I haven't heard directly from Dim Sum yet, but as soon as I do, we'll post his own words here.  In the meantime, here's what we have! - BNH

(from http://mediablog.mail2web.com/goliath.exp/blog/archive/2006/04/)

31st March 2006

I got a call from Karl this morning (09:00 UK) (23:00 Thurs AK), stating that from yesterday's location they had made it to within half a mile of the shoreline but had to stop due to lack of light. They had come across some open-water with a 9ft wall of ice on the opposite side. They managed to find a way around this then discovered they were on ice that was attached to the shore. It was quite the roughest they had seen so far, however it was old ice and not going anywhere so they were quite confident they wouldn't just drift away during the night.

I had to wait until 22:00 (UK) for Karl to come back to me with the confirmation they had reached land. His first words were "Terra Firma!" It would appear they had landed before noon and were on a thin strip of land running along the coast. Needless to say they were elated and mightily relieved. They were then going to make their way down to the settlement of Uelen (see the attached maps), some 3.5 miles away. The settlement is probably just a collection of huts and if anybody lives there then this should give the inhabitants something to talk about for the whole of next week.

After that they will be making their way down the coast, a couple of hundred miles to the settlement of Provideniya where they hope to sort things out with the authorities! That could be a whole other adventure. Dimitri hopefully plans to fly back to the US from there. Unless K&D can find some sort of internet connection / or telephones in the settlements along the coast then communications could become somewhat sporadic. If we have to rely on the satphone then we'll have to be extremely frugal with airtime as Karl only has three batteries left. But, you never know what's going to turn up around the corner with this expedition and we'll keep you updated as best we can.

 

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(from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/03/nbering03.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/03/ixhome.html)

Seals and silence greet first Briton to master the treacherous Bering Straits
By Jonny Birdsall
(Filed: 03/04/2006)

An ex-paratrooper has become the first Briton to cross the semi-frozen Bering Straits, the treacherous 58-mile channel between Asia and North America.

Karl Bushby, 37, from Hull, reached the barren foreshore of the Chukotski region in eastern Siberia on Friday with only seals to greet him after 14 days on the ice.

"Terra firma. . . terra firma," were his first blurted words to his father, Keith, in Hereford, over a crackling satellite phone. "We're on a spit of land - we're here," he said. "We've done it, Dad."

Bushby, now nearly 18,000 miles into his 36,000-mile walk around the world, could be grey or bald by the time he leaves the service tunnel on the English side of the Channel in around 2010.

He began his odyssey in Chile in 1998 and, when he finishes, it will have been the longest, continuous pedestrian journey in history. Bushby never accepts lifts in or on anything and now his most formidable natural obstacle is behind him.

"The straits had been weighing on my mind for seven years," he said.

"I have had many sleepless nights in my tent in some baking desert trying to figure out how I would crack it. I had recurring nightmares after I saw sheets of moving ice folding over each other in a river in northern Canada."

The former Parachute Regiment corporal conquered the straits with a temporary companion, Dimitri Keiffer, a French adventurer and specialist endurance racer he met in Canada.

The first recorded crossing on foot was in 1998 by a Russian father and son team but few polar explorers attempt it because it is so forbidding.

There is ice in the straits for four months of the year. March is the best month for an attempt because there is more daylight and the currents are slower - but there were large tracts of open water between the ice-floes when Bushby and Keiffer left Alaska on March 17.

Storms had blown some ice offshore. Had the men waited two more days, it would have been too late.

"We could often hear the ice breaking up just a couple of miles behind us," Bushby said. "It was very scary, like the sound of a distant express train."

They set off pulling 400lb of dehydrated food, fuel and equipment in two lightweight sledges and wearing immersion suits in case they fell into the freezing water.

Because the ice is constantly drifting north or south at varying speeds, taking a direct route was out of the question. For four days the men walked north-west to try to miss a large area of open water but currents carried them 20 miles north in the darkness when they camped.

Two days later the ice shifted south again, taking them almost back to their starting point and one sledge, pulverised by the ice, was abandoned.

It was only after temperatures fell to -30C that the ice became more stable. Now pulling everything in a single sledge, the men made good progress west. But on March 25 they hurriedly had to move their tent.

"It was 5am when we felt the ice moving under us," Bushby said. "We dived out of our sleeping bags and dragged the tent away until we found some stable ice."

A day later they crossed the international dateline between the two continents, having walked just under 100 miles. The next stage of Bushby's journey is through Russia towards the Chinese border, before turning west for central Asia and eventually Europe.