Canada, July 1999

Its amazing what one will endure to achieve a life ambition. Mine was to see a Polar Bear in the wild, and my destination was Churchill, a small town on the Hudson Bay. And to get there I spent 30 hours in a bus from Toronto to Winnipeg, 12 hours on another buy to Thompson, where I had to wait half a day for the 2 day train journey to Churchill.

And althogh I arrived a month before the official polar bear migration months of September, I very lucky to actually see a polar bear from the huge Tundra Buggies that are used to ferry tourists around in search of Arctic wildlife. Admittedly the bear was fairly far off and took off into the ocean when we tried to approach it, but I had managed to see one of these incredible creatures in the wild, and so I was happy – as several other tundra buggy trips went out over the next couple of days and saw nothing.

Of course then I had to get all the way back to Toronto, but I had time to break up my travel for a five day hike in the Pukasaw National Park on the northern shore of Lake Superior. On the very first day of the hike, not more than 3 kilometres from the base camp I was became aware of branches breaking in the forests to my right. Realising that something large was making its way through the trees I stopped. Then to my delight a black bear of medium build came trundling down the slope, oblivious of my presence. I was exhilirated to be so close to the animal, and decided it would be worth trying to get hold of my camera before it disappeared, but swinging off my backpack alerted the animal to my presence – giving it a big fright so that it shot off before I managed to capture the moment on film.

That was my last bear experience for the trip, but I did get to have some fantastic encounters with other Canadian wildlife, including a mommy moose and its baby, a family of otters, and a porcupine. Otherwise the chipmunks were also good fun – I to wrestle one for a valued biscuit while having lunch one day. Normally of course it could just have had it, but since I didn’t have enough food every crumb was sacred. I ended up spending loads of time harvesting blue-berries to supplement my meals. Did you know that if most of your meals consist of blue-berries that your shit ends up purple?

3 weeks was not enough time to see this huge country. It is really fantastic, beautiful, wild, and the people are really friendly. I gotta come back one day to see the rockies, grizzlies, and do some snowboarding.