Our camp at the Arctic Circle beside Hudson Bay, Manitoba, Canada was extremely small and a little flimsy looking as we got our first glimpse of it when flying in from Churchill. However, others had survived and lived to tell the tale and after all the tiny little electric fence around the camp would scare the polar bears away, wouldn’t it…..
Also, leaning up against the huts under each window was a special anti polar bear shutter which I am sure would be very effective if you manage to get it attached before the bear gets you. As you can see these have already been tested.
I’m being silly…..we all felt very safe and I certainly had no problem sleeping each night. The cabins were cosy and warm with comfortable beds, pretty photographs on the wall to remind you where you were, bedside lamps, a warm shower and a very impressive toilet which enabled all waste to be taken back to Churchill to be managed appropriately.
Nothing would be left behind except the empty, locked, shuttered huts.
The camp belongs to a local Inuit community who use it as a hunting camp and very kindly rent it to Arctic Kingdom for the short polar bear migration season when the bears are heading north in anticipation of the ice forming and their own hunting season beginning. They head up the western shore of Hudson Bay right beside the water, our camp is on the waters edge.
The entire camp is surrounded by an electric fence, but there are also Inuit guards watching all the time to make sure the bears don’t get too inquisitive. Walking from the main building to our two person cabins was not to be done once it was dark so I got a bit of a surprise on the first night when we were carefully locked into our cabin for the night and there was a knock at the door. Who or what could that be? It was a definite knock, not a huge bear banging against our door! We gingerly opened the door and there was our expedition leader with a rifle in one hand a two hot water bottles in the other. Crazy.
We did have an intruder in the camp, a teenage bear on his own was looking in the window while we were having dinner. He was just checking us out but seemed to slip through the electric fence no matter what was put in his way. He probably didn’t think it was fair that all the little arctic foxes could trot around inside our camp and he wasn’t allowed!
TRAVELS PAST & PRESENT 