Tag Archives: Siberia

QUIN man Declan McEvoy has always been a big dreamer. One of his mantras is “if your dreams don’t scare you, maybe they’re not big enough”. However, his next endeavour, which he plans to complete in March, will make the hairs stand on the back of your neck. Cooly and calmly he reveals, “I am going to attempt to ride a motorcycle on ice crossing 636km of frozen Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, in mid-winter Siberia”. If he completes this solo ice ride, he will make it into the Guinness Book of World Records but with temperatures expected to be -20° Celsius by day and -30° by night, and storms and freezing fog to contend with, this is no walk in the park. The idea came to him two years ago, when he was on the second leg of a round the world solo motorcycle trip. His journey took him to the shores of Lake Baikal in …

CLICKING on an email, Ennis man Anthony Galvin was met with these simple words: “If you do this trip, you will die.” This piece of advice was in response to plans by Anthony and his good friend, Henk van der Klok, to take on the coldest journey in the northern hemisphere, a 1,400km trek across Siberia. The pair had made contact with a local person to get some inside knowledge about the area, ahead of their plans to set off next January. However, if the sender of the email had intended to deter Anthony and Henk, he was mistaken. “We reckoned that it was the green light we were waiting for. If you get an email like that, you have to go for it,” Anthony laughs. He and his Dutch-born companion are now busy preparing for the mammoth trek, the second coldest march ever, behind Bowers, Wilson and Cherry-Gerrard’s six-week trek in search of penguin eggs in Antarctica in 1911, …