This Canadian town is the world's best place for northern lights and polar bears

We are driving across the white expanse of a deeply frozen Churchill River, the surface gleaming with pearl-coloured ice as the sun dips lower in the sky. From the windows of our Tundra Buggy, white drifts rear up like frozen waves, small white horses stilled by the midwinter cold.

I had arrived the previous day in the small town of Churchill, Manitoba, where the temperature was minus 33 degrees Celsius, though the "feels like" temperature was minus 51. The houses and shops were barely visible behind mountains of shovelled snow. It was too cold to be outside, other than to move from warm vehicle to warm building, dressed in the snow pants, jacket, boots, gloves and head coverings I'd been issued by local tour company Frontiers North Adventures.

Walking the icy paths from restaurant to hotel, others in my group strode confidently, while I clumsily slipped and slid with every step in my bulky snow suit. In my defence, I'd flown directly from the Australian summer, and there was a lot to get used to. Like the nerve-racking idea that we are about to drive across a frozen river. After some good-natured Canadian ribbing, it's explained that the ice is up to two metres deep at this time of the year and is regularly checked using radar equipment. Nearby Hudson Bay is also completely frozen over, and it's an inland sea.

We make it across unscathed to a snow-covered shore dotted with the birch, spruce and willow of the boreal forest - home to snow hares, foxes and the plump snow-chickens of the tundra, the ptarmigan - and ushered into a spacious, candlelit restaurant on wheels, Dan's Diner, where the young chef Claire Pollock talks us through what we are about to eat.

The menu she has created is a love letter to her Manitoba childhood: steelhead trout, venison, elk and ingredients like pickleberry, cloudberry, balsam fir and candy-capped mushrooms.

As darkness falls, we leave our cosy diner to follow a lamplit path through the trees to a log fire to enjoy a glass of locally produced whisky. As if on cue, we look up to see the swirling white ribbons of the northern lights, moving across the dark sky above us in arcs and dramatic whorls.

I am beside myself with excitement, which is matched by the locals in our group who see them all the time. This is clearly something that never gets old. Snow and forest are gently illuminated under the moving lights; the blobs of snow captured in the spruce boughs glow like Christmas tree ornaments.

On our four nights in Churchill, we are lucky enough to see spectacular lights each night, well worth the frozen hands and noses. The lights are also kind to us by coming out at a reasonable hour - we hear stories of groups who sometimes wait until 3am to see them.

It's not a coincidence that the aurora gods are smiling on us. This is the reason your Facebook feed has been full of aurora pictures for the past couple of years; we have been in a period of "solar maximum", an 11-year cycle of peak geomagnetic activity.

Churchill already has an advantage, being positioned beneath the "aurora oval" of the North Pole, making it one of the best places in the world to see the aurora borealis. Here, the lights dance directly overhead, in clear skies unclouded by humidity or light pollution, giving visitors the chance to see the lights on about 300 nights a year.

On each night of our tour, we view them from a different location, sometimes from within the boreal forest, other times across vast flat areas of ice. All the sites have cosy indoor spaces to retreat to from the bitter cold, and fires and hot drinks for thawing frozen iPhone fingers.

Most people in my tour group are experienced aurora photographers with all the good gear, while I snap away with my iPhone on the automatic setting, occasionally using my Kmart tripod. It seems that in Churchill, the lights are so good, even an amateur has the chance to walk away with a few good shots, and I am pleasantly surprised with some of mine.

As other aurora seekers will know, the vivid colours you see in photos only come out when seen through a camera lens, rather than with the naked eye. This is because our retinas rapidly refresh images, while the longer exposure of a camera gives time for the colours to reveal themselves.

But in the clear, dry air of the frozen north, the dramatic lights are awe-inspiring to watch even without a camera lens as they sweep above the ice, the shimmering columns blooming, growing and fading.

The indigenous people of northern Canada explained the aurora as the ancestors dancing to reconnect with the living, brandishing torches to light their way. Other stories say the ancestors are playing a game of soccer, kicking a walrus skull across the sky.

In Finland, they call the lights the "fire fox", the flicker and swirl of a fox's tail creating sparks as it races through the snow.

Our tour is all about the lights at night, but the days are designed to offer a glimpse into everyday life in this frontier town on the edge of the sub-Arctic, with activities organised around a decent sleep-in after late sky-gazing nights.

During our days, we are driven around Churchill in our Tundra Buggy, learning about indigenous culture, the science of auroras, the fur trade of days gone by and the current scientific research into polar bears.

The town's supermarket sells everything from groceries to hardware and even snowmobiles, known here as the "iron dog", because it replaced the working dog teams that most Churchill residents used for transport up until the 1960s.

The tradition of dog sledding is kept alive by local "mushers" like "Big Dog" Dave Daley of Wapusk Adventures, a Mati man who once famously drove a dog team from Churchill to Winnipeg. Today, tourists visit his property to hear about the history of dog sledding and the strong connection between a musher and his dogs. This ends with a swift and exhilarating ride through the snow in a sled led by the dogs, who clearly enjoy the run as much as their passengers.

Another day, we go snowshoeing along forest paths through snow-laden spruce trees. The sky is blue, and the air is crisp, and shuffling through the silent forest in deep snow feels like being inside a fairytale.

There is no road in or out of Churchill, so all arrivals, of both people and goods, are by air or train. The locals need to be resourceful - they are used to being snowed in, flooded in during the melt, drenched in mosquitoes during "bug" season and hypervigilant in bear season.

And while it was once a major shipping port and centre for grain export, today tourism is bringing opportunity and prosperity back to the town.

Churchill may be a long way from anywhere, but when it comes to singular natural experiences, the town holds unbeatable cards. Apart from the stunning northern lights, Churchill is also famous as the polar bear capital of the world. During the northern hemisphere autumn months of October and November, tourists are taken out in Tundra Buggies to view the bears in the wild. In these months, the bears converge on Hudson Bay waiting for the "freeze-up" to create the hunting platforms they use to hunt seals, because while technically they're marine animals, they can't outswim their prey in open water.

The town reaches capacity during bear season - accommodation and transport sometimes being booked years in advance by people from all over the world eager to see the bears.

Tourists are closely supervised and not allowed to roam around on foot at this time of the year. Even in the streets of the town, no one walks alone in Churchill during bear season and residents, tour guides and hospitality workers are often trained as "bear guards" - knowing exactly what to do if humans and bears come too close to each other.

During our visit, although it was outside of bear season, a mother and her cub had been spotted, and our bear guard kept a close lookout when we were out in the open.

Sadly, it's the bears themselves that are in real danger.

Scientists say climate change means the ice is melting earlier in spring and freezing later in autumn. This means the bears must spend longer on land without food. The Churchill Northern Studies Centre, which tracks the local bear population, is at the forefront of international research into these intriguing animals.

During summer, the Churchill River plays host to thousands of migrating white beluga whales, which we're told are just as playful as their cute little smiles suggest. The tundra comes alive with tiny Arctic wildflowers.

Her obsession began after long months of COVID-19 lockdowns, when she reassessed her bucket list. "I realised bucket-list items needed to be addressed quickly, because who knows what the next year can hold. So I made my bucket list come true," she said.

Since 2021, she's averaged an aurora trip three times a year, travelling to Scandinavia, Finland and Iceland. "All my money and time go into aurora hunting, but Churchill has exceeded my expectations by far, for multiple reasons."

Number one was the clear skies: "It's so important because it's so depressing to be somewhere where the auroras are out, but the clouds are in, and you've just paid all this money to sit outside looking at clouds with a green-yellow tint."

She is now keen to return to Churchill, both for the lights, and possibly for polar bear season.

"Once something's on my bucket list, I've gotta do it. I don't have one of those imaginary bucket lists," she says.

Over five days and four nights, I get used to driving across frozen water.

On our last day, the Tundra Buggy stops on the vast, icy expanse. We get out to walk on the frozen surface and inspect the giant ice-cream scoops of snow and heaped blocks of ice. Under a huge blue sky, our breath comes in clouds of vapour, and we all turn into kids, sliding chunks of ice across frozen ponds and climbing ice hummocks. The Canadians in our group perform ice ballet in their shoes and hurl themselves onto their bellies, diving across the ice.

You might come for the lights and rebook for the bears or the whales - or any combination of the above. But whatever draws you to this extraordinary town in the wild, frozen north, you have the sense you're only ever scratching the surface.

The writer was a guest of Travel Manitoba, Frontiers North and VIA Rail Canada