Dubai: No amount of time at Ski Dubai could prepare an Indian who was brought up in Dubai for the freezing conditions at the North Pole, where he has just completed a 100km long trek.
Akshay Misra, 25, experienced temperatures as low as -40 degrees Celsius on his six-day trek. At Ski Dubai the temperature is -4 degrees.
Apart from icy cold weather Misra and his team were faced with other, unexpected problems.
"We travelled about 8 to 9km on our first day, but when we woke up after camping, we saw we had in fact only covered about 5km. Because of the ice-drift it was like walking on a treadmill without going anywhere," Misra said.
Training
The team spent about a week training on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen before leaving for the Russian base camp. Training not only involved how to ski effectively while pulling the "bulk" (their equipment on a sledge), but also other tricks to survive in the arctic, such as how to fire warning shots to ward off polar bears.
"I didn't see any polar bears, only their footprints, but I was told they saw me. Apparently the bears always see you. In Spitsbergen there are 3,500 polar bears and only 2,000 humans, so we were outnumbered and polar bears are definitely bigger than us," Misra said.
Far from the shorts, T-shirt and sandals that Misra usually wears in Dubai, the clothing for the trek included a thermal vest, long-johns and a suit made from Gore-Tex material, two pairs of gloves and four pairs of socks, each with a layer of polythene.
"Because of all the layers of socks the ski shoes had to be three sizes bigger than normal size," he said.
The team trekked for ten hours a day, stopping for a five minute break to drink soup and eat dried food or chocolate.
Because the ice-drift sometimes worked in their favour, the team reached the North Pole in six days, instead of the nine days they had planned.
On breaks the team would don down coats. These cannot be worn during trekking, because they make the body sweat too much. The sweat freezes, effectively freezing the wearer from the inside out.
"It was also a problem at night," Misra explains.
"We'd sleep with a face mask and cover our heads at night, but inside the sleeping bag your breath would still turn to ice. I only had one night's good sleep while I was there." Misra undertook the trek as a personal challenge, but also to raise money for the Children's Hope Foundation and Environmental Camps for Conservation Awareness (ECCA). All the packaging and food wrappers used during the trek were carefully kept in the "bulk" packs and disposed of when the team returned to Norway.
The last day of the trek was the most exhausting, Misra says, because they skied for 12 hours to reach the pole that day. "There are no signs telling you that you are at the North Pole. You have to take measurements with the GPS. There is a Russian flag marking the spot, but it's thousands of metres below the ice on the seabed," he said.
Aside from photos of the expedition, Misra is reminded of the trek every day by a blackened index finger tip.
"I got frostbite in this finger. I remember exactly what happened. I couldn't open my metal thermos flask, so I took off my glove and touched the metal for maybe 20 seconds. I felt it burn at the time, but it was not until the evening that I felt clumsy with my fingers. Inge Solheim, the team leader, looked at it and said I wouldn't lose the finger, but if it had been any worse, I would have had to abandon the expedition."
This is something, he explains, that was explained in the training. "You have to be so careful," he said, continuing that any exposure to the air or cold metal in those inhospitable temperatures puts you at risk of frostbite.
Reminders
Misra, who says he does not even use air conditioning at home, was constantly reminded of the Dubai landscape, even though he was very far from home.
"The pressure ridges that are formed when the ice moves sometimes looked a bit like buildings on Shaikh Zayed Road. Some of the ridges looked like building blocks, and when the ice moved sometimes it made juddering sounds like you hear on a construction site," he said.
"The first thing I did," he beams, "was go to the beach when I got back".
Misra, a recent law graduate who studied in Newcastle, England, has grand plans for more charitable fundraising activities in the future and is still looking for corporate donations for his two chosen charities.
Do you know of any person who has done something similar for a cause? What is their story? Does true altruism really exist?
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