an ice-encrusted santa beard.

Towards the end of the Northwest Passage, in an area called the Smoking Hills, he nearly (in his words) cashes in his chips.

“It was Spring and the ice was starting to break up and I fell off the machine and then got hit by the sledge which was probably doing about 60 at the time it hit me …”

He’s buried underneath the machine and fears that if he doesn’t get up, he’s polar bear fodder.

“I had to literally lift off the sledge which weighed about 1000 pounds. I took inflammatories and carried on. The day after this, actually, I did 400 kilometres, because the ice was breaking up so quickly.”

This story – like so many Dingles tells – has a happy ending. Jo-anne joins him for the final leg. There is an obvious physical attraction but he also likes her intelligence and, as it turns out, her courage.

On his website, Dingle cuts a long story short: “She was able to put aside life’s setbacks and cut to the chase and get on with what had to be done … We were in the Bering Sea and our boat ruptured along the keel. I was thinking the best thing to do would be to get to the nearest piece of land, but Jo just looked at me and said ‘you drive and I’ll pump’ …”

And, he says, at his dining room table: “She pumped for about 100 kilometres to get across to Siberia.”

You get to be almost 80 years old, he says, “and you can almost count the days ahead”.

But: “I’m lucky, I’m in good shape. I don’t think I’d make a great fighter pilot any more, but I’d still baffle the opposition by making sure I wasn’t an easy target – I’d probably struggle to hit the target!”

Dingle and Wilkinson live by the water. He pulls up phone footage of dolphins in the estuary at the end of his lawn, and points out the blue heron that’s just flown along the shoreline.

“My whole life, people have asked ‘is there anything left to do?’ And of course there is. It’s just as big as your imagination … it’s just setting your mind to what has to be done.

“Adventure has always been my way of understanding the world,” he says. “But my greatest satisfaction has come from helping young people discover their own sense of adventure and possibility.”

Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.