Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and I'm right now in the kitchen of the wildlife guide and photographer Paul Goldstein in Wimbledon in southwest London.

But Paul, by the time people hear this, where are you going to be exactly?

Are being gender-defining cold in a very, very long way north in Canada.

You fly to Ottawa and you have an overnight and then you fly to Ecalewitt

and then you've got another three and a half hours to fly to the

little known hamlet which is only i suppose accessible by ship for three or four months a year

of kikatashuak it'll be about minus 23 minus 25 something like that and you are on baffin island

which i believe the fact that most people, if they know

anything about Baffin Island, will know that it is the biggest island that is part of another country.

And what will you be doing there in late March, which of course is still pretty icy? Yeah, they rather, I suppose, flatteringly call it

spring. No, it is. It's solid ice. You couldn't do this unless it was icy because we're going

there for essentially two things, polar bears with cubs just out of the den and extraordinary northern

lights. I know before people say, but you can see those in Scotland,

and we saw them in Wiltshire and everything.

Yeah, but how often does that happen?

And the key with seeing and photographing Northern Lights

is the real currency is what you photograph them with

and grounded, sculpted, manicured icebergs

in a frozen field is about the hardest currency. So yeah, you have to be

careful. It is very cold and extremities have to be protected assidiously. They really do.

Exactly. And that's why a lot of people will be thinking, hang on, this is frankly masochistic. But you've got paying customers who are spending presumably quite a lot of money to join you. In terms of the practicalities, how do you keep all your extremities? Yeah, I mean, there's two parts to that question.

In terms of extremities, you hire gear that Inuit's use.

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