Having sat down to write the November installment of this newsletter, I thought, hmm, so what exactly have I done in the last month? What can I report? Where have I been? I turned to my diary to help me and discovered that the furthest I have travelled from my front door was 7.45 miles. I have made the grand total of eight car journeys, and most of those were trips to the swimming pool. I have spent a lot of time sitting in my study, and a bit of time lying on my sofa pretending to read but actually having a little a snooze. It has been bliss.
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| And the winners are... |
The winner of October's travel-writing competition is Anna Taylor, for her piece on a painfully long South American bus journey. Read Anna's entry here. This story really took me back to some bus journeys of my own, where the extraordinary views from the windows have contrasted horribly with the discomforts and awful dubbed movies within. My own worst experiences have been in Chinese buses. My most uncomfortable trip was a so-called sleeper bus (ha ha, sleep was out of the question) from Jinghong to Kunming. In the middle of the night the driver let out a loud, bloodcurdling scream. I have no idea why.
Anna wins the Bradt guide of her choice. Entries are now open for the November competition. Just email me with the story of your most bizarre or most beautiful or most battering travel experience, in 500 words or less. For more lengthy instructions, click here.
The winner of my newsletter draw, meanwhile, is Anita O'Donnell from Ohio, who wins a signed copy of one of my books.
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In the press
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Check out this month's edition of Wanderlust, which includes a feature I wrote about wonderful ways to experience the Arctic this winter. Northern lights, dogsledding, polar bears...you get the idea.
I've also got a short piece in December's Wanderlust, on Chukotka in Siberia. That issue will be Wanderlust's big bumper 100th issue, and is on sale, I think, from 20 November.
Also coming out this month, but officially a December issue, is another, longer feature I wrote on snowmobiling in Chukotka for BBC Wildlife Magazine. My Chukotka trip was one of the highlights of this year. It was remarkable to travel across a land that really has no roads or other infrastructure, and to stay in Inuit and Chukchi villages where the people continue to live a genuine subsistence lifestyle. As luck would have it, we arrived in the reindeer herders' camp the day of the annual reindeer-driving races. Check out my photos here.
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Couldn't Guy Fawkes have chosen June?
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Last night in London one could have been in Kabul, or Goma, or somewhere equally terrifying if the soundtrack was anything to go by. For non-British readers of this newsletter (and there are a lot of you...) let me explain. Back in 1605, a group of English revolutionaries decided to take out King James I, most his family and a good number of aristos by blowing up the House of Lords at the state opening of parliament. Over a period of months, they stashed 800kg of gunpowder in a cellar underneath the House of Lords - but on November 5th Guy Fawkes was caught as he attempted to light the fuse. When asked by one Scottish lord what he'd been intending to do with such a quantity of gunpowder, he replied, 'To blow you Scottish beggars back to your native mountains.'
The king and the lords were annoyed, so they tortured Guy Fawkes for a while, and eventually he and his accomplices were hanged, drawn and quartered. And - and this is the weird bit - to this day, we celebrate his demise by burning effigies of Guy Fawkes on bonfires and letting off fireworks on November 5th, or whichever Saturday night falls nearest. Nice.
OK, enough of history. I'll get to my real point, which is this: why couldn't Guy Fawkes and his cronies have chosen a date in June? On Saturday night it was lashing with rain and wind, and it was no time for an outdoors party. Personally, I refused to leave the house. Really, they were plain inconsiderate.
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This month at PollyEvans.com
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It may seem remarkable, but I have at last posted another book review on my so-called Book of the Month pages. I'll agree that Book of the Quarter would currently be a more appropriate name. This month's book is Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie. Margaret travelled extensively through northern Alaska with her husband, the wildlife biologist Olaus Murie, during the first half of the 20th century. They mapped the land and studied caribou, elk, birds and much other fauna and flora, but this is a personal account rather than a scientific one. Murie's personal love for the far north - and for her husband with whom she campaigned for the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - leaps glowing from every page.
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Donjek Route
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The Donjek Route, the route description insists, is a route, not a trail. Running for about 100-120 kilometres through the Kluane National Park and neighbouring reserve in Canada's Yukon Territory, this is not a trip for those who can't work the GPS - unless you're like me, and you make friends with people who can.
I did the Donjek route with my friends Stefan and Cynthia at the end of August. (They're the tiny specks in the photo above - I had got a little bit left behind.) It was a really fantastic hike and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who enjoys incredible views mixed with physical suffering. It was very hard work with lots of bushwhacking, lots of sliding down scree slopes (I was hopeless and my legs buckled beneath me - according to Stefan, I tired myself out unnecessarily by being cowardly and slow), and lots of creek crossings (I fell in twice in one rather bad-tempered 15-minute period).
It was worth the work though. Our second morning, a huge porcupine came to visit us as we ate breakfast. And as we arrived on the summit of Hoge Pass, we were greeted by a few dozen Dall's sheep.
The route goes past the Donjek glacier. We camped for two nights at its toe (we had a 'rest' day in the middle when we took a half-day hike around the front of the glacier) and lay in our sleeping bags at night listening to the thundering tones of the glacier calving.
Check out my photographs of the Donjek route here.
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