Montréal’s metro and buses make up Canada’s busiest rapid-transit system.
31.08.2023 - 17:09 / thepointsguy.com
Sometimes, it's all about the setting.
Over a lifetime of travel writing, I've gone on some epic hikes across the globe, from the Alaskan wilderness to the jungles of Myanmar.
I've trekked for days across the mountains of Peru.
But nothing has quite compared to the hike I just did on Thursday.
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You can't even really call it a hike. Maybe a walk. And a short one, at that. It wasn't long. But where it took place made it more over-the-top than any exploring by foot that I have ever done before.
It was, literally, over-the-top.
It was at the very top of the world: the North Pole.
Late on Wednesday, I arrived at the world's northernmost destination along with 198 other passengers aboard the French expedition ship Le Commandant Charcot.
Just unveiled in 2021, Le Commandant Charcot is an expedition cruise vessel made for traveling through ice like no other — a true icebreaker of the sort that only governments have built until now.
Related: The ultimate guide to expedition cruising
It's also the first and only expedition cruise ship capable of reaching the North Pole, a destination to which it is now traveling a handful of times each year.
Sailing out of Longyearbyen in the Arctic's Svalbard archipelago, the world's northernmost settlement of any size, Le Commandant Charcot got us to the North Pole in just four days, most of which was spent plowing through hundreds of miles of polar ice.
It was then that the fun began.
Upon arriving at the North Pole late Wednesday, we disembarked the ship through a door on its side to take our first steps on the ice, giddily taking pictures next to a sign labeled "North Pole" that our expedition guides had brought along for the occasion.
We walked a perimeter marked off around the vessel, protected by rifle-carrying lookouts scanning the horizon for polar bears (the rifles only to be used as a very last resort). We made snow angels in the ground and sipped hot chocolate at a warming station that the crew set up on the ice.
But it wasn't until Thursday morning that we started to explore in more depth — and with more toys.
Emerging from Le Commandant Charcot after breakfast, I discovered that the ship's expedition guides had laid out snowshoes and cross-country skis near the ship's door for our use in exploring.
The ice at the North Pole was covered in a few inches of snow, some of which had come down overnight. It was nothing my sturdy rubber boots couldn't handle. But, heck, I was at the North Pole, a Holy Grail destination that had beguiled explorers and adventurers for more than a century, and I figured I needed to look the part.
I strapped on a pair of snowshoes and headed off into the great
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