Journey to the Edge of the World: Adventures in the Arctic Wilderness

The very hilarious and idiosyncratic Billy Connolly guides readers through his gripping adventures and some of the world's most dramatic landscapes in the vast wilderness of the Arctic

In the summer of 2008 Billy Connolly set sail on a 10-week journey from ocean to ocean: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, by way of the North West Passage—a fabled route deep within the Arctic Circle that has thwarted explorers and fortune-hunters for centuries. For Cook, Drake, and countless other adventurers, the North West Passage has been an alluring but impossible journey, a trial of unparallelled physical and mental strength, a haunting and fascinating wilderness. Now the Arctic is melting at a rate of 36,000 square miles a year and the journey is finally possible. For the first time, if they are quick, travelers can sail freely, if precariously, from Newfoundland right round to Vancouver. By plane, rail, road, and boat, along coastlines and across sweeping landscapes that represent the final Northern frontier of the inhabited world for both man and beast, Billy's adventure embraces a memorable mix of bizarre encounters, Hemingway-esque characters, incredible wildlife, forgotten languages, big game hunting, and all night carousing under the midnight sun. And he takes readers with him. He learns how to be a bear whisperer, pans for gold with prospectors, learns how to square dance, kayaks through ice floes between fishing trips, runs bare-assed into a sweat lodge, and attempts the finer complexities of the Inuit language. He jams with fiddlers, kisses a cod, goes hunting for Bigfoot, and invokes the spirit of the ancients while iceberg-harvesting. Billy goes searching for the beauty of ordinariness and bumps into all manner of weird and wonderful people along the way. With his infectious enthusiasm and idiosyncratic humor, this is more than just an informative and entertaining travel guide, it is also equally hilarious and poignant time spent with a truly unique citizen of the world.