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his friend Tim Harvey.
    CA: We’re going to be leaving from Vancouver up to Fairbanks; that’s 3,600 kilometres on the bikes. It’s going to be an interesting trip but fairly straightforward; it’s your typical sort of highway biking. And then from Fairbanks, we’ll continue down the Yukon River in a rowboat for about 1,800 kilometres to the Bering Sea and then we’ll cross the Bering Sea in a rowboat, which is about a 400 -kilometre crossing, and then follow the Siberian coastline in our boat until a town called Anadyr. Then we hop onto our skis and we ski for about 800 K and then back onto our bikes again.
    ML: It all sounds challenging to me—what is going to be the most challenging part, do you think?
    CA: I think the toughest part is going to be our travel in Siberia. Often people think the Bering Sea crossing is going to be the toughest, and it sounds intimidating, but we’ve really prepared for that. It’s actually fairly calm in August when we do the crossing. But Siberia itself—it’s very remote and it’s cold. We’re going through there inthe middle of winter, and the average temperature is minus 50 in January. That’s the average; Winnipeg, by comparison, is minus 20 , so …
    ML: That’s not good.
    CA: No, no. We’ve spent a lot of time preparing for this section, too. It’s all about having the routines in place and making sure that your equipment isn’t going to break down on you, because you can’t really take your gloves off and repair it.
    ML: How much food are you taking? How long is it going to take you, first of all—the whole trip?
    CA: The duration of the trip is going to be approximately 11 months. We’ve dropped off caches of food all the way up to Fairbanks for the cycling leg, and then we’re going to be carrying almost 4 months of provisions in our rowboat. The boat is packed: it’s got all our gear for Siberia and enough food to take us right into the heart of Siberia, and that’s pretty much when our own rations end. We’re using freeze-dried food; it’s approximately 1.2 kilograms per day per person, which is about five thousand calories, which is a lot of energy, but it’s necessary when you’re trudging through the cold conditions.
    Once we get to Irkutsk, which is where our food’s going to run out, we’ll have to start using local supplies, but it’s a lot more difficult using local provisions, because it’s things like potatoes and meat, which, when it’s minus 50 out, it’s pretty hard to chop the potatoes up, so we’ll have to do as much prep as we can before we embark from the cities or towns we purchase the food from.
    ML: You’ve made some extraordinary journeys in the past. Did you canoe down rivers in Russia before?
    CA: Yeah. Our most recent river journey was a descent of the Yenisey River, which flows through Mongolia and Siberia. The thing I like about rivers is that they offer you a unique view of the land. It’s almost like an inanimate guide taking you along, showing you all sorts of aspects of the land you’re going through, and this, in some ways, has some similarities—we are descending a river, but it’s almost like a whole bunch of expeditions thrown together.
    ML: And Tim? Has he had some experience with this kind of adventure?
    CA: Tim’s spent a lot of time in boats and kayaking. I mean, he hasn’t done any extended adventures exactly like this; the most recent trip he was on was working as a photojournalist in Central America. The most important thing, though, is to have the right kind of attitude and spirit, which Tim definitely has: it’s a combination of being tough, being able to endure the hardships that are definitely going to be encountered, but also having a passion for the outdoors, a love for the environment around you.…
    Why did they want to do this? Colin said it was to save the planet—to encourage people to mount their bikes and leave their cars at home in order to reduce greenhouse gases and slow down global