It’s around 7:00am on a rainy Easter Sunday morning I’m at a hotel outside Heathrow and I’m getting ready to begin the long journey to the North Pole.
It’s an early morning start – I’ll be meeting up with renowned explorer David Hempleman-Adams and the team in a couple of hours before the flight later today, so there’s time for just one more kit check before we get ready for the off. Almost everything is here but as with many trips, not everything has gone to plan. We arrived in London to find that the tour operator hadn’t managed to get clearance from Heathrow security and customs for the rifle that we would need to protect ourselves from potential polar bear attacks. Obviously, this is a very real risk for our team so the plan now is to try and find a rifle in Spitsbergen or Barneo.
Nevertheless, we’re ready and excited for the trip ahead and I can’t wait to meet up with the rest of the team. We’ve got a busy few days of flying ahead of us – first to Oslo, where we will stay overnight before flying to our first base at Longyearbyen via Tromsø.
From there, we head to the Russian Ice Station at Barneo which is now up and running – it is only open for around 6 weeks every year before the ice begins to melt. Unfortunately, things haven’t being going to plan for them after reports came in earlier this week that one of the two helicopters that they use had crashed. Thankfully, nobody was hurt but it does reinforce just how dangerous this challenge is.
I would also like to say a big thank-you to Fred and Carole Nash for their generous donation. If you would like to donate to either charity, please do so by the yellow banners at the side of the page.
To listen to how we’re getting on, simply click the grey “Play” button at the bottom of this blog post. Don’t forget that you can follow my adventure at twitter.com/cn_northpole and at facebook.com/charitynorthpole. If you’re a user of Foursquare, you can also track my progress by becoming a friend of arcticdavid.
