It is the first night of the journey. The forest looms dark and unbroken beside the tracks. You can stare out of the window for hours and see very little but trees.
The sway and rattle of the train are keeping me awake. 'I'm going north,' I whisper to myself. A childhood spent in Canada has given those words magical symbolism. They spell danger and excitement in a land that is as rich as it is foreign, as deadly as it is beautiful.
We are aboard VIA Rail's service from Winnipeg to Churchill, across the central Canadian province of Manitoba. The trip takes two days and most of the tourists aboard are on their way to see polar bears. I'm here for the journey. It will take me from city through farmland to taiga forest and finally across the tundra to arrive at the sea, in Hudson Bay.
This standard-gauge line was completed in 1939 to export grain to Europe. Once in Churchill, the grain is loaded onto ships that sail across the Atlantic Ocean. Today the track also carries passengers, for it remains the only land transport link between Churchill and southern Canada.
As the train pulls out of Winnipeg, the world opens up, flat and brown. The crops have been harvested and the land is dead and silent. The sky, stretched between unbroken horizons, is grey and laden with drizzle. The snow has not yet arrived, with Canada experiencing an alarmingly warm autumn.
The ride is deafeningly loud. There is none of the swoosh of smooth rail and woosh of compressed air that European high-speed trains emit. This train sways and clacks as it trundles down the track, averaging less than 40km/h. They call it 'the slowest train in the world', and they might be right. The track is built on permafrost, permanently frozen ground, which makes a rough, unsteady track bed. The motion and pace of the train are similar to those of a yacht at sea.