Setting sail for the North Pole - DAY 1
Posted: Friday, November 02, 2007 10:31 AM
Filed Under:
On Assignment
By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent
NBC News sent Miami-based correspondent Kerry Sanders, Miami-based producer Nery Ynclan, and Moscow-based cameraman Dmitry Solovyov to the North Pole.
The only time you can travel by ship to the North Pole is during the summer months. Our NBC team departed June 26, 2007.
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| NBC News |
| The NBC News Team at the North Pole from left to right, Kerry Sanders, Dmitry Solvoyov and Nery Ynclan. |
Quark Expeditions arranges to take passengers to the North Pole every year. It's an expensive proposition to go to a place on earth where it's estimated only about 40,000 people have ever been (that includes explorers, members of the military, scientists, and tourists). If you want to go, begin saving now: cost exceeds $20,000 per person.
Our team traveled to the North Pole to prepare reports for NBC Nightly News, the Today Show and CNBC. Onboard with Kerry and crew were scientists, an extreme sportsman who once skied to the North Pole, and a few dozen tourists.
What follows is a day-by-day look by Kerry Sanders at their voyage to the top of the world.
Onboard Yamal:
DAY 1, 5 p.m.
We set sail from Murmansk Russia, a depressing, colorless city of 700,000 just north of the Arctic Circle.
This was long a secretive city because it was a Soviet nuclear maritime base. The USSR may no longer exist, but the nuclear ships and submarines are still here, and so too is high-level security.
The crew onboard our ship ordered us to keep our cameras in our cabins and to come observe topside as we cast off. But when the two tugs began to tow the icebreaker Yamal out from its berth at the port, the upper-deck was flooded with passengers, most toting cameras. No one from the Russian security team onboard seemed to mind, so we rushed back down to the lower deck to grab our gear and document our departure to the North Pole.
Playing on the ships loudspeakers: an old Russian anthem, popularized during World War II. Today the music is traditionally played throughout the country when groups head off by train, or in our case, on an icebreaker. It sounds like the music track of an old war movie: Very Russian. Very Soviet.
I met Eileene Meyer onboard. She’s a fund raising consultant from Connecticut who’s traveled most of the world, including Antarctica. Excited by the trip, she also wonders what will be left after she reaches such a remote location. It’s estimated about 400 tourists a year make it to the North Pole.
The rest of Kerry's journal entries from his trip to the North Pole will be posted in the World Blog over the coming week. And tune in to the Today Show all next next week to see their "Ends of the Earth" series.
