America Conor O'CleryIn Barrow there's a Mexican restaurant called Pepe's with a Filipina waitress, a Japanese restaurant run by Koreans and a Northern Lights Restaurant serving Chinese and Italian food. There could very well be an Irish bar, too, if this largely Inupiat Eskimo town of 4,800 people deep inside the Arctic Circle wasn't officially "dry".
Located on the northern tip of Alaska, Barrow is accessible only by air, or by sea during the summer months. It is not much more than a cluster of single-storey homes and seven churches on the edge of a pristine wilderness stretching for hundreds of miles.
This appears empty but is inhabited by dozens of animal species including polar bears, Arctic foxes and half a million caribou of the Central Arctic and Teshekpuk herds. It is home to scores of birds including snowy owls, Arctic terns and geese.
Just outside town I see several caribou and a fox and several birds, including glaucous gulls and snow buntings and a little group of willow ptarmigans on a snow bank that take off as my guide Bunna Edwardson walks towards them. It is well below freezing, but he is in open-toed sandals.
Bunna likes to show visitors how acclimatised he is to the cold, though he admits that after he jumped into the sea once in a show of bravado, he "wasn't a man for 10 minutes".
He relates proudly how the old ways are still followed in Barrow, which is called Ukpeagvik in his native Inupiat language, meaning "place where snowy owls are hunted" (today they are protected).
Subsistence hunting, fishing and whaling are very still important to the local economy. Many residents who work full- or part-time continue to hunt and fish for much of their food.
The first bowhead whale of the season was harpooned at the end of April by whalers in sealskin boats who took advantage of a windbreak in the sea ice.
The day I am there the fourth bowhead is hauled in across the pack ice by a few hundred volunteers who converge in pickups and snowmobiles and stay around to help themselves as the eight-metre mammal is butchered on the shore.
Unlike other native communities Barrow is well developed. It has four hotels, a big supermarket, cable television, flush toilets and a single traffic light that is always green unless someone wants to cross the road. Its homes are heated by gas, piped in from a nearby field.
This vast northeastern part of Alaska, a wilderness about the size of Ireland, is so rich in gas and oil that it is officially called the National Petroleum Reserve.
It is even bigger than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to the east, which has gained world attention as a symbol of the battle between development and conservation.
Drilling for oil in ANWR is on the agenda of the Bush administration despite 25 years of successful opposition, particularly from the Gwich'in Nation, indigenous people whose way of life is tied to the 130,000-strong porcupine caribou herd.
But the debate over ANWR has diverted attention from the prospect of widespread drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve, where wildlife and fish provide a living for more than a dozen Inuit villages, and where the tundra is so fragile that only vehicles equipped with immense balloon tyres can cross it without doing permanent damage.
The area was designated as a potential source of oil for the US by president Warren Harding in 1923 but remained undeveloped until seven years ago when the Clinton administration opened a tract of land for oil exploration near Barrow. It specifically excluded the Teshekpuk Lake area, the world's most important moulting ground for the Pacific black brant and other geese.
Since then 17 exploratory wells have been drilled. Last year the Bush administration extended the area for oil exploration and five companies have since bought leases to develop the northwest sector of the reserve bordering on Prudhoe Bay.
The area around Prudhoe Bay where the oil rush began in 1968 is now an industrial complex, pumping oil along a 1,300km pipeline across Alaska.
Despite "clean" technology there is on average at least one oil spill a day, and as much nitrogen oxide pollutes the air as in an average American city.
Development of the sensitive areas excluded by the Clinton plan was delayed last month after protests from the Inupiat and Yupik native people, led by George Ahmaogak, the Barrow-based mayor of the North Borough, which encompasses both reserves.
The mayor is no opponent of drilling. He maintains that coexistence with oil has brought high-quality education and a strong economy.
But Ahmaogak protested that the Bush plan would utterly fail to protect the "internationally significant wildlife resources" of the Teshekpuk Lake area.
"A lot of families are split over the oil," says Morgan Sakeagak, a friend of Bunna, as we drive around trying (in vain) to find the first snowy owl of the spring that they spotted on a telegraph pole the day before.
"In some families one goes to school, one goes to live the old ways," he says. Morgan admits that he himself is conflicted.
He loves the solitude and the pristine remoteness of the Arctic. But he also enjoys the amenities of Barrow that allow him to indulge his craze for cribbage by challenging competitors in London on the internet, and to enjoy an occasional "tacos on the tundra" in Pepe's restaurant.