The first Filipina to cross Greenland's Arctic Circle trail
Christine Amour-Levar also led the first allfemale team to bike across it in winter
Queen Rania of Jordan once said, “If one girl with courage is a revolution, imagine what feats we can achieve together.” Indeed, women coming together make for great achievements, as proven by advocacy movement HER Planet Earth when it recently traversed Greenland’s Arctic Circle Trail with a team of 10 fearless ladies. Led by Filipina philanthropist, adventurer, entrepreneur, author, and HER Planet Earth’s founder Christine Amour
Levar, the group is the first all-female team to bike across the 200-kilometer Arctic Circle Trail, which connects the Russell Glacier with the western coast of Greenland.
The pioneering expedition braved one of the most barren, most isolated regions of Greenland to raise awareness and funds for the underprivileged women affected by climate change in Asia.
Greenland is 80 percent covered in ice and the melt from its glaciers is among the major contributors to the global sea-level rise. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Risk Report 2019, various coastal cities will be affected by the sea-level rise, especially Asian cities given their population, economic activity, and landmass. The study reveals that by 2050, four out of every five people impacted by the sea-level rise will be those living in East or Southeast Asia.
The team, therefore, chose to raise funds for UN Women, in aid of programs that support the economic empowerment of women in rural areas in some of the countries most troubled by climate change like Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Nepal.
“My team and I had to push our limits to the brink of exhaustion on multiple occasions, across vast distances, in extreme conditions and temperatures, in one of the most aweinspiring and beautiful places I’ve ever witnessed,” Christine says, explaining that various factors made this particular exploit unique and worth undertaking.
Advancing across snow and ice using fatbikes—off-road bikes with oversized tires—was not an easy task. “At the end of each day, every bone and muscle in our body would be hurting. On the trail, it often felt like the journey would never end,” Christine says of the difficulties of the trip. “We kept looking through our goggles for our support vehicle to appear in the horizon, with some hot tea or soup, to give us hope and a muchneeded boost of energy. During those precious breaks, we could never stop for long, because we would get too cold, too fast,” she adds.
“Going up the mountain passes in a 13-kilogram fatbike, carrying a six-kilogram pack, while breathing through a balaclava was also quite an exhausting job,” she admits. “On top, however, we were always rewarded with breathtaking views. The valleys and frozen lakes below were spectacular. And from these heights, the downhills were formidable, a much-deserved reward after the long and hard slogs.”
This adventure, like any other, had its lessons. Christine rediscovered the importance of a team coming together to support each other. “The teammates looked after one another throughout the journey with empathy and compassion and that made all the difference. We encouraged each other, made each other laugh, a lot,” she narrates. “The faster ones learned to slow down, to wait for those who were catching up. The team was tight, and gradually became a high-functioning unit.”
The stakes were high and Christine made it clear there was no room for error. They could not afford to be complacent as the risk of frost bite was all too high. “We disciplined ourselves to stay close together despite the different biking paces, because if someone got lost, hurt, or left behind, they could have easily frozen to death or died of hypothermia within hours,” she says.
Christine confesses that Greenland stands as one of the hardest expeditions they have experienced so far as a team, both physically and psychologically. Nevertheless, she plans to keep on taking her all-female teams on other tough challenges in the future.
Both her NGOs, Women on a Mission and HER Planet Earth, continue to inspire women to leave their comfort zones, in an effort to rally support for a worthy cause. “We seek to take participants on pioneering expeditions around the world, so that they can make new discoveries, flourish as individuals, but most important, contribute to society,” says Christine. “By traveling in challenging conditions, we hope to bring international attention to the need for societies, governments, and corporations to get involved and help support climate action and female empowerment.” The next HER Planet Earth campaign is a diving trip in May 2020 to Pangatalan Island in Palawan, to work on restoring the coral reef. This activity will be in partnership with the Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation, a Philippine-based non-profit organization dedicated to conserving, protecting, and restoring the natural resources of Palawan through environmentally sustainable practices and active ecosystems restoration. Due to the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, Christine’s team is currently evaluating the situation whether or not they will push back the trip to a later time.
‘Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together—George Eliot.’