Pictures on right from top to bottom: Chris looking cheerful at the start of the Blizzard expedition that would eventually see him at 63kg with such low blood sugar he could hardly walk; a quiet moment in the Charing Cross A&E department while we prepared for our publicity photo (see home page); Chris apprehensively awaits his fate at an Buiti ceremony in Gabon; Chris enjoys some of the local delicacy in Chukotka: a walrus fin that had been left to rot for 2 months (we brought some marmite which our hosts thought was far nastier than putrid sea mammal) I thought it was basically inedible but Chris genuinely grew to love it; watching as Bettina, a primatologist with whom we filmed in Gabon, uses a blow pipe to tranquillise a chimpanzee in order to test it for SIV (the chimpanzee equivalent of HIV); befriending a dwarf crocodile in the swamp forest in congo; removing the “small” bowel from a ten-ton grey whale in Arctic Russia. The most unpleasant part of the complex business of dressing a whale for the dinner table;  making our accommodation on our first day with the Biaka in Congo; Chris surveying his bath water at the end of a long stay in the forest.

Pictures on left from top to bottom: doing my rounds in the MDM field hospital in Darfur; posing with Amchi Gyatso in the roof of the monastery in Lomanthang, on the roof of the world in the himalayas; my swollen face shows the effects of an attack by african killer bees (I got off pretty lightly - our heroic producer Tom Beard was stung over 50 times as we attempted to hunt some honey with the Biaka); being lowered into a Jacuzzi filled with iced water, one of numerous unpleasant scenes that we filmed but didn’t manage to use in the final cut; the results of 10 minutes of fishing in the packed lakes in Chukotka, we ate the fish raw about an hour later;  me, moments after being pierced at the Thaipusam festival in Kuala Lumpur - our priest had assured me it wouldn’t hurt a bit which is a lie I’ve told often enough to patients so probably some divine justice there; admiring Mnjenge a Biaka baby who was recovering from severe malaria for which we’d treated him (he’s still alive and well); a close encounter with one of the 30,000 or so walruses that “haul up” every year at the village where we stayed; anxiously warming my stethoscope before the nerve racking experience of examining Amchi Gyatso’s mother ( Gyatso was the head of the Tibetan medical school); shaving at 6300m in the Himalayas on the Caudwell Extreme Everest Expedition; me, looking contemplative on the Congo River.

above: Chris and me holding the heart of the whale that we had seen hunted in Chukotka. We felt a little uncomfortable posing for this; I’ve always believed whaling to be unnecessary and unsustainable and in most contexts it is. This village had the right to hunt two whales per year as part of an aboriginal subsistence exemption. The meat was used to feed the village exclusively and without this food source the population would have had to rely on imported, processed food at great financial and environmental cost. The parts of the whale that weren’t eaten (mostly the guts and bones) were used to support the local population of polar bears. The Chukchi were, in our experience, extremely concerned for the animals that to a great extent fed and clothed them. They took only what they needed and treated the wildlife with respect and reverence. We weren’t able to draw attention to the massive environmental damage being caused in the arctic by persistent organic pollutants (POPs) but we hope to in future projects.