Charlie Walker, "On Thin Ice: An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival" (Duckworth, 2026)

**Nicholas Gordon** (0:01)
Welcome to The New Books Network.
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of The Asian Review of Books podcast done in partnership with The New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia Pacific region. In February 2022, British explorer Charlie Walker flew to Siberia's Saka Republic to walk a thousand miles up frozen rivers to the Arctic Ocean, through Earth's coldest inhabited region. Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Tamping down his concerns, Charlie continued on his journey meeting indigenous people and ice road truckers along the way. Yet his trip ended in fear and confusion, with an arrest and a month in a Yakutsk jail. The story of his new book, On Thin Ice, An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival. Charlie is an award-winning explorer, author, and international keynote speaker. He has traveled over 60,000 miles by foot, horse, raft, bicycle, ski, and dugout canoe in places as varied as the Tibetan Plateau, the Mongolian Steppe, the Congolese jungle, the Arctic Tundra, the highlands of New Guinea, and Sahara Desert. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, a Scientific Exploration Society Explorer Award winner, and the author of Through Sand & Snow and On Roads That Echo. Charlie, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Talk about your book, On Thin Ice, An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival.
As I was reading your book, I was reminded of Peter Hessler's book, Other Rivers, which is also about a plan for travel, a plan for a book that quickly gets overtaken by current events.
In Hessler's case, it's the COVID pandemic. In your case, it's the war in Ukraine. But why don't we start with the original plan you had when you traveled to this part of Russia? What did you hope to do?

**Charlie Walker** (1:54)
Well, firstly, thank you for having me on. The original plan was to fly into Yakutia or the Sakha Republic, which is this enormous region in the far east of Russia. It's 94% the size of India, so really, really vast and very sparsely populated, only about a million people.
I planned to fly into Yakutsk, the regional capital, and from there, travel along the Lena River, on the frozen surface of the river, for roughly 1,000 miles up to the coast on the Arctic Ocean. And along that course, drop in to various small communities. There's a few indigenous peoples who live in the region and get a sense of what their lives are like, particularly during the winter. Winters are fairly unimaginable in this part of the world.
They last about eight months. In this region is the coldest inhabited place on earth, known as the Pole of Cold, where the record low temperature in a human settlement was logged at minus 67.8 degrees. So I wanted to fly in, get a sense of this place. I suppose to some element, to some extent, test myself against the elements, camping and hiking in brutally cold conditions. Also to get a bit of an idea about how the rapidly changing climate is or is not impacting the lives of people still living by traditional means indigenous people in this region. So that was the plan, but not all plans go to plan.

**Nicholas Gordon** (3:33)
So tell us a bit more about this part of the world, and maybe let's start with the natural side of things.
I'm sure it's really cold, as you note. But what's the climate and the natural landscape like in this part of Siberia?

**Charlie Walker** (3:52)
To give you some sense of the location, it's on the same time zone as Brisbane, so it's really, really far east, and it's very far north. Roughly half of Yakutia lies within the Arctic Circle. So the majority of Yakutia is what the Russians call taiga boreal forest, so mostly large trees, and that continues up to about 70 degrees north, beyond which there is the tundra. There are a couple of mountain ranges on, broadly speaking, to the west and east side of Yakutia. And those mountain ranges create a fairly unusual weather system, where essentially a dome of cold air forms over this area, and within the mountains, a sort of a bowl, if you will, and just gets colder and colder and colder throughout the winter.
It's very, very still. Wind doesn't shift that cold air out. You don't really get weather patterns coming through, and that's why it's quite as cold as it is. So a huge expanse of forest stalked by wolves, bears, various mustelids, little small fur creatures, so mink, sable, ermine, wolverines, and a smattering of humans.

**Nicholas Gordon** (5:19)
Well, let's talk about those humans. Then where does this region sit in terms of Russia's political system and its economy?