Special Guest Blogger: Roald Amundsen

My life and that rather ignominious final chapter where I managed to lose myself. The irony, I tell you, is thicker than a week-old blizzard.
They say you should follow your passion and my passion, as it turned out, was for being profoundly cold. While other lads in Oslo were dreaming of warm bakeries or perhaps not dying of scurvy, I was reading books about men whose primary achievement was turning various shades of blue before succumbing to a polar bear.
My dear mother had other plans. Doctor, she wanted. A respectable profession. indoors by a warm fire. She pictured me with a stethoscope, listening to men cough. Instead, I took a dogsled and listened to the howl of the Arctic wind from the bow of a ship heading for the Northwest Passage.
I had to. The Northwest Passage was the Everest of my day, only flatter, wetter, and considerably more likely to crush your ship into splinters. People had been trying it for centuries, mostly adding to the growing collection of ghost ships.
My plan, in a nutshell, was not to be tragic. It was revolutionary. I learned from the chaps who actually knew what they were doing, the local Inuit. We wore their clothes, ate their food, and more importantly, let their dogs do all the actual work. The real heroes of that expedition weren't the men but the furry, four-legged chaps who seemed to view the entire adventure as a rather demanding walkies.
The South Pole was the main event. The one that gets all the press. This is where things get a bit competitive.
You see, there was this other fellow, Captain Robert Falcon Scott. A splendid chap, I’m sure. Very British, very heroic. Great moustache. But his approach to exploration was, shall we say, a touch more romantic than practical. It was all about noble suffering for the glory of the Empire. Splendid stuff for a poem, awful stuff for staying alive.
My plan was, in essence, don’t be a tit. It involved Ski's for moving efficiently, dogs for pulling the sledge (or in a pinch for emergency rations) and warm fur clothing for not freezing your nuts off.
Scott’s plan involved Ponies which sank into the snow and had to be shot, motorised sledges which broke from the cold immediately and good old British spirit which is fine until you got no ponies or sledges left.
Unsurprisingly we got there first, planted the Norwegian flag, had a quick nip of something medicinal to ward off the frost, and thought, Right, that’s done. Pole conquered. Now, where’s my lunch?
And so, we come to it. The curtain call. The bit where the great explorer gets… well, lost.
All my life, dedicated to navigation, to finding my way across the most featureless landscapes on Earth, only to go missing on what was supposed to be a simple rescue mission.
An airship crashed in the Arctic so I hopped in a French seaplane to go and find him. A routine jaunt,  when we took off from Tromsø, and then we simply ran out of map and, it seems, sky.