Andy Richardson: Holiday planning is never plane sailing

Now that I come to think about it, it probably isn't.

But I'm digressing again – and it's only the second paragraph so let's stop that right now. Three years feels about right. So we'll stick with that, shall we?

Three years ago I flew to Churchill – the place, not the £23 million Kensington home of our Wartime Prime Minister nor the kennel of a faux brown and white British bulldog who sells insurance on TV while declaiming: "Oh yeeeessss."

Why does he do that? Does he think we're more likely to upgrade from third party fire and theft if we see a nodding dog gurning in the Coronation Street coffee break?

Churchill is in Northern Canada and it's the polar bear capital of the world. Located on the shores of Hudson Bay, it's majestic and very, very, very cold.

The windchill made it -35C when we visited. That's cold enough to freeze your eyebrows. Ours became brittle like twigs and crumbled onto the floor.

Located in Manitoba, it's also the occasional home to the northern lights; dancing kaleidoscopes of colour that are at their most resplendent from January to March.

It's got much more than polar bears. There are beluga whales, an old stone fort and endless miles of majestic wilderness. Seductive and charming, pristine and wild, it's an enigmatic place, the sort of town that leaves a permanent imprint.

We were taking photographs of polar bears, which are simultaneously beguiling and alarmingly scary. In Churchill, polar bears hide out in snow drifts then amble over to the PolarCar to inspect the cwazy fools armed with zoom lenses and video cameras who hang out in monster trucks.

On one memorable afternoon of polar bear spotting, their vast paws reached up along the sides of the PolarCars and they sniffed the air, wondering whether we were friend or food. Click, click, click. Result. Beautiful pictures of polar bears and holiday money well spent.

Churchill is a two-bar town: the sort of place that has one watering hole for visitors and another for the locals.

We went to the latter, eating vast plates of food before beating the locals at pool like Steve McQueen in the Cincinnati Kid.

The beer flowed freely, the stories grew taller than the Empire State Building and we immersed ourselves in all things Churchillian – while resisting the urge to puff on a really big cigar and hold up the V for Victory sign.

And now I've got the itch. It's time to go and do something unusual: you know, swim with penguins in the Galapagos, snorkel with seahorses in the Maldives, watch turtles lay eggs in Borneo, go scallop diving in Peru, float in over-salted lakes in Djibouti or visit Dudley to eat grey paes and bacon after spending the afternoon at the town's castle ruins.

I'm looking for a place that will take me on the coffee trail of Nicaragua, sea kayaking in Fiji, gourmet foraging in Shropshire or surfing solitude in Mozambique.

So I've bought a bunch of travel guides. The only trouble is, none of them seem to tell the truth. They are wildly over-enthusiastic, promising the moon on a stick and suggesting hyper real experiences that will leave me 10 years younger and happier than a Lottery winner.

They skirt over inconvenient truths – the Churchill guide doesn't say anything about eyebrow freezing winds – and point blank refuses to say anything other than: "It's great, you'll have the time of your life."

So I thought I might start a travel guide of my own that doesn't necessitate filtering through hours of hyperbolic travel drivel to find a kernel of truth.

I'm looking for candid rather than corrupt, realistic rather than romantic, incisive rather than inflated.

I'm looking for a guide that says, for instance: England, a rainy day country where Marmite might be hard to find in branches of Tesco because of a post-Brexit pow-wow.

It will warn me of sexually predatory females in Blackpool, awful food in Grimsby and tell me that Helmsby, in North Yorkshire, is one of the prettiest and most beautiful towns in England and has a chip shop that's even better than those in Tipton.

With so much erroneous information about, planning a holiday is harder than working out the plotlines on EastEnders.

And with the value of the pound falling so fast that it's soon going to be worth about the same as the Greek drachma, picking a destination is a challenge.

So I'll do what I always do. Leave it until the last minute, pack a bag on the morning I'm going to travel and fly to wherever the wind may take me. Bon voyage.

By Andy Richardson