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Far Frontiers Travel
Far Frontiers Travel specialises in tailor-making bespoke travel to Central Asia, China and Mongolia, the Far East, Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas, Indochina, Middle East, North Africa and Europe, Russia and South America.
In the wake of Bering | 17 days
This expedition is as unique as the First Kamchatka Expedition of 1725 – 1730 which was led by Danish explorer Commander Vitus Bering on orders from the Russian Tsar Peter the Great. His orders were to travel overland to Kamchatka (from St. Petersburg) and there build two ships and sail ‘north by northeast… chart the coast and collect information’. It was an ambitious journey and a remarkable expedition.
Our expedition departs from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, a city named in honour of Bering’s two ships built here for the second Kamchatka (Great Northern) Expedition. From here we will sail north by north east to discover wildlife and wilderness that few people have seen or experienced because of the region’s remoteness and the fact that it was a ‘closed area’ until the early 1990’s. It is a land of extremes and a myriad of environments, including snow-capped active volcanoes, geothermal regions, vast forests, extensive tundra, uninhabited islands and rich oceans.
Every day we will search for the best wildlife experience, but we hope to find one bird in particular – the extremely rare spoon-billed sandpiper, classified as ‘globally vulnerable’ with possibly less than 1,000 breeding pairs and declining. Its only known breeding ground is in northern Kamchatka and Chukotka and only a few field workers have seen it there.
Ship: The Spirit of Enderby
When: 23 June – 9 July 2012
Guide price:£7,390 per person based on twin cabin (shared facilities)
Clients’ comments
“This was a wonderful trip. Getting there and back was slightly trying, not because of the airlines (both Transaero and Yakutia were good) but because of the length of the flights, the hassle of boarding, stopping over in Irkutsk on the way back, and of course the time changes (3 hours London/Moscow, nearly 9 hours Moscow/Petropavlovsk, and the reverse on the way back. The voyage itself was splendid. There were some early starts and late finishes, a few rather optimistic ‘dry landings’ from zodiacs (I always wore rubber wellingtons and always needed them) and one optimistic ‘walk’ through a pass between bays which involved ploughing through deep/very deep snow for about a mile while on a slope most of the way. But we took these in our stride. We saw tons of wildlife – literally; at least two dozen whales, more than 5,000 hauled-out walruses, about 50 sea-lions, dozens of seals, and at least 15 brown bears. We were successful in finding the spoon-billed sandpiper, and the scientific element of the trip was both enlightening and exciting.”
Chris Meader, In Bering’s wake, in search of the spoon-billed sandpiper, June/July 2011