I'm one of the lucky people that, my job is my passion, is my hobby. I hope this doesn't sound arrogant: I truly feel that this is what I'm meant to do, to swim and to talk about protecting the environment, my two passions.

I was very, very lucky because I started swimming when most of the landmarks in the world had not been swum.

I love swimming, swimming's my passion and I hope I swim until the last day of my life, so I really, really do enjoy swimming, but swimming for me is simply a way of carrying a message.

What I'm asking people to do is to look at their lives, wherever they may be. I mean, you may be a housewife or a mother in Gauteng and you're driving your kid to school, you know, and you've got one kid in the back and you're driving 30 kilometres to school and 30 kilometres back, so 60 kilometres in a day, to take one child to school. Is there a possibility that you can put a few more kids, some friends' kids in the car, and start saving on those types of things?

I got bored and then joined the British SAS. It was five very exciting years of my life, and then I'd always had this passion for swimming, so started swimming around the world, in some of the most exotic and distant and dangerous locations.

Britain has bred many great explorers, but they seem to get so little coverage compared to soccer and rugby players.

Sometimes we set boundaries for ourselves in life, or even worse, we allow others to do so. In many cases, these boundaries are just in our mind and need to be pushed away.