Not your average small town

I was in Churchill for 2.5 days so couldn’t dilly dally about. My b&b was in town and being a small place it was easy to cover on foot. Provided I did so during daylight hours and didn’t venture down to the bay. So with these words of caution from my hosts I spent the first afternoon walking around, doing a spot of shopping and looking through the museum.

This is the b&b. All of the buildings are built for the unique climate and are mainly wooden and weathered looking.

Their scary looking but lovely three-legged dog.

It is quite a sparse and barren looking place.

The next day I went on a long-awaited polar bear tour which I’ll cover in a separate post. Later that evening I met up with another girl from the tour and a couple of others to go to a ‘polar party’ to mark the start of polar bear season. There we got to sample local cuisine such as caribou and musk ox – which is about as crazy as I get when it comes to food experimentation!

My departure the following day was not until the evening so plenty of time to fit in another tour. This was around the local sights and was really interesting. Polar bears are the mainstay pull but is certainly not the only feature.

However, their presence did mean our tour guide carried a gun for the parts of the tour where we left the bus.

And Churchill isn’t just about nature either – there is a fascinating history from its trading origins and now defunct military base. This is an old radar facility.

The wreck of a cargo plane which crashed in 1979.

Visiting a stretch of beach called polar bear alley…

This is a jail of sorts for polar bears. Any that repeatedly venture too close to town are captured and held in this compound until the Hudson Bay freezes and they can be released to find food.

A rare sighting of what is apparently a variant of red fox.

All in all, not your average small town.