RIYADH, 2 July 2005 — Six Saudi students left Riyadh on Wednesday for a stopover in Britain before leaving next week for Oslo from where they will proceed to the remote arctic island of Svalbard.

The boys, aged between 13 and 14, are students from two prestigious Saudi schools in Riyadh.

The students chosen for the challenge are: Abdullah Sultan Al Shalhoob; Bandar Al Shamikh; Muhammed Saud Al Salih; Muhammed Al Rajhi; Saud Hamad Al Sagri and Sultan Al Qahtani.

On arrival in London, they were transferred to Windlesham House Schools (WHS) in West Sussex.

Yesterday, the six Saudi explorers met for the first time with their counterparts, four British schoolboys from WHS: Dichon Cole, Ed Maclachian, Hugo Glover, and Tommy Fitzalan Howard.

On July 3, the team will fly north from London to Oslo, and then to the arctic island of Svalbard for a 14-day expedition.

These schoolboys were selected by the British teacher Mark Evans who now teaches at WHS.

The journey to Svalbard is the first of a series of annual ventures linked to the Connecting Cultures initiative, founded by Evans. The initiative aims at promoting cultural awareness and understanding between young people in UK and Saudi Arabia through challenging wilderness journeys.

On arrival, the explorers will spend two nights in log cabins sleeping on reindeer skins and help train young husky dogs, before traveling by boat into the wilderness. They will live in tents for ten days close to a huge glacier that reaches into the sea.

The camp will act as a base for daily hikes with the students studying the area as they travel. They will walk many hours daily. For the entire period of their stay the sun will not dip below the horizon. The explorers will be encouraged whenever possible, to sketch, keep a daily diary and take pictures so that they can lecture on their experience when they return.

Svalbard is in an archipelago off Northern Europe that includes Spitsbergen and Bjornoya (Bear Island), between the Arctic Ocean, Barents Sea, Greenland Sea, and Norwegian Sea to the north of Norway at 78 00 N, 20 00 E.

It is a wild area with rugged mountains; much of high land is covered in ice with the slightly more temperate west coast is clear of ice about one-half of the year. The permanent population of about 2,000 live on the export of coal, iron ore, copper, zinc, phosphate and fish.

In July, the island will be green and thousands of birds and wildlife including, reindeer, walrus and arctic fox, will be making the most of the short summer with temperatures ranging between 3 and 12 degrees C.