Yukon, if you want to

The woman sitting next to me on the plane flying into Whitehorse tells me she knows the mother of the person I’ll be staying with. The chances of this seem wildly remote, until she tells me that she thinks the population of Whitehorse is around 20,000. The plane itself is relatively small, and the interior reminds me of a seaplane I had seen not that long before in an aeronautical museum. It’s a disconcerting first impression, given that, unlike a plane in a museum, my life is rather depending on this one working properly.

As we near our destination, the pilot announces that it’s 4 degrees Celsius outside. The woman next to me says that she heard it snowed last week, and the mountaintops weren’t covered in white – as they are now – when she left two weeks ago. From the air, Whitehorse looks like a grubby collection of ramshackle sheds, nestled against a grey cliff, on top of which sits the airport. We circle the city before coming in to land, and I can see that, further out, it is indeed ringed by snow-topped mountains.

Even stepping out of the plane and onto the telescopic walkway, the air is noticeably colder. The small band of fellow passengers and I walk through the tiny airport to collect our bags. As I realise that, for some reason, it reminds me of a Swiss railway station, in the blink of an eye, the rest of the passengers retrieve their luggage, meet loved-ones and disappear out of the door. I wander outside too, to look for a taxi, and all of a sudden can see my breath. It’s very cold; to me, at any rate. To residents who experience the place during the winter, when it gets down to minus forty, this might just be slightly cool.

Also waiting for a taxi are an English couple, now resident in Phoenix, Arizona. She’s very friendly and chatty, but he’s a bit cooler, and not just in a physical sense. It seems that their visit here is his idea, but she does not appear to be wholly convinced by the plan, and is not reticent about this. I suspect she may have made this clear to him a few times, which might explain his defensiveness.

Eventually, just as I am running out of readily-accessible warm clothes to put on, a taxi arrives and the couple get in. The taxi driver offers me a free ride with the English couple to their hotel, and from there to the B&B where I’m staying. Although the English guy’s expression makes it clear that this is the last thing he would like, my only alternative is to stomp about in the cold outside the airport, tying to keep warm until the taxi can return, so I eagerly accept the offer and jump into the front passenger seat.

Even waiting overlooking the airport car park, it’s clear to me that Whitehorse has a charm of its own. My first reaction that it’s bleakly beautiful, although it also looks like one of those places where, no matter what people may do, it’s Nature that calls the shots.

What's up, doc?

There comes a moment in long-haul travel, particularly if you are over six feet tall and it has been impossible for you to sleep on the plane, where it is dangerously easy to forget not only where you are, but also how long you have been travelling.

About halfway through a rickety bus journey from Nairobi to the remote village of Kajuki, along dusty, rutted, and red mud roads, I realised that there also comes a point where you begin to question where you left your sanity. Either that or you wonder if perhaps, against all the odds – crushed kneecaps, for example - you actually succeeded in falling asleep on the plane and have yet to wake up.

For me, that moment arose when, glancing through the grimy bus window, I watched – or thought I watched – as two human-sized rabbits fought each other in front of a skeletal hotel building. Doing a double take – how could I not? – I realised that my sleep-deprived brain was not playing tricks on me and that I had indeed watched this unlikely scene being played out.

Whether to advertise the hotel or just – you know – “because”, possibly on a whim, two grown men dressed from head to foot in furry rabbit costumes, upholstered model heads and all, were trading what I hoped were pretend blows by the side of the road. They appeared to be having fun, because even so completely disguised it was possible to see that they were laughing, as they parried slow hits and struggled to keep their heads from falling off.

The unlikeliness of such a situation took me some time to process, as the bus juddered and rolled its slow way along the road, swerving precariously to avoid donkey-pulled carts and straggling rows of goats, minded by lone children. Had the manager or owner of the hotel conceived this as some unusual marketing scheme? The irregularity of traffic on this road rather argued against it, unless the seemingly foolish optimism that had led to the construction of the hotel itself also extended to their skills at promotion. An alternative theory, that both men had, independently, come to the decision that morning to dress up as Bugs Bunnies, seemed equally improbable, but then I was new to the country, and had not slept properly for around forty hours.

Looking around at my fellow passengers, I was blearily surprised that nobody else seemed to have considered the sight remotely remarkable. Settling back into my seat, I resolved not to be thrown by this, and leaned my head against the pleasantly vibrating window, to watch the passing banana plantations give way to rice fields, until I drifted off to sleep.