Johan Ivarsson
Johan Ivarsson
Johan Ivarsson
Skeleton Coast is one of the most inhospitable, unexplored and at the same time most beautiful places on earth. It reaches over 700km from the mouth of the Kunene river, at the border of Angola and Namibia, and south to the Swakop river. In 2011 I hiked the 400km northern parts of the Skeleton Coast, from Terrace Bay to the Kunene river, as the assistant leader and part of a group of eleven carefully chosen participants from different countries. We were entirely unsupported and had to use a unique desalination technique to pump drinking water from sea water.
During 2004-2005 I spent ten months travelling along the Kolyma river together with Mikael Strandberg. The Kolyma river has an infamous reputation as the area where Stalin, and the Soviet Union, had their worst prison camps (Gulags). The extreme cold, with temperatures well below -50C during the long winters, together with the remoteness makes this one of the toughest areas to live in. For ten months we travelled along the river, first by canoe and then by skis, to try to document another side of this region. Even though it was extremely tough, we met some of the friendliest people in the indigenous populations of the Yukaghir, Chukchi, Even and Jakut.
