I've been lucky enough to stand on both poles, but the place that seemed the remotest to me was Butugychag, a former gulag in Siberia. It is completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland.
Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.
Environmental scientists in Canada said it was impossible for me to get to the Pole in 2004... I said 'no,' it's still OK, and I can still get there, and I did.
Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.
I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.
Rivalry is one of the factors pushing me. While my back was turned, the Norwegians managed to achieve the first Arctic crossing in winter. I didn't want the same to happen in the Antarctic.
I went to Moscow and met some slightly powerful and scary people.
I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
One of the most remarkable shindigs I ever attended was in Warsaw.