About

The 360 Extremes Expedition will leave São Paulo in August 2014 on an epic and unique journey around the world... the hard way: along the polar axis.

The team of two people, Natalia Almeida and Benjamin Weber will travel south from São Paulo by bike, to Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina, before sailing to Antarctica and kite-skiing across the South Pole. After completing this, we will sail over to Australia and cycle across the continent before cycling north through Asia and Russia. From the top of Norway we will embark on the final and hardest part of the journey, traversing the North Pole, before cycling back down south through the Americas to São Paulo over three years after we leave.

The team has been in training for two years, training technical skills, physical fitness and strength; building the mental strength to be able to face some of the most extreme and hostile conditions on the planet. Training projects have included extreme altitude mountaineering in the Andes, and cycling through the British winter from Land's End to John O'Groats, and they will shortly be travelling to Baffin Island, just on the Arctic Circle in the Canadian winter, to train with the accomplished polar explorers of the McNair-Landry Family and their company, Northwinds. Following this we will spend a month in May crossing Greenland through skiing and kite-skiing, to hone our polar skills.

We will be documenting the entire journey through film and photography in order to produce documentaries and photographic exhibitions about the project, as well as educational materials for schools, with detailed case studies about each of the key locations visited and the environmental and cultural aspects of these regions. In each of the 30 diferente countries we pass, we will be holding events at local schools to engage with the different peoples and cultures we meet.

The team of the 360 Extremes Expedition will be the first to complete the polar axis circle largely by land. Natalia will be the first Brazilian to traverse the Poles and the Greenland ice sheet.