TASS, July 9. Tours to the North Pole from the Taimyr Peninsula (the Eurasian mainland’s northernmost part, the Krasnoyarsk Region’s north) may be available in 2020, Head of the Taimyr District’s Administration Yevgeny Vershinin told reporters on Tuesday.
"We plan to organize a transit tourist center in Khatanga - to meet and train tourists there, and then to send them from there to the North Pole," he said. "This year, we are bringing in necessary fuel, and such tours will be available next year."
According to the official, maximum 200-300 tourists will be able to go to the North Pole over next season.
"We shall develop the Khatanga area and Taimyr’s coastline, and next year we shall offer new routes," head of the regional tourism commission, Maxim Fomenko, said.
Khatanga is one of the two places, from where tourists may get to the North Pole. The second place - Spitsbergen - is in Norway, he added.
"[We eye] different variants: various routes, trips by the sea, tracking, walking routes, and the only limitation is the cost of tours. <…> The Yenisei flows into the Kara Sea - hence we can offer tours by boats," he continued. "Tourists may also visit the Putorana Plateau - a place of 1,500 waterfalls."
"The Taimyr is a huge territory, the demand for the Putorana Plateau is high, but the season is so short - only three months," he said, adding the interest to trips to Siberia among foreign tourist had been growing over recent years.
The Krasnoyarsk Region has been working on a tourism-recreation cluster, dubbed Arctic, where investments are more than 4 billion rubles ($63 million). The cluster will unite territories of Norilsk, Dudinka and Taimyr’s Putorana Plateau. Norilsk will be a center of cultural and industrial tourism, Dudinka - of ethnography tourism, and the Putorana Plateau - of extreme and ecology tourism.