Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 8th of

October and that means of course travel desk Tuesday in which I talk to one of my excellent

colleagues on the independent travel team. Today it's the turn of Annabel Grossman, who is the global travel editor.

And Annabel, at night's drawing in, I want you to take us to your amazing ski experience in

Norway, where you weren't just content to go skiing like normal people go skiing. This was something of an

entirely different and more challenging order. Yeah, so last, it was earlier this year, I think it

was in March, I went out to Fincer in Norway, which has been described as the Little Antarctica

because it looks so much like the landscape out there

and it's where all the major explorers right back to Shackleton's time

would go to train for their adventures.

And so I went out to do a very mini adventure.

I spent just one night out in the wilderness.

So I'm a... I absolutely love skiing. I'm a very big skier, but this was my first time on tour skis, which I wasn't quite

prepared for as they are incredibly different to your normal ski. And what we did is I went with

the company Cool Chackleton, really, really excellent organisation.

And what they aim to do is to inspire more people to get out and try adventures on a very accessible level.

So we went out on our tour skis.

We went out to spend one night in the wilderness, dragging everything

that we needed for the night in our, they're called Polk's little sleds, which you drag behind

you on skis. So it was a real adventure. For those of us who enjoy downhill skiing, because

basically you get taken to the top of a mountain and then gravity does the rest.

This sounds like an extreme ordeal because if you're touring, therefore going presumably mainly

...