Thule • Deserts • Lindisfarne

Sandi Toksvig travels to places of peace, to isolated lands away from the frantic world. Her guests are Joanna Kavenna, author of "The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule"; desert adventurer and conservationist John Hare; and Alkarim Jivani, the television editor for the London arts and entertainment magazine "Time Out", who likes to escape to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.

Joanna Kavenna is a writer and has just published a new book "The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule". Seen once by an Ancient Greek explorer and never found again, mysterious Thule came to represent the vast and empty spaces of the north. Fascinated for many years by Arctic places, Joanna decided to travel through the lands that have been called Thule, from Shetland to Iceland, Norway, Estonia, and Greenland.

John Hare is a desert adventurer and conservationist; he has travelled extensively in both the Gobi desert and the Sahara . During his travel he has become involved with the protection of the wild Bactrian Camel, the only wild camels in the Mongolian and Chinese quarters of the Gobi desert.

Alkarim Jivani is the television editor for the London arts and entertainment magazine "Time Out" and likes to escape to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to concentrate on his writing. Alkarim has stayed in the great wilderness of the Australian Outback where at night fall he felt as if he was on the edge of the universe.