Tomorrow morning I'm heading north to the Arctic proper. I'm flying up to Inuvik for a few days - and from there I'll hopefully be able to take a drive out over the ice road to the Beaufort Sea and, if not dip my toe in it, at least give it a kick.

I'm now in Dawson City, supposed to be the halfway point of the Yukon Quest - but the snow towards the intended finish line at Whitehorse is so scant that the organisers have decided to turn the teams around midway between here and there, and bring them back to finish in Dawson. So I'm sitting tight here for a few days yet. It's a great little town, famous as the centre for the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898. Many 0f the old buildings are still standing so it's a quaint and historical little place.

It's now 2.30 a.m. in Central, a very tiny community in the middle of nowhere, Alaska, and one of the checkpoints on the Yukon Quest dog-sledding race. We've been waiting for a few hours now for Saul, the musher whose team I'm travelling with, to arrive. He should have been here at about 11 o'clock, but there's a storm on the mountain, the trail conditions are atrocious, and a group of four or five mushers has not turned up when they should have done. So it's going to be a long night ahead.

I'm now in Fairbanks, Alaska, waiting for the start of the Yukon Quest dog sled race which begins on Saturday. Fairbanks seems to be a slightly strange kind of a place. People in the street keep laughing at me. I am not entirely sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with my clothes...