Name: MICHAEL PALIN | Pole to Pole | COLD START | NORTH POLE | EPISODE - 1
Uploaded: 2024-12-06T11:53:20.000Z
Duration: 49 min 16 s
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We're looking for a piece of ice, it'll be long enough, we'll see what we can do.

Yeah, we'll probably land within at least, probably right at the pole.

The first problem is where to plant your pole.

The North Pole is on a constantly moving sea of ice, so where the pole is now may not be where the pole is in an hour's time.

That's why, as the Americans might say, once you've got it, flaunt it.

I'm standing on the top of the world, at the North Pole, where the time is, well, the time's anything you want it to be up here.

The temperature's about minus 25 degrees centigrade, so there's no point in hanging around.

What I'm going to do is make a journey from here to the South Pole, which is in every direction.

If I went that way, I'd go down through Japan.

If I went that way, I'd go down through India.

But we've chosen a route that way, 30 degrees east, line of longitude, down through Russia and Africa.

It's going to be a hell of a long journey, but, well, let's go.

I hadn't expected things to be such a rush.

The pilot won't risk turning his engines off in the bitter cold.

Though I'd quite like to sit and write a few postcards, he wants to be off while we still have enough fuel left.

And you don't argue with the pilot. Not at the North Pole.

The plane we're in was designed in the 1950s.

There are no airstrips, no control towers, no emergency vehicles below us.

There is rapidly changing weather, intense cold and hundreds of miles of frozen ocean.

We've chosen the 30-degree east line of longitude simply because it covers the most land, running through Scandinavia and the great cities of St Petersburg,

We'll be travelling down the River Nile, across the desert to Khartoum and on to Lake Tanganyika and Cape Town, from one extreme of the earth to the other.

Even if everything works, we have almost half a year's travelling ahead of us.

After 13 hours flying over the Arctic Ocean, the sight of the tiny settlement of Nielsen on the island of Spitsbergen is an indescribable relief.

Many Arctic expeditions began here and some, including Amundsen's last flight, never returned.

We ourselves touch down with only minutes' worth of fuel left.

We may not quite have run out of fuel, but we have run out of good weather.

There's nothing to do but wait, and waiting, they tell me, is what the Arctic is all about.

It's two days before the blizzards let up.

We've made it an unwritten rule of the journey not to use air transport where there's any possible alternative, and the only alternative out of Nielsen is by the modern equivalent of dogs and sledges, snowmobiles and sledges.

It's an unusual journey, and, as one of our Norwegian guides explains, it's a journey that's not just about the weather,

It's an unusual journey, and, as one of our Norwegian guides explains, it demands unusual precautions.

We have to carry guns just in case polar bears are too hungry to leave us alone.

How many polar bears are there on these islands?

If we don't get to a hut or to safety of any kind and we have to stop on the glacier, do you have emergency rations and tents and things?

Yes, nothing elaborate, but just enough to keep us alive for two or three days.

We shall all have to master the art of snowmobile driving, even me.

The Arctic is littered with weather stations which can tell you how big the ozone hole will be in five years, but strangely little about what's going to happen in the next five hours.

At the first pass, the snow sweeps in again, and suddenly you can't see a thing.

The boys' own fun of snowmobile driving becomes something much more serious.

Mind you, there are times when I'd almost prefer not to see where I'm going.

Conditions change so quickly that it's absolutely essential never to lose sight of the vehicle in front.

Sometimes, I admit, my concentration wavers.

We drive on through the night, though at this time of year the sun never sets.

It's still there at three in the morning, and at last we glimpse the first sign of human habitation since leaving Nielsen.

It's a trapper's hut, standing on the shores of a frozen fjord.

A rack full of dead seals, meat for the trapper's dogs.

It is, thanks to the owner's generosity, our hotel for the night.

Our host, Harald Solheim, looks more like a rabbi than a trapper, and he's lived here on his own for 15 years.

It's a very lonely life here, Harald, isn't it?

In the beginning, it was some sort of adventure about the whole thing, but it's not that anymore.

The idea of a trapper now is very unfashionable.

Environmentally, the idea of people hunting and killing animals is now much criticised.

It's OK if they are vegetarians, then they could blame the hunters.

That I could understand, but people that are going into shops and buying meat...

As far as I know, every meat comes from living animals, and you have to kill them before you eat them.

If you were a vegetarian, how would you survive here?

You seem to have most comforts here, but is there anything, any one thing that you miss?

Sometimes one could miss different things, and especially it could be pleasant to have some women companions sometimes.

You are an ordinary man and you feel some needs, no and none, but I think I would prefer to stay alone.

As our revving engines rudely shatter the tranquillity of an arctic morning,

We wave our goodbyes and hurtle on our way south to goodness knows what problems and crises, leaving Harold Solheim's remote kingdom surrounded once again by the certainty and comfort of silence.

Three quarters of Spitsbergen is permanently covered with ice.

The port of Longyearbyen, which we reach after two days travelling, is still 600 miles from mainland Europe.

Even now, in early summer, there's only one ship strong enough to take us safely through the ice, the MV Norsal.

She may not look the part of an arctic rambo, but she knows these waters well.

She's been a scallop fisher and a seal catcher, and now, as a supply vessel, she's become an arctic lifeline.

Progress through the ice is painfully slow, and looking at the inflatable globe, which has already been round the world with me,

I can see we're hardly clear of the bit where you blow it up.

There isn't much to do on the Norsal, except walking and skating, which is a bit of leisure nevertheless.

The Norsal is a very quiet coastal island, rather concluding in the tides.

Accommodating a sizeable population, there isn't much to do on the Norsal, except walking and skating, which tend to be the same thing anyway.

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MICHAEL PALIN | Pole to Pole | COLD START | NORTH POLE | EPISODE - 1

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