Then two other Japanese, that I’d met on the train, Mariko and Seiji showed up. None had fantastic English and I know about two words of Japanese but we still managed to have some great, often funny conversations.

At 11pm, Boyle, the old man, came down and told us the Northern Lights were out. We rushed out and could make out a greenish cloud fading and moving in the sky. It disappeared but we waited and eventually it came back, filling most of the sky, rapidly moving, hovering, twisting and fading in and out of intensity. It finally started twisting together like wool being spun and turned an intense white, purple and red. It was fantastic. I kept laughing so much. I was so intensely happy and so was Seiji, who was also seeing it for the first time. We put our arms around each other and laughed drunkenly with happiness. I couldn’t stop laughing. Who needs TV when you have this sort of thing?

Mariko is not so impressed. She works up at Yellowknife where Japanese tourists take weekend trips all the way from Japan just to see the Northern Lights. Mariko and several other young guides, have to stand outside in the sub-freezing temperatures, waiting for the aurora, while the paying tourists drink and eat inside the warm lodge. When they give the signal, all the tourists come rushing out and Mariko and company have to rush around taking photos for everyone. It’s all over in about ten minutes, then the tourists head back to the warm lodge and Mariko and company are left to defrost their fingers and toes until another night.

When I got up this morning I checked the thermometer hanging on the Boyles back porch. It read 22 degrees Fahrenheit at 7am. I called Arkel, and the lady who answered told me that she had four spare clips packaged up and ready to be sent express post (it arrived the next day while I was away). I then spoke to Kevin, one of the designers who wanted to give me a prize for being the first to break one of the clips. He was real cool, and asked me all about my trip and hoped that the broken clip hadn’t ruined any plans. What plans? I’m even more impressed with Arkel after this experience.

I set off towards the Arctic Circle with two mismatched panniers, eight litres of water and two days worth of food. I was either being really optimistic or really foolish, probably a bit of both, and hoped to be able to hitch a ride all the way there and all the way back to be in Fairbanks again tomorrow night. It was so goddamn cold. The hair below my bottom lip kept frosting up from my breath and I had to be careful not to spill water on my goatee, as that kept icing up too. I quickly lost feeling in my toes, and my fingers, only covered with old, holey Thinsulate gloves, hurt like hell. My cheeks, nose and ears stung like crazy. I figured it was better that my extremities hurt like hell rather than not being able to feel them at all, but before long, I couldn’t feel them at all. My water bottles kept icing up and whenever I was thirsty, I had to stop and smash the ice at the top of the bottles. I stuck out my frozen hitchhiking thumb at every passing pick-up, but it was not until I was 35 miles out of Fairbanks that I got lucky. The bike went on top of two big eskies (ice coolers) on the back, one full of beer. It was two First Nations people, who took much humour in calling me a dumb Aussie for being out here on a bike. They took me all the way to the banks of the mighty Yukon River, where they had a cabin and were going to spend the winter (and they were calling me crazy?).

It was still another sixty miles to the Circle and unpaved road all the way. After about five miles, I pulled into the Hot Spot cafe and got a chocolate thick-shake while the owner (apparently an ex-stripper, she sells “Hot Spot” t-shirts featuring the silhouette of a well endowed women reclining in a seductive manner) told me all about a crazy Italian girl who had passed through a few days before on a bicycle while it was snowing and insisted on making it to Prudhoe Bay. I’m getting the impression that the locals, who anyone else would consider crazy for living up here, consider anyone else who travels up here, crazy.

I set up my tent at the empty, undeveloped camping sites about a quarter mile from the Arctic Circle sign. Now I felt really alone and also a little paranoid about bears. So I cooked my dinner back at the sign and then put my food pannier in the drop toilet outhouse back at the campground. The sound here carries remarkably well, another guy showed up at the campgrounds, and though he is over 100 metres away, I can clearly hear him as if he was right outside my tent. Richard came over and introduced himself and offered me a glass of wine. I’d been sitting outside of my tent and because I’d packed so lightly and had no entertainment, I was literally doing nothing but looking at the magnificent Autumn colours and waiting for the sun to go down. Richard is a taxi driver from Las Vegas and comes up to Alaska every year for a holiday. He was kind enough to offer me a lift all the way back to Fairbanks tomorrow, very cool.

After Richard headed back to his tent I checked my $5 REI compass/thermometer that probably has an accuracy of plus or minus 20 degrees and it was at freezing point. It was 9:30pm by the time the sun set and by this time I had every piece of clothing I could find on, and even with two pairs of wool socks my feet were stinging from the cold. I crawled into my sleeping bag with everything on, and it was not until 2am that the full feeling in my toes came back. Every hour I woke up with my alarm to check if the aurora had come out. At 11:30pm, I peaked outside my tent to find a thin white cloud streaked all the way from the north horizon to the south horizon. It was possible to mistake it for a jet’s exhaust stream but it illuminated the ground with the same intensity as a full moon. Slowly it started shimmering vertically like a wind-blown plastic phosphorous-coated shower curtain, tinged with purple and red. And then it would change into cloud shapes that moved and stretched across the entire sky in a matter of moments. It’s something I’d been wanting to see for many years now and it was so much better than I expected and really indescribable. It was lovely. I had planned to get up and take a bunch of long exposure photographs, but when it’s below freezing outside it’s very easy to justify that a photograph would not do the Northern Lights justice.

I enjoyed the ride back to Fairbanks; Richard was a very knowledgeable bloke and I learnt a lot of things about Alaska during the five hour trip. In some parts the smoke from the bushfires was particularly bad with fire right up to the edges of the road.

I also bought a $40 pair of windproof/rainproof gloves and a $20 face mask. I’m now prepared to laugh in the face of any weather that Alaska and Canada throw my way.