Pole to Pole

Murmansk--->Helsinki. And a drink.

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:53:05 GMT

I'm posting this out of order, and also unedited and so on. The Loyal Readership has several missing days of entries coming (WALRUS LOVE ALERT!!!)(distant, worried-about-nuclear-icebreaker walruses).

These tour travel days are gruelling marathons of waiting, with sporadic deadlines. E and I left the rubber boots loaned by Quark outside the door before we went to bed (as well as hanging the "Do not disturb" sign out, something we need to do more often than not... people keep buying us drinks, and then we buy each other drinks, and then, inevitably, intense snoring follows, the kind that only a polar bear can disrupt.) Leaving is a gradual attrition, in some ways---a day or so ago we had to turn in the fluffy bathrobes and slippers---and a gradual accrual, in others, as we've been given now not only parkas (in Public Works Yellow) but a cute itty bitty ditty bag to tote stuff home in and a cute mini desk clock from the company that runs the "hotel" side of things---that's care and feeding of passengers.

We did most of our packing yesterday. My practice is to pack as much as possible the night before and then zip up the bags. Overnight, a miraculous compression occurs, and no matter how full the bag might have seemed, I can fit in the last odd articles like toothbrush and pyjamas. Neither E nor I bought stuff but the parka takes up space. In heroic packing achievement, I get down to two bags having come with three, and that's including the packed parka. My carry-on is all optics and things with plugs. When I open the duffel bag, a new universe will be born from the expansion of the matter within.

But you're not here to read about packing! Exotic locales are what this blog is about. The ship arrived in Murmansk on the morning tide, just as the Kapitan Khlebnikov had floated into Fremantle at the right moment---and these are icebreakers, which I think are relatively shallow-draft ships for their size, so getting the Russian Navy out of Murmansk must require some fine footwork. Tugboats arrive and push their bows against our ship's side to place it at the dock, just where it was before, next door to the Russian aircraft carrier which tourists are not supposed to photograph. We have some fairly stupid tourists in our group, though. This port is home to many icebreakers and it has a rather familial feel with all the unwieldy, square, squat ships---I am no expert, but I think a few of them were Sorokin-class siblings of Kapitan Khlebnikov---tied up along the docks and moored out in the river.

Some of our waiting is expedited by the ship's passenger clocks leaping ahead two hours just after breakfast. The crew runs on their own clock, Moscow time I believe, and does not participate in the finagling of time to make passengers comfortable. It is hardly necessary to have the difference---in the Arctic summer, the 24-hour light means that it does not matter which arbitrary moment you declare to be noon. The two-hour jump compresses time to lunch, also, which is served at 13:00 (new style). Before lunch, we give our luggage a last zip and leave it in the passageway outside the cabin. After lunch, which uses up half an hour, we wait and wait some more, and the buses to carry the passengers on an exciting city tour of Murmansk and its local museum arrive at last in stages, around 15:00 or 15:30.

While doing my share of waiting, I read a book from the ship's small and antique library, written by a Swedish-Finnish woman who had been married to a doctor who went to Greenland in the 1950's to do research on neuroses among the native Greenlanders, for example, fear of kayaks. Her author photo, posed glamorously in snow wearing formfitting white ski pants, white turtleneck, and white fur, with long dark hair blowing in the wind, is not at all what one might expect. (The title of this, if you care to look in the library, is A Doctor's Wife in Greenland.) She vacillates unpredictably between seeing the Inuit as people and seeing them as child-like or naive or innocent---her (and her husband's) psychological insights are locked in the academic psychology of their time, and it doesn't appear to occur to them that, for example, not dwelling on a failed hunt is a good thing in an environment where most hunts won't be successful.

Veterans of bus tours from the Fram trip last year, E and I are stoic as we climbed on the bus. We fail to notice at once that it was named "Sputnik," because we are saying goodbye. We are provisioned with chocolate, nuts, and snack bars from the stash we never ate our way through on ship, and though we have given away some of our embarrassing surplus of sugar and alcohol to needy expedition staffers we still have too much. As for the stoicism, we know that our charter flight is supposed to take off around 21:30 and figure we just had to endure until then.

It begins raining as the bus negotiates the port security. In vain we try to get the idiot on the bus filming the no photographing sign which is a camera with a red bar through it as well as the Russian Navy's aircraft carrier to stop doing that, as the whole party will be delayed if the security staff notices. Luckily the guards turn a blind eye, and we are soon at a memorial site dedicated to the siege of Murmansk, commemorating also Russia's twelve "Hero Cities" of the war---the cities that took the worst pounding and the worst losses. Plain and huge, a fine example of the Art Deco Soviet school, the statue with its eternal flame, wreaths, and simple row of plaques listing the city names is dignified and as monumental as the great loss of life in the siege deserves. It is nicknamed "Alyosha" and dates from 1985. On brighter days, the views from there must be grand, and the statue must be visible for miles. It is certainly not the worst memorial we have endured.

From the memorial, we're carried to the local Natural History Museum, which is like many other town museums. Our guide, Mike, begins by telling us that we can take off our clothes. Since his English is otherwise perfectly accurate, perhaps he was using that to get the group's attention? Mike collects about 25 passengers and sets off, and as we turned into the first hall of stuffed and mounted animals we are rushed by a group of about ten elderly women from the tour. It seems that the forty-five-minute interval between leaving the ship and arriving at the museum have been too long and all of them have to use the toilet, and as Sue Currie had warned that it might be a dreaded foreign one their needs must be genuine and dire. It puts me in mind of those Adélie penguins charging pell-mell through the emperor penguin colony in Antarctica. Once that is sorted, we carry on viewing the glass cases of elk, fox, wolverine, beaver, birds, and fishes. The museum has an interesting mineral collection, for those who like minerals; it includes examples all of the 1000 minerals found in the Murmansk district, and the guide said that 200 of those are endemic to the area, found nowhere else. We are extremely rushed in going through the collections, but it appears to be a good representation of the town's history; it includes what looked like sympathetic and accurate exhibits about the Sami and the Pomors and an exhibit about the war and the siege. On the ground floor is a show of recent photographs, which we have no time to study.

Certain passengers' enormous anxiety about meals and toilets is assuaged (remember, the passengers have eaten breakfast and then lunch two hours later) by the reason for the rushed museum visit: we are taken to a restaurant for "tea" in the English "substantial meal eaten at about 17:00" sense of "tea." The bus trundles through town (I am getting to know a certain supermarket, as it is a word I can spell out in Russian and we have passed it four or five times already) to a hotel. In parkas and fleece and carrying knapsacks, the untidy group traipses through the glossy lobby and down a little hallway into... into... well...

E and I are pretty sure it was a strip club. The glowing green sign beside the door forbids sneakers and guns.

The contrast between the passengers and the industrial, styled interior decor is hilarious. From an enormous buffet set up at the edge of the dance floor and along the bar, we eat delicious soup which has been sharpened with a shot of lemon or vinegar, little pancakes, and excellent black bread. Beating the rush, E and I make for the toilets, and then are able to authoritatively convince several others that they are foreign toilets and that payment is required for toilet paper. Very nicely done foreign toilets, we say, you know, all marble and nice materials but... but... Sue Currie has done half the work for us already in the previous day's briefing. They are ready to believe. The expressions on our victims' faces are worth the bus tour all by themselves.

After our meal, E and I spot strip clubby looking bars everywhere as the bus totes us along to the airport. (We have never been so ready to get to an airport in our lives.) Murmansk, the Norfolk of the North: full of young Navy guys looking for something to do in a few hours on the town. It seems to involve booze (available in kiosks at bus stops, with flowers and vibrantly-colored stuffed animals) and maybe a little electronics shopping.

The airport presents a wholly different face to departing passengers. It is arranged for painless waiting. Our checked bags have been effortlessly whisked from the ship to the airport, we do not need to claim them or take them through security or expend physical effort at all. We sit in chairs trying to get the advertised wifi to work (fail) and coveting the travel-sized roulette wheel in the gift shop (closed, fortunately). There is a nifty mural of sun and moon and planets and stars, which I forget to photograph in the excitement of getting into the queue for screening of carry-ons, check-in, passport control, and all that. When the incoming group of passengers arrives, to pass unseen through the other, Beckettish, side of the building, restlessness ripples through the departing herd. We sit in the departure lounge with some of buddies, swapping iPods randomly and admiring each others' taste in music (E knits simultaneously, so talented). Shockingly, contrary to his assertions, D does not have only Led Zeppelin on his iPod.

Our flight to Helsinki is brief and smooth, and our passage through the airport---thanks to the tour group dealing with the luggage---is also brief and smooth. From the bus, we glimpse a sunset of Assyrian splendor, purple and gold, with rays of orange light streaming in a semicircle. An hour after landing, E and I have our room, our internet connection, and our bags, have Skyped home, and are heading to the bar for a drink made out of raspberry vodka, with extra raspberries. We are relieved today is over. Nothing went wrong. But tomorrow is another day...

ETA: forgot to add that the hotel bar was amusing mainly because the TV was on, showing a Finnish Candid Camera program whose crux was unexpected female nudity. E and I laughed ourselves silly watching the American retirees' eyes get bigger and bigger as they encountered Television With Breasts Not On Pay Per View! Typical was a gym setup in which a very attractive blonde model, wearing a loose and unrevealing shirt apparently made out of a couple of kleenex (loose shoulder fastenings, no side seams), offered to play a ping-pong match with a succession of young male gym-goers. After a few volleys, a blast of air would come from somewhere and her shirt would blow off. Interestingly, the men almost invariably clutched their faces and covered their eyes, seared by the sight of boobies! The fact that the woman started laughing at them made them more comfortable and most managed to confront the breasts with direct gaze after steeling themselves. Similar tricks were played in a park at a "lottery machine" etc. Stupid show, but the perfect audience.

Hooker Island, Rubini Rock and Tikhaya Bukhta; and Cape Flora

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:04:05 GMT

At 1:00 in the morning, another polar bear strolls past the ship. What with the landing and the fog, we haven't seen one since yesterday morning.

The ship follows this bear — another subadult male, probably — for an hour, and the bear wants very much to get away from the ship.

Shortly after we meet him, he is panting with exertion. Polar bears are not designed to hurry; their thick fur and blubber insulate them so well that they are at great risk of overheating.

He leaps over narrow leads in the ice and steps on and off ice floes trying to escape the noisy big thing following him around.

I am relieved when, after an hour and a half of the ship stalking him, he's allowed to strike off over the ice by himself.

Tikhaya Bukhta means "Quiet Bay" and the bay is tranquil: its still water, very deep, allows the ship to draw very near Rubini Rock. The water really is that color this morning.

Rubini Rock is an exceptionally resistant chunk of columnar basalt, deformed after it formed, whose basalt columns twist in every direction — the complex form may be a factor in its resistance to erosion by glaciation. It looks like an knotted multi-strand cable made of stone.

The blunt basalt column-ends and long columns on their sides form ideal nooks and shelves for nesting seabirds.

It is so sheer that the ship can approach fairly closely.

The season is early and the guillemots and auks are just getting going, but the cliffs are also home to glaucous gulls (near the top), which are larger than the others and which prey on their eggs and chicks;

kittiwakes (intermixed with the guillemots, but in clumps);

and skuas, and they seem to be sitting on actual nests, constructions of dried grass visible under them. I don't think the guillemots and auks have eggs quite yet — but soon — they are occupying their brooding spots to protect them from encroachment by other birds.

A bird will return to the same place on the cliff year after year, particularly if it has successfully fledged a chick there. Looking at the cliff, one can easily discern that there are better, more protected locations and suboptimal, exposed ones. A crevice into which the egg and the later chick can be tucked while shielded by the parent bird's body against skua and gull attacks is ideal. The auks seem to prefer the highest reaches of the cliffs and a bit of the green domed top of the rock that is not so steep as to prevent plants from growing. The birds' guano has accumulated there and in crevices of the rocks and supports a thin-looking cover of plants. This is an ideal nesting site for these sea-birds; the extreme verticality of the cliffs makes them unapproachable by anything without wings.

The sound of the bird colony is cacophonous and exuberant; the different species call at different pitches and they are all shouting to be heard over one another, rather like the people in the ship's dining room.

The ship does not moor, but uses the engines to move very slowly around the rock, allowing passengers to watch the birds for about three-quarters of an hour; yet most people have left the decks after 15 or so minutes. The rock itself is as striking as the birds it hosts; its saddled top and curved sides are mementos of glaciation, and it must be a fluke that this little knob survived, sticking up with sheer sides, from the bottom of the glacial valley.

An hour later we are going ashore using the helicopter, landing on Hooker Island at another historic site: Sedova Station.

Doomed polar explorer Georgiy Sedov's expedition overwintered at Tikhaya Bukhta during the 1913-1914 winter, and subsequently the Soviet Union maintained a radio station at the same location from 1929 until 1963. (This radio station is most remarkable for having had radio contact for a few minutes on 12 January 1932 with the Byrd expedition's radio station, though not Byrd himself, located on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica!) We're told that Hooker Island is the one in the archipelago that has been most visited by the Russians for this reason.

The forbidding and inhospitable nature of most of the Franz Josef Land islands accounts for the repeated occurrences of the same locations in the historical accounts of exploration and exploitation. Sedov's attempt on the North Pole is a sad tale of scurvy and frostbite; he and his party set out in February, when Sedov was already ill, and he died on 5 March 1914. His men turned back at once, carrying his body with them, and interred him under a small cairn with a flag planted on top. The shore of Tikhaya Bukhta, therefore, is littered with various eras' remains, including graves from the Sedov expedition and a more recent one of a pilot from the radio station years. Machinist I. A. Zander died of scurvy early in 1914.

Grave of Sedov Expedition machinist I. A. Zander, who died in early 1914 of scurvy; Sedov's grave, with a its Russian cross (rebuilt in 1931) is in the background:

Grave of Peter Ivanovich Fotiev, a pilot, who died here 12 February 1948:

In this frozen land, graves are cairns, hacked into the frost-patterned ground and heaped with ice-tumbled stones. Typical circulation patterns are visible in areas that aren't covered with meltwater or ice and snow. Severe as the environment is, you can see that the low spots between the upraised, finer soils are slightly more hospitable to mosses and plants. Tiny differences mean life or death here.

Where the snow and ice have thawed, a layer of water and mud sits on the permafrost. The mosses and lichens are brilliantly vibrant in the monochrome landscape &mdash especially monochrome on this day of low-hanging mist.

Thawing Arctic peat-boggy ground releases methane, produced by rotting vegetation. Standing and watching a puddle for a while, you can see it bubble.

Slightly drier areas support the Arctic willow. This is a sub-sub-dwarf sized tree, but it's producing pollen already.

How small? This small.

This is the same plant that, a little farther south in a fractionally less severe climate, grows knee-high. Here, the environment is so severe that it stays two or three centimeters above the ground, max. This plant's evolved adaptation to cold and aridity, its exploitation of the most marginal niche imaginable, is as amazing as an Emperor penguin's habits.

The Svalbard poppy is a perennial, but though the clump can grow each year, it reproduces by scattering seeds. The early season flowers come one short, stubby stems, contrasting so much with last year's straggling seed-heads that they look like two different plants. A poppy that's still dormant looks like a skeletal, tentacled monster!

The radio station was a large one. The buildings include a hangar, a clinic, an outhouse, a windmill, a radio mast.

It reminds me quite a lot of Qullissat in Greenland, another ghost town. Like Qullissat, odds and ends of abandoned domesticity litter the landscape. E tells me she saw a pair of frozen long johns, board stiff, on the shore, and I find a kettle, milk cans, an old stove, a razor-sharpener for a straight razor (D identifies this readily), a mattress, all jammed into a building whose windows are all broken and whose door is eternally sealed with a scowling Soviet-era padlock.

The buildings, their knotty wood weathered to silver and losing strips of tarpaper with every storm, still have the numbers on their outer boards to assist in assembly: they were prefabs knocked down and brought here. They have the poignancy of all abandoned places — why were these things left behind? — and it is likely that they will be here indefinitely, like Nansen and Johansen's useful log. I hope the tourists brought here on these cruises have not pilfered anything. I've read that scientific teams still use the place from time to time. It might be fun to return in milder weather and, if one of the buildings is still a bit weatherproof, set up a little "museum" like the one at Qullissat. At the moment, most of the buildings are full of snow.

The bay is quiet but the birds on the cliffs above it, nearly invisible in the fog, are in a raving frenzy. It is spring, it is time to claim a nest site, time to mate. Little auks' mating yodels sound much like rockhopper or chinstrap penguins' and another similarity to the penguins is that a little auk doing a display will set off sympathetic displays all over the colony. The kittiwakes are courting, too, at a higher pitch, a shrill thready line of notes nearly drowned out by the exuberant auks. As at Rubini Rock across the bay, here the little auks and guillemots are just settling in for the breeding season. The snow bunting is here also, pinging among the rocks and waiting for his mate, less elusive than yesterday's.

The relatively favorable weather is allowing us to make a nearly comprehensive tour of the historical sites of Franz Josef Land: the ship repositions during lunch and in the late afternoon, we are brought by helicopter to Cape Flora.

En route:

Cape Flora has been the jumping-off point for many schemes and expeditions, but it is most famous for two things: the Jackson-Harmsworth scientific expedition of 1894-1897 was based there, and when Fridtjof Nansen's kayak was holed by a walrus as he and Hjalmar Johansen were setting out to paddle from Franz Josef Land to Novaya Zemlaya, it happened just off Cape Flora. Nansen and Johansen were able to get to shore before the kayak sank, and just before they set off again after repairing the kayak, Nansen heard a dog bark. Walking inland a little ways, he found the dog: Frederick Jackson's dog; and he found his professional colleague Jackson too, who didn't recognize him at first, he was so begrimed after a winter of sitting over a small stove burning sooty blubber. Nansen and Johansen were saved a laborious further journey and returned to Norway on the expedition's supply ship. A strange accident of coincidence, but probably not the strangest in all the history of humans in the Arctic — the paucity of places and paths directs people together.

At this site are many fewer building remains than at Tikhaya Bukhta, which is a shame; a subsequent (disastrously badly-organized) expedition asked Jackson's permission to borrow and reuse some of the buildings elsewhere, so only foundation outlines remain. (If memory serves me, the Sedov Expedition, desperately short on fuel, raided the place for wood to burn to fire their steam engines, also.) Here remains, though, a great boulder on the beach, which Nansen is said to have climbed up on to sit and brood from time to time, a feat which E and I considered but had to abandon because of our unwieldy and awkward rubber boots.

Walking around the boulder, we found the remains of a stairway, hinting that perhaps Nansen wasn't actually bouldering whenever he wanted a quiet think.

The sweeping, curved slopes of scree below Cape Flora's basalt cliffs are particularly pleasing to look at, and there is indeed more plant life there than at other locations.

It is still too early for most of the flowering plants to be greening up, but we found beautifully colored mosses and saxifrages.

We scrambled up the steep slope of fractured basalt chunks, climbing for a better view. The grassed-over scree slope below the cliffs shows stone runs (another freeze-and-thaw phenomenon, sorting the particles of the soil) similar to the stone runs of the Falklands.

It hardly seemed possibly that I was really in this remote place, ice and water shifting under the chiaroscuro light, my back pressed into the rock while the wind stirs bleached grasses, the cliffs across the bay receding, coming in and out of view.

The local snow bunting was less shy than others, and paused several times long enough for a photo.

And as the fog lifted during the afternoon, the land, sea, and ice because more and more spectacular, particularly from the lower parts of the vegetation-covered slopes below the cliffs. It is a fascinating place to walk around and look at things, and I wish we had had four hours there instead of two.

Not an art installation, but as good as one.

The rolls of cloud are thickening; fog is coming again. It's time to leave in the helicopter, looking back, looking around...

Worryingly, I have discovered that a lot of my memory cards are bad — they're not readable and not formattable. Fortunately enough are unaffected that I'm not short, as none are available on the ship! I checked them all before I left, and they were all readable then. Maybe they were exposed to something seriously magnetic in the repeated airport screenings of my journey to Helsinki.

Cape Norway

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 23:58:18 GMT

At 1:00 the loudspeaker in our cabin crackles tactfully several times and then a soft ladylike voice, Susan Currie, gently breaks the news that a polar bear is on the ice outside the ship, at "11:00". That means it's on the port side, and so E and I scramble out of our bunks and sit in the wide-open portholes, on the cold radiator, shivering in pajamas and sweaters as we photograph the bear.

The bear is confused by the ship. It's all wrong. We see from his tracks in the snow that he had been sauntering along minding his business, which would be looking for seals, when he saw the ship and did an about-face. Now he walks away, but the ship follows very slowly, neither drawing closer nor moving away.

The bear, a sub-adult male, looks over his shoulder often at the novel nuisance. He travels steadily away over pressure ridges.

Suddenly the bear pauses in his tracks. He looks intently — or rather, sniffs — at a patch of snow, rigid and no longer noticing the ship. And then he moves, lightning-fast, and an instant later he's gotten a seal.

Female ringed seals build dens beneath the snow to bear their pups and shelter them after birth, the dens being atop a breathing-hole in the ice to allow the seals access. After her pup leaves the ice and enters the water through the hole, the seal might continue to use the den for a while to rest, though she will use other breathing holes as well. Polar bears know this and can smell, through the snow, whether there is a seal present in the den. This one got very lucky: the seal was probably confused by the vibrations and sounds of the ship, and the bear wouldn't have walked that way if he were not trying to avoid the big noisy smelly thing. He has gotten a meal out of it.

Now the bear would like to eat the seal, but sub-adult bears are sometimes robbed of their kills by older, dominant bears. The bear considers the ship a problem and picks up his seal to lug it off.

He walks for a very long distance with the seal — perhaps a kilometer — trying to escape the ship, which might be a threat. The ship follows. The bear walks smoothly, leaping easily from one sheet of ice, from one floe, to another, a little more quickly than is comfortable: we can see that he's panting, and I begin to feel that observation has become harassment. At one point he breaks into a trot, something polar bears do only rarely; they overheat fast. He goes over five or six pressure ridges and over three or four leads until he gives up. This thing is following him and he wants to eat his seal. He stands, watching the ship warily, and gulps strips of blubber from the seal.

Ivory gulls live by scavenging polar bears' kills; our bear is instantly joined by three, one of whom is bold enough to dodge in for a scrap before the bear is anything like finished eating.

The others, less daring, wait a small distance away.

The bear eats as the shadow of the ship's stack passes him, lifting his head for another suspicious glance.

It's apparently not interested in taking his seal, so he returns to eating. But the Russian crew move the ship backward again, backward and forward several times. At last the bear's gotten a few bites down and he's had enough. He picks up his seal carcass and lugs it off again, delighting the ivory gulls, who peck at the bloody snow.

The ship waits for a moment, the bear settles behind a pressure ridge to eating again, and then the ship moves on. The bear has eaten all of the blubber, which is the highest-quality food from the seal first. A well-fed bear (a good hunter) would leave the rest; this one means to eat it all.

We get back to bed around 2:30; but at 6:00 another call comes. The ship has arrived at the island on whose shores we're to be landing today, and a mother bear with twin cubs is on the ice outside.

No, really: here they are, Highly Magnified with a 300mm lens on a digital Nikon:

The cubs will have been born sometime around December and thus are about six months old. They are smaller copies of their mother and imitate her steady walk over the snow — except that they wander from side to side, flop down to wrestle or curl up together, sit stubbornly and then panic and gallop toward mother, and generally act like cranky little bears. When the mother, who is busy hunting, gets too far away, they run to get to her. A few times she goes back to collect them, or waits for them, and they seize the opportunity to suckle for a few minutes. The cubs are eating meat from their mother's kills already, but (if I remember correctly) will continue to suckle for another year.

Eight seals have appeared, distant dark punctuation, on the ice behind the ship. The mother bear is aware of the ship, and moves slowly away from it as she sweeps the ice for buried seal breathing holes, but she can't sneak up on a resting seal, certainly not with two cubs trailing along behind her. Several times she halts for a long still-stalk, but has no luck; we watch from the ship, through binoculars, but the ship stays its distance this time.

The mother bear sniffs from time to time toward the island, also: another bear is walking along the shore. This could be a threat to her cubs. The other bear, though, goes out of sight behind a heap of ice cast up by winds and tides, and we can't see him. We watch the bears for more than two hours and then have to rush to get ready for the landing.

The sound of the helicopter drives the bears away at a trot, last seen hurrying to the other end of the bay over the ice. We are lifted over the sparkling ice to Cape Norway.

There are a surprisingly large number of important historical sites in Franz Josef Land, and Cape Norway is one of the most interesting. Here, after an arduous journey over the sea ice in a failed attempt to reach the North Pole, Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen came to land and overwintered. Their hut was primitive, but to them, after living on the ice in tents, it offered sufficient comfort and protection to bring them through the winter. Their hunting skills and the perennial curiosity of polar bears ensured them a steady supply of food, as they had few provisions left from the Fram. They spent the Arctic winter waiting for spring and repairing their gear, and left in kayaks when the ice began to break up, on 19 May 1896.

The hut was partially dug into the ground for better protection, made of the basalt rock that is the principal material of Franz Josef Land. Nansen and Johansen were fortunate to find a log washed up on the beach, so they were able to have a roof to their hut, made of walrus hide stretched over the log and weighted down with rocks. They found no other wood or firewood worth mentioning, and it seems that cutting peat was probably not practical given the permafrost. A spare column with a plaque memorializing their stay now stands near the site of the hut, which is still quite recognizable.

If undisturbed, the log will lie where it has fallen nearly forever; wood decays very slowly in the Arctic.

The site of the hut is a narrow band of flat tundra-like land (tending to be boggy) backed by scree slopes below basalt cliffs occupied, at this time of year, by breeding seabirds.

The weather here is severe enough to discourage any but the hardiest plants; it is apparently too harsh for the willow and birch that spread across Svalbard. Svalbard is warmed slightly by the passing North Atlantic Drift current, which does extend farther east but is greatly attenuated by the time it reaches Franz Josef Land. Today the sun is piercingly bright and I suspect that if we could stay for a few more hours, we'd be able to watch individual plants pop up and open their flowers. At any rate, there are lichens and colorful mosses;

there are the tiny, perfect Arctic plants

including bog-cotton (not yet green),

saxifrages,

our old friends the Svalbard poppies,

and ranunculus;

and there are some common eiders floating offshore. (Later, I hear that someone spotted a dunlin.)

Another sound ripples through — no, not the drone of inane tourists discussing money (this seems a particularly American vice, by the way) — it's a trilling, homely-sounding series of distinctively limpid and perfect notes. Is one of the security guards a really good whistler, or do I hear a perching bird of some kind? I ask Kara Weller. She doesn't dismiss out of hand the possibility of a joking Russian security guard, but listens a moment and then says that what we hear, flitting here and there amongst the rocks, is a snow bunting. He sings in spring and summer together, lightly fluttering in short hops across the hillside to announce his presence.

The dripping ice and snow puddle on the permafrost. We sun ourselves on the dry slopes.

A front is coming in, and lenticular clouds form downwind of the peaks.

All too soon must we return to the ship, although E and I are incorrigible foot-draggers and go back on the very last helicopter flight.

In the afternoon, the changed weather forces the expedition team to cancel our scheduled landing at Payer Island to walk on the island's small ice-cap: just looking out the window, we expect this, because a low fog has socked in the ship since we left Cape Norway and visibility is nil. So the sunny morning at Cape Norway is today's highlight, and the combination of the historical excitement of the place and its natural beauty (perhaps more obvious to those of us not spending the winter in a walrus-roofed hut made of cobbles) make today the best imaginable of the trip so far for me.

A travel day, heading south

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 23:56:20 GMT

Following the assumed-late night last night, we're spared the expedition leader's wakeup call (and threadbare, sub-Reader's-Digest humorous quotes). A brunch is served instead of lunch.

Today is brilliantly sunny — looking out the window is painful without sunglasses! The snow-covered ice glitters and the water and sky are rich blues. In point of fact the sun has been up all night, high enough above the horizon that we are sweltering in our cabin. The icebreaker's living quarters are made of metal and when the sun plays on them for hours at a time, they become incredibly hot. Dressing in layers becomes challenging; E and I experiment with sleeveless t-shirts and, to go outdoors, have to add wool, polarfleece, and Gore-tex still, because up on the flying bridge where we stand to watch for bears, it's still numbingly cold. Nonetheless, we go out, because out is where there is to go.

Sun makes the deck beside the engine room heat vent an absolute lido. Where are the deck chairs?

We've seen few polar bear tracks since about 27 June, but we are following our own trail almost exactly back south, we should soon be in the zone where there are many seals and many bears. Besides the rapidly-dwindling stock of bears in the gift shop.

Here in Cabin 40, giddy anticipation follows the arrival of two invitations for "Cocktails with the Captain" this evening at 18:45. We will have to get our best Polarfleece out for this, to be sure. Unsurprisingly, some of the women have not only traveled with dress clothing, but with jewelry, including "good" jewelry (this, overheard on the plane as an item not needing to be declared to Russian Customs). A lot of the men have packed jackets, but not ties. These people have a lot more luggage than we do.

We can't flatter ourselves that the captain, a really busy guy, wants to make our acquaintance; he's been very courteously hosting drinks when circumstances permit for small groups of people all through the trip. I guess our number is up today. We still haven't had an engine-room tour, though, and E wants to be sure not to miss out on that.

The captain's cocktail party is stiffly formal, held in a conference room off the bridge; the security guards loom by the room's one doorway, and the guests are seated around a long table to sip glasses of wine and nibble little hors d'oeuvres and snacks. Unmemorable questions are asked by the guests and politely answered by the captain; it's not a situation conducive to easy conversation. At the end, a queue forms for photos.

We spend most of the day looking in vain for polar bears, seals, anything moving: we see little auks alone or in "couples and fews and severals," but as we are still in heavy ice and the open leads are very limited, this is not surprising.

Big rafts of the alcids and other colonial birds, in general I think, occur only near near the colonies as foraging groups rendezvous to leave and arrive together. Being in a group lessens each bird's chance of being targeted by a skua. Thus, as the ship breaks through the ice beside a lead, we are likely to see a single little auk or guillemot burst away out of the water or dive underneath to escape the disturbance.

We will arrive in Franz Josef Land tomorrow, no question about it — this is a certainty, as the ship is effectively unstoppable. Victoria Salem presents another excellent history lecture, this time on the discovery, or gradual mapping and comprehension, of the archipelago of icy islands named after the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Sources from a century ago are still among the best information available about this little-visited place; it resembles Svalbard and is not far from it, but as far as I know no commercial large-scale coal mining has been carried out. Small seams at the surface have been exploited by expeditions, over the centuries, for fuel. Salem tells us that in researching her lecture she found little or nothing in print about Franz Josef Land and had to resort to the British Library for century-old publications about it.

Kara Weller gives a helpful talk on identifying plants we're likely to see; Arctic plants are very similar or identical across the world, as the conditions are so difficult few plants can make it. At this very early season of the year, we're unlikely to see a lot of flowers (but there will be a few), but she calls our attention to lichens and mosses as colorful elements in the landscape, instead of flowers.

Our tea break is distinguished from other tea breaks by the presence of sandwiches instead of large slices of creamy or gelatinous cakes, a very welcome change. The sandwiches are decorated with toothpicks bearing little chefs and assorted (random) national flags.

The best thing we see all day isn't the sandwiches, though: it's a fogbow in the mist beside the ship as we move through a fog bank. Very faint colors are visible in the curve; it varies in completeness with the density and height of the fog and lasts a long time — half an hour or so.

The illuminated fog is strikingly different from fog without sun. The ice glows, no longer dully blank, but luminously transcendent. To stand there in the light, watching the fogbow shimmer, heightens and exhilarates the mind and shortens the breath. It is very beautiful.

In the effulgence, we see bear tracks on the sea ice again...

and as we pass from it, we begin to see many seals hauled out to rest, who flee into the water with scarcely a ripple when the sense the ship coming.

The sun that makes this blue-and-white world so achingly beautiful is also transforming it into reflecting pools of shimmering turquoise meltwater.

Southwards

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:36:33 GMT

Today is as unlike yesterday as can be imagined — we're traveling south, the fog has vanished, and the air is clear and dry. With the sun so bright it's painful to look out the window without sunglasses, the weather is right for helicopter sightseeing.

The ship is returning south in the path it cut going north. It looks like a train traveling along a track.

The ice, on this bright clear day, is beautiful, but I don't notice many people taking photos of it or even looking at it. They're missing the point. The ice is enthralling: the colors, the textures, the strange lack of scale without referents, the almost-predictable patterns of the pressure ridges and cracks, the rhythm of the wind-shaped snow.

Because an odd number of people have come for the ride in the first group, a seat's available. I'm able to get on the first flight, snap photos, and on landing hurry back to the cabin: with most of the passengers rushing about for flights, it's the best moment for a shower. The hot water surges only once. I step out of the bathroom to find the helicopter hanging outside the window, cruising slowly along the ship's side.

The only sight to see out here is the ship itself, so the helicopter buzzes around, the conditions ideal for some very daring close-in flying by the pilots, who appear to be enjoying themselves. Each successive flight comes closer and closer to the sides and bow, hovering, backing, turning with tight control. The closest it comes might be thirty feet, or less; I can read the logos on the jackets I see on the people inside, see patterns on hats and scarves. It is probably more exhilarating to see this performance from the ship than from inside the helicopter — I'm not sure the passengers realize quite how low they are, how close to the ship and the ice!

After the tourist flights are done, the filmmaker John Murray's charter flights go out. For the first shot, the helicopter flies tightly around the ship, Murray filming from the open door, and also farther away. For the second shot, they land on the ice ahead of the ship, perhaps a kilometer or a bit more away, and Murray and his presenter step out on the ice and film as the ship comes directly toward them, crashing through the heavy, smooth ice chosen for this shot. They do several takes, taking off and landing again, the ship steered toward them. On the first, a crack opens between floes and jags toward them, then goes sideways twenty feet from them. They continue filming.

An amusing minidrama has played out around Murray's charter flights: hoping to defray some of the cost, he offered to share them with a few passengers. He had envisioned perhaps five people going — they could take photographs out the windows while he filmed through the open door and got on with his work with his presenter, Charlie Bird. But a great many men who considered themselves very important jumped up and began waving their wallets as soon as the idea was announced; they wanted to go, and they wanted their wives to go too (rather like Life of Brian, that part), and a list of seventeen passengers wanting places developed frighteningly quickly. The cost per person, after all, was to be about $300 — less than the average bar bill on this ship, probably. I put my name in also, and explained to Murray that I wanted to send someone in my stead: professional freelance nature filmmaker and photographer Sue Flood, who happens to be on the staff of the expedition. I asked Flood and she agreed, and the expedition leader agreed also, very pleased. My intention was that the best of Flood's photos would be made available to everyone on the ship, distributed gratis to all the passengers. She might also be able to take some shots of Murray working, she said, for him to use promoting the film. It seemed like a win-win-win situation. However, on the day the flights were to take place, the Quark marketing person, Prisca Campbell, wanted to spike the plan. Her position was that Sue Flood, as an expedition staff member, couldn't leave the ship. The expedition leader said in fact Flood could go with no inconvenience to anyone, that it was arranged that her shift at the Reception Desk would be covered, and he had no problem with any of it.

Campbell then said that, although Flood's present contract doesn't restrict her photographic activities, she (Campbell) didn't want Flood's pictures from the charter flight showing up on Getty Images, where Flood, as a freelancer, places images she wishes to license. Campbell apparently considers all images taken on the trip to be Quark's property — although no contract exists (yet) giving Quark those rights. Apparently Quark has a new, very unattractive-sounding, contract in the works for its expedition staff, restricting them from making photos for their personal use (in other words, professionals like Flood would be workers-for-hire and would not own any photos they took during a trip they were employed on). However, that contract doesn't exist yet. Thus Campbell, vaguely threatening, wanted to hold someone to the terms of a contract that does not exist and has not been signed. I say "vaguely threatening" because there is obviously the implied threat that if a contractor stands her ground and insists that her present contract has no such restriction, she might not be offered another contract next season. There is, of course, no legal standing whatsoever for this behavior; nothing has been signed, and Flood graciously agreed to let Quark use the photos she shot on the flight, imposed upon.

I was shocked to see a marketing person interfering thus with the expedition leader's judgment, and it brings up a question of who is in charge. One thinks of GAP Adventures and the sinking MV Explorer, whose captain had to get authorization from the Toronto corporate office before giving the orders to evacuate passengers and then to abandon ship — wasting precious time and second-guessing the captain. Finally, of course, one can ask: will Quark, since it's claiming ownership of Flood's images, repay the $300 I've paid for Flood's place in the flight? I'll wait and see, and if I get bored, perhaps I'll start that hare. But in the meantime, I've gotten what I wanted out of this: there will be excellent photos of the ship bashing through the ice available for everyone, not just the few big-wallet boys willing to pay for an exclusive.

This digression into current issues in content and copyright seems like an irrelevant distraction from the glittering Arctic. But it's germane: the freelance staff who accompany a tour like this in any position do so in two capacities, contractor and freelancer. A creative-content freelancer lives off the backlist, the stock of material developed over time and resold or licensed. To take that away without significant compensation is wrong, and it's going to affect the quality of photographer available. Having seen fine photographers at work and how they can enhance the experience, I think that's important to the quality overall of the tourist's trip.

In the afternoon, guide Victoria Salem presents her lecture on Fridtjof Nansen's life, a talk previously twice postponed by other events, and Sue Currie talks about the geology of the Arctic, emphasizing the tectonic movements that have formed it and its ridges and basins. She briefly discusses the uncomfortable, infuriating (to me) subject of "who owns the Arctic?" At the end, she shows a hypothetical projection of current continental movements in which the continents end up clumped together again, approximately as they began, in a new Pangaea formation — 750 million years from now. The idea of crustal plates sloshing and bouncing off one another is appealing, even soothing.

In the evening, a "gala dinner" and dance are held. The courses are delicious, the presentations elegant and the cooking excellent. For a few passengers, it's their first encounter with foie gras, truffles, or lobster. A large table orders bottle after bottle of wine and grows noisier and merrier, toasting their achievement at reaching the North Pole. They jump up and run from one end of the table to the other to clink glasses, clutching chairs for support: all the while, we are moving ahead. The ship enters rougher ice and the glasses dance on the tables, the wine and water vibrate in the glasses, and the Russian waitresses (many named Yelena) imperturbably serve cheese and fetch coffee in high heels and short skirts.

My ears are ringing after dinner, the dining room being small, and I skip the dance — which, being described as "cutting the carpet with your tango" doesn't sound like my kind of thing anyway. E is overwhelmed too, and we go to bed early, enjoying the prospect of a slightly later morning than usual tomorrow. Outside our open cabin windows, the ice creaks and cracks and rumbles like thunder, the water sloshes foamily over it, and the sun streams down on the Arctic summer.

90 Degrees, Every Longitude and None

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:34:22 GMT

I spend most of the morning outside on deck, watching our passage through the densest ice of the voyage. This has only slightly slowed down the ship's 75,000-horsepower progress to the North Pole. The ice resents the disturbance and cracks but reluctantly.

The juddering knocks an emergency flare from one of the life preservers beside the bridge and the impact sets it off. Foul-smelling orange smoke drifts along the side of the ship.

We're not in critical proximity to the Pole yet; the bridge is still sparsely manned.

After pressing doggedly through the thick ice, we pass through an area with more open leads and newer pressure ridges. These aren't necessarily a symptom of warming; the tides and currents of the sea lift and shift the ice, and break apart and throw back together its great plates, the floes.

Soon we are in the heavy ice again. On the flying bridge, above the bridge, I stand with E and a few others to watch the ship inexorably crush the ice, reverse, then move ahead more rapidly just beside where it had weakened the ice: a rhythmic forward-back-pause-accelerate-forward surging dance.

When we reach an area of leads, the captain takes the ship beside them, using them to accommodate the ice displaced by the ship's progress.

We watch the compass swing round with each twist of the ship and the longitude numbers flicker madly — all lines of longitude converge at 90 degrees latitude, so you can go round the world in a stride or two. In minutes, sometimes seconds, we're 79°E, 82°E, 126°E, 174°E, then 44°W. The ship's path in the ice swerves like a drunkard's walk, seeking one particular imaginary point among all the other imaginary points.

As the ship is steered around the compass, homing in on the infinitely small 90.0000 point, all the officers are on the bridge, visible from the bow below where the passengers were assembled for a champagne toast.

Are we there yet? Everyone stares at GPS receivers and all have a slightly different answer (thank you for that inaccuracy, US DoD). Still, from chaos arises consensus: not yet, not yet...

We pass through bands of weather. A high, bright sky with sun struggling to break through becomes fog with a closed-in horizon, narrowing the apparent size of the North Pole from vast to a few city blocks. The map is not the territory, but here it's very near: representing the Arctic with the flat whiteness of a piece of paper, slightly crumpled, crossed by a few dark dashed lines, is a fair depiction of the truth.

As the GPS we are watching on the flying bridge reads 89 degrees 59 seconds 56.1 minutes, the bridge decides that the passengers are close enough to the North Pole to celebrate — it's extremely difficult to achieve any position exactly and then hold it for more than a few seconds. (Our slewing around longitudes is entirely irrelevant, by now.)

So the captain sounds the horn, a bone-shaking noise, sparkling wine is poured in glasses on the bow, and on the flying bridge we pour 18-year-old Lagavulin into paper cups (thanks, David!) and toast each other, take a few photos, and go down to join the others.

There is a general air of high spirits, but no one is excessively elevated or jolly. David shares the remains of the Lagavulin, in vain.

I chat with a few people, most notably with Susan Currie with whom I speculate on whether more people had been to the North Pole or the top of Mount Everest. (She thinks Everest; I think the Pole.) I then climb up to the radio room to Iridium-phone my mother and then return to the cabin to check my own GPS.

The ship's bubble system, compressed-air jets all along the sides, is foaming like a jacuzzi. The crew, using them as position thrusters, are adjusting the ship's placement minutely. As I pull the GPS in from the window, where it hangs outside, I see the latitude decimals changing quickly and get my camera ready. Sure enough, a few seconds later the horn sounds again triumphantly as the bridge passes over 90 degrees, and my cabin follows a moment later. I snap the shutter. I have moved over not just an approximate North Pole, an approximate imaginary geometric point of convergence on the surface of the frozen sea, but over the precise nonexistent position.

The Pole conquered, the ship staggers off into the ice, looking for a place to party.

At 89 degrees 58 minutes, the ship's bow is eased into thick, solid ice — "garaged" is the Russian term — where, if the expedition leader deems the conditions safe, passengers will be allowed to leave the ship. The ice is covered with a layer of snow, which softens the pressure ridges and plate boundaries. E has come back to the cabin with the empty whisky bottle and is having a little nap; I've downloaded my photos from the morning. Maybe a nap is a good idea.

A little while later all is prepared: two rifle-carrying guards are posted on the ice, the Quark staff have set up tables, a ladder has been lowered into a slush- and ice-filled gap in the ice at the stern, and a red rope ring has been laid on the ice around a red sign reading "90°N North Pole". The passengers are told to assemble in a circle at the ring for a group celebration of their achievement.

E and I, having become habituated to sleeping through the expedition leader's voice on the PA, must now rise groggily from our much-craved naps and begin repacking ourselves in layers of long underwear, insulation, and windproofing, meaning we are tardy for the official Just-off-the-North-Pole Circle of Self-congratulation, but singing at each other anyway.

Fah who for-aze!
Dah who dor-aze!
Welcome Tourists,
Come this way!

I don't believe anyone paying passage on this ship has achieved anything. We bought tickets, as great an achievement as taking a train to New York or flying to Tokyo: the only difference is the price tag, and even that's pretty moderate, considering. No personal hardship has been borne nor has heroic effort been expended. Had the journey here, even for passengers, been longer or more arduous, I'd be rolling my eyes less, but it is disturbing to see how much people puff themselves up for doing so little.

Speeches are spoken, cheers are cheered, more photos snapped, and the passengers are at liberty to get out there, into this cool, slightly off-North-Pole place, and relate to it. A Breughelian carnival ensues.

Vladimir, a crew member, arrives ceremonially bearing the Russian and Russian Navy flags, then performs asanas on a towel by the swimming hole, raising his body temperature; when he goes in, he strokes back and forth and even dives into the black water beneath the ice chunks covering the surface.

Russian sailors and an officer set up a football pitch in the snow, which is soon trampled and polished to ice, and keep a game going for hours.

A rope — at first a thin blue one, then a real hawser — is dangled from the bow, so people can have their photo taken "towing" the ship.

Snowball duels are fought and snowmen stacked and snow angels attempted in the wet snow. Many, many flags are waved, most notably Russian flags, but others have brought Swiss flags, Beijing Olympics flags (a contingent of Chinese tourists pose nonstop with stuffed plush Olympic mascots and polar bears---they purchased the ship's gift shop's entire stock of toy bears within half an hour of its first opening), a Soviet flag (flying from the gangway beside the Quark flags), and flags I can't identify without the big atlas. Some of them, like the Soviet flag, may be for countries that don't exist.

Though there was a hint of sun a short while ago, fog persists in clinging to the ice; it's not possible to see more than 500 feet from the ship, but the fog is a surface fog and so it is brilliant with sun, we walk on the snowy ice in dazzling depthless and shadowless light.

The rifle-toting security guards don't appear to be scanning for bears; they're looking inward, whistling sharply if people wander too far from the ship, violating unmarked boundaries. For them it's a day spent cat-herding.

Figures become silhouettes fifty feet away and so many people wear identical yellow parkas that the ice around the ship looks, from above, like a scattered set of children's toy figurines. Objects lie here and there: a knapsack, a parka, a stuffed animal, a cigarette end. The ice begins to feel cluttered and crowded with human energy.

Merely turning one's head away from the boisterousness brings back the size and blankness of the icescape. The pressure ridges, some having thrust broken ice pieces up on edge, from a knee-high ten feet or more, zigzag and curve out of sight in the fog. The sun, circling high above the horizon, is a cold white disk behind the clouds and mist, so the ice has hints of form on the ridges and is colorless, only white and dull grey. A few deeper crevices between chunks of ice flash blue, but these are rare. Snow has drifted over and been driven into all the angles and cushioned them. It has covered the cracks and seams between the floes, too, which come into view as the day goes on, in the footworn spaces by the ship. And right beside the ship, where ice blocks have been tipped sideways, a few brown chains of algae are visible, freezing in the air. But away from that tiny area, there is no bird, no seal, nothing, not even a bear's pawprint, to mark the surface of the Arctic ice.

The whine of the ship's generators clouds the silence and shouts down the delicate whisper of wind: noise is another way of establishing territory. Humans don't bring the Arctic anything it needs; it is complete without people. The snowmen that a few tourists persist in sculpting, the names and dates written in the snow, are out of place, inane attempts to domesticate something too big for the sculptors to comfortably comprehend. More significant in domesticating the Arctic are the carbon emissions created by the vehicles that brought us here, our jets and automobiles and electrical power plants.

A meaty, elaborate barbecue meal (there were few takers for the cold salads) including fresh breads, punch, beer, and sugary cookies, is served to the passengers, who sit in rows at the folding pine picnic tables and benches ranked beside the ship. Blonde waitresses made burly in cold-weather gear go to and fro with trays of beer cups.

The Breughel vision is nearly complete here; we want only one more thing, and soon it comes: a wedding. The ceremony is performed a little ways from the ship on the ice, two staff members, Carola and Tobias, having been engaged for some time, realized that the captain can marry them. The captain is charmed to be asked — it's another first for him in a day of firsts — and the bride and groom's friends from the hotel section process from the ship, laughing, bearing trays of glasses and boxes of champagne, and an artificial-flower wreath for the bride. The couple give each other rings made for them by one of the Russian crew members, two-banded circles of gold-colored metal. Afterward, they pose with the wreath on a snowman.

Many of the passengers have retreated to the ship: it's a big world, cold and empty, and the cabins are heated and have hot running water.

The ball game is over. Now a group of Russian crewmen are scooping pure fresh meltwater from the top of the ice into jugs, for later, and using the occasion as an excuse for a wee dram, carefully poured from an inner coat pocket into a shot glass decorated with a flying green hippo. They call it "cognac," but it's sweet as syrup.

There are only a few humans on the ice now. It is time for us to leave, and to take our silly concepts with us.

When the number is down to eight or so, the ship's whistle blows and we go up the gangway, looking back: trodden into the ice and snow, I can see black marks from discarded cigarettes.

Hard engineering and mushy thinking

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:47:13 GMT

This morning: 86 degrees, 38 seconds. The expedition leader in his morning announcement doesn't give a longitude because it doesn't matter, this far north, he says. So draw a straight line from yesterday...

The morning is bright and sunny, so the expedition staff cancel the planned activities (lecture, engine room tour, Tai Chi) and instead arrange for the passengers to go up in the helicopter to photograph the ship.

The ship obligingly starts and stops for landings and takeoffs, but as soon as the helicopter goes up the engines gear up and it begins breaking ice again in a most satisfying way. For these fifteen-minute flights, everyone gets a window seat.

We are allowed to open the windows on the helicopter, and the sun falls on the back of the northbound ship and makes the wake look like turquoise marble.

The white expanse of fairly regular ice and lack of icebergs or other features means that the ship is the only object of focus in the landscape...

I photograph a few ice floes in leads, but essentially the world here is a long whiteness to the horizon, with irregular cracks of dark water, a few brownish algae stains, and the ship's roiled wake of ice chunks.

The helicopter returns us to the ship and collects the next group of sightseers. The brilliant sun brings out the sharp blues in the ice and water, but the clouds on the horizon warn of another fog bank in our near future.

Close up:

In the afternoon, Laurie the expedition leader lectures on nuclear icebreakers, his material being drawn from this one and the Yamal. Essentially this is a nuclear-fired steamship, as the power plant is used to generate steam that drives turbines generating electricity to run the engines. Seawater is used to cool the reactor. An interesting extra feature is the series of vents along the lower hull, which are connected to an air compressor. In order to create a wider lane for passage behind the ship — a larger wake, in effect — compressed air is forced out along the hull, bubbling up and both reducing drag on the ship and creating turbulence that moves ice. This is something that only icebreakers would have, naturally.

Apparently the 50 Years of Victory is setting a speed record for getting to the North Pole, and as it's the captain's first time here in this brand-new ship he's eager to distinguish himself, his vessel, and his crew. That attitude, and the ship's 75,000 HP, mean that this icebreaker is going through 3-meter-plus ice as easily as the Kapitan Khlebnikov (25,000 HP) went through lightly packed floes. The thick, melt-layered pieces of multiyear ice break off the plates as the ship passes through them and slide under or over the ice beside them, or tumble end-up. We appear to slow down only when the course is being adjusted or a particularly heavy pressure ridge is met. "Slowing down" here means going perhaps 8 knots instead of 13 or 15. The ship is amazing.

Laurie's subsequent briefing on the activities planned for the North Pole is rather less fact-packed. Many cringe-inducing things, some of which show a stupendous incapacity for critical thinking on someone's part, will be done. For example, a flagpole will be erected with a line of banners, stretching to the ship, of flags of every nationality represented on board. The North Pole does not belong to anyone, including Russia, and raising a national flag over it brings nationalism to a place that is and must be beyond nations. We are not explorers claiming anything for anyone, nor are we representatives of national governments here in any official capacity. We are tourists in no man's land. The North Pole is not a fixed point on the ice, and has only theoretical existence and geometrical form.

Some of you reading this are thinking, oh, come now, it's only a string of bunting. But how we comport ourselves in these places is important; it shapes not only others' view of the world we're in, but our own views. Quark's flag-waving, collegially multinational though it may seem, precludes the opportunity to remind us that some things belong only to themselves, that some places aren't real even when you're standing on them, and that we are visitors, not owners, at the North Pole and in the world.

Other activities will include a barbecue served on the ice (cold food, hot off the grill!), a chance to take a dip in the sea, and whatever harebrained scheme the artist has come up with. I hear that he has with him a bottle of water from the South Pole, and he planned to pour it out at the North Pole. Very symbolic, and kind of lame as performance conceptual art goes. Also, anyone who's ever dealt with invasive nonnative species finds this idea thoughtless and repellent rather than symbolic of unity and oneness of the world. (It would be higher-concept and more daring if he took an identical bottle, filled it with melt water from the North Pole and set it beside the other, photographed them both to show how there was no visible difference, and then filmed himself drinking the water.) I asked one biologist on the staff about this idea, theoretically, and she found it unobjectionable, feeling that the water was unlikely to be toxic; however, she observed that every biologist would have a different take on it.

The polar activities briefing ended with another cringe-inducing moment: a filmmaker on board wants to charter the helicopter to get a particular shot of the icebreaker for a film he's making (on ship) and he was hoping to share the cost ($3,000 per hour) of a half-hour flight with a few passengers. He misjudged his crowd badly as he was rapidly overwhelmed by rich white guys with big wallets and fat egos who consider themselves photographers equal to the moment. The filmmaker's intention is to get footage of the icebreaker nose-on, breaking ice, and this is amazingly dangerous because the helicopter will land on the ice ahead of the ship and be ready to take off in an instant should one of those cracks travel suddenly underneath it. The filmmaker will be attached by a safety line to the helicopter so he he can film on the ice. (Apparently on a similar shoot in the past, a crack HAS opened, and the filmmaker ended up dangling from his safety line out the open helicopter door above a widening gap in the ice.) Passengers, being inexperienced at derring-do and uninsured for it, are to remain inside the helicopter taking photos through the windows.

Meanwhile, on the flying bridge, someone took the canvas cover off one of the compasses and didn't replace it. I seize the photo op and tie the cover back in place. (The crew do not use these compasses to navigate. Please stop embarrassing me, fellow passengers.)

Weather.

Weather equipment. The deck is wet from fog and misty not-quite-solid precipitation.

Not weather equipment.

Looking toward the bow along Deck 3.

The ice has become heavier and heavier, the plates larger and smoother-looking — from the ship. I don't think it's smooth at all, on the ground, but the ship is so tall it's difficult to see details. The light, too, flattens textures and distances. The seams of the pressure ridges show where plates of ice have broken apart and fused repeatedly, high and snow-covered. This area we're in now is the "permanent" sea ice, formed over several years. Its surface may melt in the summer, but it (shouldn't) melt away altogether — although now, all those rules have changed.

What we see is a long white plain, stretching away in every direction, with ridges formed of chunks of ice and occasional black areas of open leads. The cracks opened by the ship scrawl across the whiteness like writing that both traces our path and leads us.

I saw two or three little auks yesterday. No polar bear tracks were spotted from the ship, nor seal breathing-holes. All the life is under the ice — when the blocks flip over, we see the algae that feeds the entire Arctic food chain.

We visitors carry our food chain with us...no melting snow for water, no stalking seals to shoot, no fear of becoming part of the food chain ourselves, though gossip could take its toll on weaker members of the party.

North polar webcams!

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:41:59 GMT

Just in case you were wondering what the weather's like up there, the Magic of the Internet brings us webcams on a research buoy of the North Polar Environmental Observatory (NPEO) which is drifting in the ice, presently at 84.795°N 0.094°W and heading south.

This is nowhere near Fifty Years of Victory but is nonetheless fascinating.

Location (it's the 2008 Buoy #30065 with the magenta track):

Web cam 1:

Web cam 2:

More information about the webcams and what they are seeing and doing can be found here.

Three days of victory

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:50:29 GMT

82°45' N, 52°28' E

I think my highest north last year was 81 or 82 degrees, when the Polar Pioneer went as far north as was feasible into the summer ice pack, above Svalbard.

It's misty-foggy; Fifty Years of Victory is pushing steadily through heavier ice this morning, making use of many openings, the leads between the plates. Even though the ship breaks ice easily, it's still faster to use the leads when they go in the right direction. The plates of ice are seamed with pressure ridges, some low, some high: lines of tumbled chunks of ice showing where two plates rammed together and fused, or where one plate buckled and crumpled under the force of impact with others. The ice is moved by winds and tides and currents, so it's always shifting — it's not a solid layer anywhere, although the thicker it is, the more resistant to breaking it is.

The fog shrinks the world. It does this everywhere, but here in the ice, without no landscape feature to cue the brain to calculate distance, it makes the world very small indeed. Ten feet beyond the boundary of visibility, a polar bear could stand watching the ship pass; we would not see it.

The icescape flows by. Patches of blue seem more vivid and colorful than they would in brighter light. A crack stretches to the horizon, a few hundred yards away; a kittiwake passes, an object with firm edges aggrandized by the small world.

A dusting of fresh snow on the ice shows some recent polar bear tracks, spotted around 10:00. I haven't seen the numerous seal breathing-holes and tracks today; there are very few birds this far north, too. Arctic seals don't hang around to be looked at by tourists (unlike the cooperative Antarctic seals); I am sure that if any were resting by a breathing hole when the ship approached, they went back in the water and swam away as soon as the disturbance in the ice and water became noticeable. As the day goes on, we see bear tracks but seldom. They live on the ice, but follow the seals, and the seals at this time of year are probably closer to the edges of the ice.

Kara Weller gave a talk on polar bears this morning, describing their physiology and habits. This trip is light on lectures; there are, however, engine room tours coming, so if you have questions about nuclear icebreakers, email them now!

The ship is newly built and newly fitted for passengers, so it includes a lot of little conveniences. In the cabin there are lots of electrical outlets, for example, and it's furnished with a power strip (into which a TV and DVD player are plugged — kind of pointless, I think). The lounge has a big flat-screen TV on which football (soccer) playoffs were watched until we were out of signal range. There are some primitivisms that probably reflect Russian ideas about how things are done: the bathroom is basic, with the worst and most dangerous shower I've seen yet on a boat. No pressure regulator and no thermostat, so the hot water comes in bursts, scalding hot. It can even spurt out after the tap's turned off! A floor heater is on all the time in there, too. We can't control the temperature in the cabin; heat comes and goes at the whim of the crew, although a waterfall noise trickles steadily in the heating pipes. The carpet is spongy stuff chosen, I think, for its nonslip quality. It feels sticky to walk on, like the kitchen floor in a dorm after a party. But it works well when the ship is juddering and bouncing — footing is quite secure.

Outdoors, though, the fog and a mist of wet snow have slicked the decks, stairs, and railings; there are nonskid paint pathways, but not everywhere. Water sloshes as the ship moves (it seems inclined to list to port, judging from the puddles) and collects at the sides of the decks.

This afternoon I pass on another lecture from the auctioneer-style history guide. We're scheduled to stop in the ice for an on-deck barbecue, but at 17:00 the expedition leader announces that, 1, the deck's too wet and slippery for a cookout, so dinner will be a "carvery" in the dining room; and 2, would people please return the Quark logo mugs to the lounge? We are only three days out and 90 mugs are missing. That is pretty impressive for only 83 passengers! E and I took two, today, because when we went to fetch our morning tea there were no mugs, only paper cups. We'll be happy with cups and saucers or plain cups. Neither of us needs another mug at home, but we want to drink our tea in a relatively civilized way during the voyage, and we'll put the mugs back at the end.

As the fog thins, it glows.

The big glow beyond the fog hints at better days elsewhere.

We can see the track the icebreaker leaves; we're still in a monochrome white-muffled world, but the contrast is beginning the heighten.

Late in the day — "afternoon" can't be inapplicable when it's always midday — the fog and cloud lift quite high and begin to break up, though the wind is also picking up.

The snow on the ice is white as white can be and stretches in pressure-ridged ripples to the horizon. Very small patches of blue begin to break through the clouds and then the northern sky clears, though we're still under clouds.

The light snow and sleet of the day have left ice on the ladders and decks outside, so it's best to time one's movements for a less bouncy bit of ice-breaking, but it's fine bright weather to be outside. We are very far north; I've seen two kittiwakes when the ship halts to assess conditions for the barbecue (a pity we didn't do that — the smells might have attracted bears!) and a handful of kittiwakes and a dozen or so little auks and guillemots in one of the leads, in the morning.

The carvery is preceded by one of those shipboard ceremonies in which Neptune is propitiated, this time for crossing 85 degrees North. A few people kiss the cod and get their noses painted red; as naval ceremonies go, this is very low-key. Outside, the clouds are like mother-of-pearl and the wind is cutting. We'll be back beneath the fog so soon, why rush to go indoors?

At 19:00, as I write this down, we're at 84 degrees 45 seconds north and about 26 hours from the Pole.

Day two aboard

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:47:42 GMT

Awakened at 6:03 by a telephone call in Russian. E answers the phone, groggy, listens, and hangs up. Wrong number: just like home. The phone is hard to answer because the handset is locked to the cradle. The water noise in the radiator is louder today; the heat's on. The call was particularly inconveniently timed, E tells me, because she was just about to learn the punch line to a really funny new risqué joke in her dream.

Yesterday's thermos jugs of not-quite-hot water in the lounge down the hall have been replaced by a gleaming new press-button machine which can dispense all kinds of fancy coffee drinks, hot chocolate, or steamed milk at the touch of the right button. Fortunately, it also produces plain hot water, and morning tea today is much better.

Adult kittiwake

First-year (nonbreeding) adult kittiwake

Kittiwakes are crying outside the ship just before 8:00 as I drink tea and catch up on writing. The expedition leader tells us in his morning wake-up call that we have traveled about 500 nautical miles from Murmansk and that it's just under 4C (40 degrees F). He also tells us our official position: 77 degrees and a fraction I missed North and 45 degrees and a fraction I missed East and the wind is 10 kph; noon readings for the ship haven't been posted. (I ask at the information desk during breakfast, and the expedition leader tells me I can get that information on the bridge. The staff plan to put up a map with the ship's course and noon positions marked on it, but haven't done it yet. I kind of think captain and the bridge crew don't want everyone pawing through the logs, though...) The weather is dully overcast and dim, but less foggy than yesterday. The expedition staff say that when we cross into the ice pack later today, we'll probably have clearer skies.

The morning lecture is from expedition staffer Sue Currie, covering very basic geology (starting with a definition of terms like core and mantle), so I skip it and spend an hour or so on the flying bridge watching the Brünnich's guillemots zoom past the ship.

Brünnich's guillemot, or Thick-billed Murre

The ship passes several pieces of ice, not big but noticeable, with lots of blue colors in them. They could be calved from glaciers in Franz Josef Land or even from Novaya Zemlya. As we approach the first large one we also pass a line in the water demarcated by a wavy line of very small ice pieces; the top of the water changes, also, from heavy-looking and smooth, with low undulations, to riffled and choppier.

I don't see any more puffins, although a few seals pop their heads above water and dive again far off the starboard side. There must be fish. Small groups — ten to thirty — of black-and-white guillemots and sometimes a kittiwake or two overtake the ship, pelting past it, swerving away or right in front of the bow. A Brünnich's guillemot can fly 65 to 70 kph[1], so when I describe them as zooming, I do mean that. The guillemots arrange themselves in Vs and crescents in the air, reshaping themselves freely depending on the gusts, long scrawls that never resolve to a meaning.

Staff guide Jane Salem's preliminary talk on birds of the Arctic is well presented and interesting. It's always worth hearing what different lecturers have to say about their subjects, and the tour staff generally attend if they have free time. (Lectures are given in the aft lounge.)

Outside the aft lounge, a black-and-white world.

It's socked-in fog again, so I try to catch up on journal writing, skip the communal-work-of-art class (good call: later I see them daubing and smearing poster paint on a big sheet on the floor), and find the radio room to send an email. Andrei the radio officer on duty has not so much English as Viktor on Kapitan Khlebnikov, and the few functional phrases of Russian I had have deteriorated (although "Mozhne?" still works); when he sees my flash card, though, he lets me use a workstation to copy and format my message.

The "Geographical Introduction to the Arctic" is not successful. I hear several other members of the audience remarking on falling asleep as we leave the room — I doze off repeatedly myself. A monotone delivery, a too-rapid bombardment of facts and dates without anecdote(I couldn't write fast enough to keep up), and a dimmed room with fast-passing slides will send the most interested parties to sleep, and I'm really interested. E is in the bar working on a project she brought with her and is pleased to have made the right decision about skipping a talk.

At about 17:30, during Sue Flood's lecture about making BBC's Planet Earth documentary, the ship shudders and a dull boom sounds. We've met some real ice! There's no announcement, but after a few minutes of sounds I get up (from my front row seat — sorry, Sue) and go outside. The ship is still moving fast, scarcely below 18 knots, as the ice is smallish loosely-packed floes, but already it's so far in that the wake trails off into the fog behind us, the floes and slush jostling back together. I can't see the ice edge. The fog is very low around the ship.

The ship crosses areas of open water, but they're obviously only leads.

I stay on the flying bridge watching the few birds — guillemots and kittiwakes — flitting past or fleeing the ship, which bears down on them unswerving, a thing beyond their experience.

We see polar bear tracks on the floes we pass, and on the larger patches of ice the tracks travel in a straight line from one point to another, lost in the edges of the fog.

Sometimes we see seal breathing-holes in the ice which the bears have been visiting and watching; at one spot a bear has been going back and forth between two holes. Once there are two sets of tracks together, large and small, a mother and a cub, where a seal's breathing-hole has been excavated beneath the snow.

From below, a seal scrapes a breathing-hole through the ice, without breaking the snow cover, concealing it from the bears, but the bears have learned to sniff out the holes and dig for them. A seal will use the hollow chamber under the snow, around the breathing-hole, as a place to rest out of sight. Once we pass a breathing-hole with red-spattered snow around it, where an ivory gull stands picking at the carcass of a seal. We don't see any bears or seals, but the traces are exciting.

I leave the bridge long enough to eat dinner and add a layer of clothing. When the ship passes through an open area of water — a lead or maybe a polynia — there are many more birds, including now little auks. We're too far north for puffins, and there have been none since the scattered handful this morning. But there are Brünnich's guillemots, kittiwakes, very occasional skuas, and now the little auks flying or floating in small flocks, veering around the ship.

Broken ice...

Around 22:30, suddenly the fog is behind us, a lead-grey wall under aluminum-grey skies. To the east we see land! It's one of the northernmost islands of Franz Josef Land. (Strangely, the expedition staff makes no announcement of this either.) The captain has chosen this route because the satellite ice charts show an opening or less-strong ice here in the lee of the ice drift, and that's why we've made such good speed. The land is steep, sheer purple-black cliffs, columnar looking and possibly therefore basalt, capped with a smooth dome of ice and snow. The cap breaks at the edge to expose the cliff, toward the ends of the island, but extends nearly to the sea otherwise. This is permanent ice, now snow-covered.

There may be guillemots and little auks breeding on those small areas of exposed rock; certainly in the open water here there are many of them. As the ship approaches they seem at first incredulous, then panicked; they paddle frantically with their feet, running on the water, beating with their wings, and if very alarmed dive or take to the air. Their cries are thin, pure, high notes.

As we proceed, another smaller island, possibly more of the first connected by a low isthmus, appears, farther east. The south end of the larger black-and-white island is blurred by the charcoal-grey fog, which ends fairly abruptly with a few trailing wisps reaching out: its dark line is impenetrable to the eye. We peer in vain through the binoculars to make out details; probably there are none. There is basalt, ice, and water.

The sun is not visible, but the ceiling has lifted; behind the ship the wake is visible making a long curve as we pass through the open water and back into the ice, changing bearings to adjust back to straight north from the northeast track that took advantage of the passage in the lee of the islands. The islands recede slowly; a bright gold line, very thin, appears on the horizon very far ahead, where the sun is shining. Nearly midnight now, and the show will go on for hours, but I've got to get some sleep.

Behind the ship, fog:

Beside the ship, ripples:

[1] Because much publicly-funded research is printed in locked-away purchase-only (at a very dear price) journals at evil academic presses (I am looking at you, Cambridge University Press), I extracted this figure with great difficulty from Google searches. It may be wrong.

Helsinki to Murmansk

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:28:01 GMT

I find tales of air travel dull, so I won't bore you with my flights to Helsinki on the 22nd and 23rd.

From the airplane, I saw a dragon...

I arrive at the hotel on the evening of the 23rd, meeting Chuck Cross from Polar Cruises at the door and my roommate for the trip, E, a little while later. E and I catch up on news and then go in quest of food for me. It's the curse of the out-of-towner in the far north: residents and businesses keep normal hours, and restaurants close before the time-fuddled tourist is ready to dine.

After walking around the few blocks nearest the hotel, we return to its bar and I order a large and disintegrating "club sandwich", good but difficult to wrangle.

In the morning, E and I for a short walk around Helsinki. Central Helsinki isn't very large, so we couldn't go very far. We strolled past many of the major attractions, including the Lutheran cathedral, the daily open-air market at the waterfront, and a very nice tram. Trams run right on the streets where people are walking, and Finns are so smart they don't get killed. Try that at home, America.

Today the group made its halting way from the Radisson SAS Royal hotel — much assembling of luggage and lugging of luggage onto buses — to the Helsinki airport. On my way through the duty-free section, I pick up some supplies for the trip in the form of chocolate, nuts, and chocolate-covered nuts. My friend E. has already provided us with other refreshments, including a bottle of something distilled from maple syrup. In case we are fatally, swooningly bored, I buy a deck of Moomin playing cards, too.

The charter flight, on a new Airbus plane operated by Finnair, to Murmansk is short, just an hour and a half; it's much closer than one would think to Helsinki, by air.

Clouds prevent me from seeing the landscape...

and not until the plane begins its descent does the northern Russian, typically Arctic, terrain of lakes, bogs, forests, and ground-down knobs of granite become visible. It's vibrantly green and lush, with patches of dryer ground looking a little rusty. Here and there are fields or maybe clear-cut areas of forest, but it appears largely unpopulated.

At the airport, our group is processed methodically and slowly by the immigration and customs staff. The Quark artist causes a long delay by trying to import bundles of flags — wooden sticks with cloth flags on them, yes — which looked very like survey flags to the Russians. It seems that the artist had some plan of dragooning everyone into a conceptual art project involving writing the names of 360 endangered species, one for each degree, on the flags, and setting them in a circle around the North Pole. (I may expound further, later, on what I think of that idea, if occasion arises.) The Russian customs and security agents, understandably given the current political realities, do not allow him to import something that looked like surveyors' flags. Their stated reason is that he must be planning to sell such a large quantity of anything. (A hint to travelers: "I want to speak to your supervisor" is not a valid card to play anywhere but the US, especially when talking to someone who can throw you out of the country.) After an hour or so, about thirty passengers are cleared, enough to fill one waiting bus, and a frazzled member of the expedition staff hops on to conduct us to the ship.

A 40-minute drive over a road that looks exactly like a road anywhere else in Europe follows. Except for the Russian signs, it is a universal highway, a bit billowy from frost heaves but with the same lines, the same gravel at the sides, the same tarmac, as highways everywhere. Considering the challenging environmental conditions, it is in perfect repair. The driver, who has a splendid moustache, doesn't speed, so there is time to look out the window. The dirty glass and light rain make taking window photos unrewarding.

Forests here are birch; I suspect the area must have been logged long ago. The birch trees are slender and tend to be contorted, not tall and straight, larger-scale versions of the dwarf birch in slightly higher latitudes. The birch grows everywhere it can. The bus passes, outside Murmansk proper, a large cemetery whose fenced graves have been penetrated and overtaken by birch, so much so that it wasn't possible to see at first that it is a cemetery and not just scraps of fence abandoned in the forest. The trees rise up inside painted railings enclosing graves, blue or red or white, or twined through them, reclaiming.

We see, in several places, groups of cars parked by the side of the road. I don't think people are into hiking here. Perhaps they are fishing (we crossed a stream, lakes too) or picking mushrooms or berries.

Most of the buildings are weatherbeaten; there aren't many single-family houses, most of the buildings for residence are apartments, square tall slabs. Two very new, very colorful, freshly-stuccoed-and-painted ones glow conspicuously among the grimier, older concrete blocks. A brand-new-looking church on a hill overlooks the river and port. Apartment buildings are not uniform, nor well-cared-for; the lawn is uncut, the birch trees moving in on the margins. The variable styles, colors, and conditions of the window frames indicates that inhabitants maintain them on their own: a freshly-painted set of blue windows beside a peeling set of white windows beside a nearly-paint-free set of once-grey windows. We passed abandoned places — houses, a yard full of rusting front-end loaders, warehouses. A hardware store, or equipment store (HUSQVARNA signs), looks like a healthy business, a bright neon sign flashes outside a club or bar, and outside a roadside restaurant, cars are pulled up at and people eating at white-painted picnic tables. Our bus passes a public transit bus full of passengers, stopped to let people board; people walk home carrying shopping in universal polythene bags; a dog carrying an enormous stick — nearly a log — trots smugly along the road.

To reach the port from the town, the bus turns at the new church and follows a road down a long slope, with birch and a few weedy flowers and granite exposed by cutting to one side. The port is packed with icebreakers on summer holiday! We see a Russian navy ship is dark and shadowy-looking and all business, no pleasure boats, a handful of tugs. Cranes, scattered debris and derelict equipment, entire buildings half-disassembled are strewn about. The birch trees are absent. A few dogs, husky-types, amble aimlessly or lie snoozing among the rubble piles. One dog comes to investigate the bus after it negotiates a series of chicanes and halts at a security gate. Here a young man in uniform and a woman in jeans get on; he announces and she translates.

Passports are checked again, my fifth time that day, and when the name of each person on the bus has been matched up with the list the young guard has on his clipboard, he thanks us and steps off. Now the gate opens and the driver rolls the bus forward slowly, carefully, into the port. But not quite in. The gate closes behind us and we sit few minutes, neither in nor out, surrounded by brick and steel gratings, probably waiting for the operator of the first gate to walk around to open the second.

But the bus moves forward, and we arrive. When the gate opens we are perhaps fifty feet from the gangway — the bus does not stop — the driver takes us directly to the gangway and aligns the doors so that we have no opportunity to go wandering around. The catering staff and the few guides and other staff who arrived at the ship before us have been popping out to look as the bus carrying the passengers inches through the last layers of security. Now we hand over our passports to the expedition staff (this is usual), are ticked off on a list, and board 50 Years of Victory. We've been told not to take pictures in the port of Murmansk, so I have no photos of the boarding: eager people charging up the gangplank to find their cabins.

In our cabin, E and I find the first day's schedule, bottled water, brochures. Our cabin is on the deck with the shop (racks of polarfleece with polar bears on, stuffed musk-ox), the library (a very small collection of old books), and the bar. E and I head for the bar for a drink. We believe in beginning as we mean to go on.

It's dinner time, and while we eat the luggage arrives, complete and intact. After desultory unpacking, we go out on deck to watch the tugboats moving the ship away from the dock. Crewmen supervised by an officer rush about getting the lines in place and the mooring lines stowed.

The crew coil and stow the mooring lines, then do it again, and then do it again. Until it's not just done, but done right.

The stern tug works just long enough to draw the ship into the river, then releases the hawser to allow the bow tug to swing the ship around. All is slow, graceful, deliberate.

The midnight sun has dipped and is lighting the clouds with gorgeous oranges and flaming yellow.

When the ship's engines start, I'm surprised by how quiet they are and how smooth. As the tug lines go taut and start to strain, screeching audibly, the ship is drawn into the river, and the loudspeakers on the flying bridge crackle. Out bursts a metallic-sounding recording of what I assume is the Russian national anthem, heroically played by a brass band with plenty of emphasis and a polka-like beat. It loops for ten minutes or so. There is no one to wave goodbye to.

From the ship, as it moves out, we can see Yamal's shark-tooth grin across its bow.

It's going into drydock and that's why we're touristing on this new ship. Moored in the river is the Arktika, the first icebreaker to go to the North Pole (1977).

I overhear speculation that the orca wind indicator (and the patterned paint on the hull) on the bow of this ship are derived from Yamal's shark teeth. E overhears a passenger asking whether the orca is the wind indicator the bridge uses. Why yeeees, of course...!

There are no fishing boats, no dories or sailboats, nothing recreational... a little ways down the river, an angular black thing juts above the water. A buoy? A rock? No — it's the prow of a sunken submarine, left there because it's too much trouble to move.

Sergei, the passenger mate. Welcome aboard, us!

Packing for 90° in 96°

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:48:00 GMT

Polartec fleece, long johns, parka, woolly socks, sweaters, liner gloves, hat, extra hat...

On Sunday I'm leaving for a (short) three-week trip that starts with three legs (ugh! Chicago!) of flying, to Helsinki. I've never been to Helsinki and I'm excited about seeing it! I need to buy a guidebook---so far I've struck out in two local bookstores, but I'm sure that either Books Inc., the travel bookstore, or Stacey's will have something.

On Tuesday, after a night in Helsinki, I travel to Murmansk with the rest of the tour group. That's right---I signed on for another Quark trip, to the North Pole. This time I'm going "with" someone, too, a friend I met on the Fram last year. ER is a single-malt drinker and a great traveler. I just hope I'm going to be as agreeable a companion as she! Her husband said he'd seen the North Pole already, from underneath (ex-Navy submariner) and didn't want to go again really. I wish he had come as I do think it might be different from on top. But we'll see.

Chuck Cross from Polar Cruises tipped me off that places were available still on this trip, and he's going to be on it himself. The ship is in its first tourist service season and as a booking agent he wants to check it out. Also, icebreaking is fun. Or so they tell me. Reportedly, a nuclear-powered icebreaker is not daunted by 8/10 to 10/10 ice, as the poor old Kapitan Khlebnikov was.

I've been looking at the National Snow and Ice Data Center's Sea Ice Index page and it looks like the Arctic is, though icy, not heavily, densely iced. The extent this year seems to be in the normal range. This trip won't involve much land time---on the return from the 90-degree mark, we're supposed to maybe stop at Franz Josef Land, and there I hope to get a look at some bird colonies. But I expect we'll have some chances to see a few seals and a walrus or so on the ice, maybe even polar bears, although I'd expect any animal with brains to stay well away from a nuclear icebreaker bashing its unswerving way onward.

An imperial audience

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:30:51 GMT

Ship's Position at 12:00:

67°15.4' S 65°68.9' E
Course 280°; Speed 15 kts
Air temperature 4°C; Wind 14 kts; Direction 270°
Weather: Sunny, fine; Visibility 10
Ice Cover: 8/10
Distance covered past 24 hours: 201.6 nautical miles

I have meant to mention that we left the Cosmonaut Sea sometime on 24 December. Now we're in the Cooperation Sea. Among its features are Pingivin Island (ED)(Existence Doubtful), which is noted in fine purple ink on the chart. The handwriting seems to be that of the mapmaker who did the 2005 revision (footnote at bottom). The Antarctic map is sprinkled with (ED) notations, and historically the region has been a haven for land of dubious authenticity.

This morning the ship has reversed direction. Heavy ice pack was encountered at 01:00 last night on the way to Amanda Bay and the expedition staff and captain decided to try again for Auster Rookery. The distance is not great and on this pass no time is wasted on difficult passages, and also the pack ice has shifted a bit. The helicopters begin carrying passengers over at 13:00 (the staff have already gone to set up landing area, walking paths, etc.). The passengers are organized into five helicopter landing groups, which rotate in order of going; as luck would have it my group is last today. This is a good thing because the last flight back will be at 21:30, and we'll have long shadows and evening light for photography.

The clear weather holds; the wind doesn't suddenly steam up to a screaming gale; an Adelie penguin, addled out of its wits by the noise and the people, is racing around the two tents at the helicopter landing area. From there it's about a one-mile walk to the emperor penguin rookery; the Adelie rookery is visible a couple of miles beyond that, but we do not go so far. The Adelies and emperors don't mix — no penguins share colonies with other penguins, though as we've seen non-penguins can be acceptable.

The emperor penguins are not as large as I've been led to believe, an incorrect impression created by the strange practice of giving bird sizes (at least for penguins) in beak-tip to tail-tip, rather than how high they stand. The emperors are, however, beautifully colored and patterned. The chicks are of assorted sizes; I see a few already molted into first-year adult plumage and a few very small ones, but most of them are nearly as large as their parents and with well-fed beanbag figures. A few are so fat that they appear to have difficulty walking — the chicks mostly don't have the tobogganing trick yet. The black-and-white masks are indeed cute and easy to humanize, on top of the baggy-looking body of the smaller chicks and fluffy cylindrical larger chicks. The mid-level molting chicks have slimmed down to a more adult profile, splotched grey black and white. And all are hungry. I see several beanbag chicks wake sleeping adults to beg for food.

Around 19:00 is penguin rush hour: several trains of tobogganing emperors come in from the sea, which is miles away — a 20-minute helicopter ride for us. A large gang of Adelies come in, too, and charge chaotically, flapping their wings and quonking energetically, through the middle of the emperor penguin colony, which is (demographically) mostly chicks. It happens to be between them and their own nests many miles further from the sea (Adelies need land to nest, and the nearest rock outcrop is nowhere near open water) and they don't see any reason not to continue in a beeline for home. The emperor penguins ignore the fuss; the Adelies emerge on the other side, re-group in their train formation for tobogganing, and carry on.

The emperor penguins are not quiet, though. The chicks whistle for food if there's an adult penguin in sight, with special urgency if they see another chick being fed. When the emperors return, a cascade of their melodious, trumpeting greetings rises. The chicks all begin crying and flapping their wings excitedly, even those who don't have a parent returning. The older chicks try to make the trumpeting sound also, but don't quite have the range.

There are dead chicks at the colony, both old and recently dead, and dying ones too. The weather that delayed the ship was fatal here to chicks not fed up well enough to weather the storm or chicks whose parents didn't return in time — or at all — to feed them during it. The skuas and petrels hanging around are well-fed and insolent. Brown-and-buff South Polar skuas scavenge the dead, but leave the dying alone. Apparently it's rare for a skua to actually kill something; waiting around for the inevitable is probably a better use of energy. Chicks are dying because the ice we're standing on, sea-ice that retreats every year, has not retreated very far yet this year, and their parent penguins are having a hard time keeping them fed. It takes the penguins days to make the round trip to the sea and so instead of getting fed about three times a month, chicks may be getting only two feedings. The parents cannot trek back and forth indefinitely, feeding the chicks, as they will be moulting soon and will need to feed themselves up to survive the month-long moult. So it's a race against time to rear the chick or to get it to a large enough size that it can fend for itself. Unlike other penguins, emperor chicks can swim even before moulting into their first adult plumage.

During the visit we see again that penguins are spellbound by tripods. At least once, every photographer using one attracts the scrutiny of penguins, who sometimes just stand and stare at tripod's legs, the camera, the feet in the snow, and sometimes grab it in their beak and bite or shake it inquisitively. This is one of those times when the wise photographer has a backup pocket camera and the lucky photographer has a friend watching with a camera. Penguins, like parrots and other birds, turn their heads to one side to have a better look at something.

The penguin colony is surrounded by gargantuan frozen-in-place icebergs; some are grounded, some are not and will float again when the sea ice melts in January.

We have to leave around 20:00; it's a good 40-minute walk back to the landing site, including stopping for photos of icebergs, wind-shaped snow, and a young Weddell Seal who must be the most photographed mammal in Antarctica by the time we go by; he's been lying near the flagged trail all day. Three half-moulted chicks are now hanging out near the helicopter landing area, a mile from home (a long way for a chick!). Emperor penguin chicks are unique among penguins in that a half-moulted chick can actually swim and survive in the water on its own, if it's big enough; these three probably followed some older penguins toward the water (17 miles away) but got tired after the first mile and stopped. Another younger chick is nearby, a true stray who probably won't survive long. We aren't allowed to put them on the equipment sled and drag them back to the others.

Back at the ship, the engines rev up and it sets out (slowly) even before the last helicopter carrying the emergency equipment and staff returns. An announcement informs us that we are en route to Prydz Bay, and the paper schedule distributed is labeled "Expedition Day" but has no time of arrival given — maybe they've given up on that, because it just causes jokes and disappointment!

One can have too much white Christmas

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 04:18:40 GMT

Ship's Position at 12:00:

67°22.7' S 66°22.5' E
Course 104°; Speed 15 kts
Air temperature 1°C; Wind 20 kts; Direction 60°
Weather: Snow; Visibility 3
Ice Cover: 0/10
Distance covered past 24 hours: 125.1 nautical miles

We are out of the ice at the moment, but still at the whim of the weather!

This grey-white morning hardly seems the same planet we were on yesterday: the ship's in the fast ice some miles from the Auster Rookery of emperor (and I think Adelie also) penguins. Thick clouds muffle the sky and deaden color. At 05:30 a wake-up call alerts us to the chance for an "ice walk" in other words a chance to walk on the solid ice. The "Polar Plunge" planned for the morning was canceled, as there was no (reliably) safe access to the water. A scant handful of Adelie penguins were hunkered down; one or two padded around, looking for other penguins and settling next to them when they found them. I was told that there'd been emperor penguins around earlier — later I learned this meant at 4:30 in the morning!

I walked across the snow-covered ice, breaking the wind-sculpted snow crust just a couple of times. Under the crust, the snow is soft and dry. Two very narrow ice-blue, deep-blue cracks crossed the flagged path, not wide enough to be dangerous. The clouds were thick and low and when I turned to look back at the ship the band of sky above the water (and glaciers) and below the clouds was copper colored.

The walk led to a glacier which had plowed into the fast ice with tremendous force, buckling it. It might have been a slow impact, still going on as the glacier was pushed into the ice by a current, not necessarily a sudden event. Admired the glacier for a few minutes, but then it was time to turn back as the lowering sky was lower still and snow was beginning to fall. By the time I had returned to the ship, followed by the staff taking up the flags to close the walk off, it was snowing heavily and rapidly becoming a white-out. The dozen or so penguins were scattered oval black dots on the snow, ready to wait out any weather that comes. Though they look like cuddly toys, they are tough little birds.

I am certain now that the angular appearance of the top of an Adelie's head is a small feather crest; when they come out of the water, it's slicked down and their heads are rounded like other penguins'.

Such conditions forbid landing at Auster rookery; the staff's plan had been to use the helicopters to transport people there. The backup plan is to move the ship to the Murray and Scullin monoliths, huge black old basalt remnants, and to visit the rookery of Adelie penguins and see the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of various petrel species (Antarctic, snow, and Wilson) nesting there. There are fulmars, too, we're told — but the weather at the monoliths is also bad and the captain is dismayed when his depth reading flips from 100 meters to 14 in an instant, six miles from shore — there are ancient basalt remnants under the sea also. (Scullin was an Australian prime minister, by the way, and Murray was Chancellor of the University of Adelaide.) The sketch map on our daily program depicts the monoliths as volcanic plugs, the Scullin almost like a collapsed caldera, but that may be artistic license; the staff geologist thought they were remains of flow lava.)

The monoliths are sublimely stark: the ice between them, a glacier which leads to the great continental ice sheet, has a blue tinge even on this cloudy, snowy day, and the basalt rock is black as black can be. The ship is too far out to see birds, though, even with binoculars, and I am disappointed of the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of birds in a cloud traveling to and from their nests. The captain very sensibly does not trust the bottom; the ship turns and heads away. No landing.

I don't know whether the staff intend to come back here or not — the feeling among many of the passengers right now is "emperor penguins or bust" and I suspect satisfying that will be the focus for the next few days, be trying to get to an emperor rookery. The ship is now heading east, toward Amanda Bay rookery of emperor penguins, where the staff hope that weather will be better and that the ice conditions might even permit walking to the rookery (the ship gets rammed into the fast ice and the gangway is put down for these ice walks, by the way). It is regrettable that the tour's timetable does not allow some extra days for waiting out a spell of bad weather or fighting the heavy ice we have met everywhere.

Tonight there's a special dinner for Christmas Eve, with the main course being venison! Unfortunately I have no clothes that can be charitably seen as "dressy" — the best I can offer [... truncated message ...]

At Sea

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:26:22 GMT

Ship's Position at 12:00:

55°51.2' S 31°03.4' W
Course 118°; Speed 9 kts
Air temperature 3°C; Water temperature 1°C
Wind 15 kts; Direction 150°
Weather: Fog, cloudy; Visibility 1-5
Ice Cover: -
Distance covered past 24 hours: 219.5 nautical miles

More talks! An introduction to wildlife photography, life in a penguin colony, how to draw penguins (the trick is to get the penguin to lie on the paper so you can trace it), a "Blue Planet" episode, and expedition historian Bob Headland on "South Georgia: The events of 1982 (or, Galteiri: my part in his downfall)". It is all a bit overwhelming and leaves little time to read, write, think, or look through one's photos. Don't forget the demanding mealtimes schedule too!

Bob Headland was on South Georgia, a BAS staff member, when it was invaded, so his talk presented a firsthand perspective with dry humor. A tear of boffin pride must come to the eye of anyone hearing how a load of BAS scientists imprisoned in the hold of an Argentine ship collectively worked out that they were being taken to Tierra del Fuego by using a washer on a string (as a pendulum).

Brief update from South Georgia

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:59:43 GMT

[Limited bandwidth telegraphic email update; full photo-riffic entries to follow in February sometime.]

At Grytviken this morning; would have been suitable for a whole day as a beautiful and historically interesting place with few irritable fur seals. This afternoon to a king penguin colony so huge and so densely populated that we stood on the outermost fringe, penguins for about a square mile. This evening short Zodiac ride to see macaroni penguins; there were only a few although they are said to be the most numerous penguins in South Georgia. Difficult to get to as they prefer rocky cliffs for nesting. Had hoped in fact to see miles of macaroni penguins also. Saw few chinstrap penguins too; much smaller than the others.

Sent many cards from South Georgia, next pickup listed as 'December'! Also bought things at shop benefiting S Georgia conservancy.

Tomorrow is day at sea; activities include "how to draw penguins." Trick is to get them to lie on a piece of paper in order to make an outline.

ricochet travel

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 01:29:49 GMT

I flew Ushuaia-Chile today, half an hour of gorgeous fjords viewed from above.

This morning as I was leaving Fram I heard about the MV Explorer. Everyone on Fram is shocked, as we had just been in the area two and three days previously. As you know.

We had passed Explorer about two days ago, on its way down to King George, and had just seen Nordnorge in dock (and in transit!).

You can be very very sure that the company is sweating lead bullets just now because if that ship goes down without being pumped clean, it's a very nasty environmental black mark...

Someday the IAATO is going to have to stop being voluntary and start imposing standards.

In the meantime, if you, kind reader, see anything else about this, or indeed about anything relevant or marginally so, could you please post it, or a link to it, here? I well know that current info will disappear in the swirling swill of Google irrelevance too soon, and I'm incommunicado for about six weeks soon. Thanks!

Or email me with full text & photos...etc....

en route to the Horn again

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:37:06 GMT

We'll be going up the Beagle Channel and in Ushuaia in the morning. From there I fly to Punta Arenas; tomorrow I fly to Port Stanley. I'll be in the Falklands until 1 December, but I don't expect to have net access then... possibly not until 8 January, as on 1 December I'm boarding Kapitan Khlebnikov will be five weeks going halfway round Antarctica to Perth.

Here's a last penguin photo-fest: http://poletopole.livejournal.com/21090.html

Enjoy!

trivia

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:28:10 GMT

Today we are crossing the Drake Passage. The weather is good; the ship is of course moving which the interior decorators didn't anticipate terribly well so a few things are sliding around. I ask you: on a moving ship, are polished granite counters a good idea? I think not.

But this is in fact much calmer than the North Atlantic crossing was, and it's only one day. Tomorrow we arrive at King George Island, in the South Shetland Islands, and if conditions permit, we will go ashore to visit some penguins there (if the penguins are at home); and perhaps if there is time one may put one's nose into Arctowski Research Station.

Petrels and albatrosses coast on the draft behind the ship. It is too rough to get a decent photo of them. They appear to be enjoying themselves!

Someone has left a copy of Georgette Heyer's Venetia among the pile of Truly Worthless Mass-Market Paperbacks my fellow passengers have discarded. Do I want it?

Penguin-heavy 16 November entry posted!

newer entries

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:08:42 GMT

11 November: http://poletopole.livejournal.com/19999.html

12 November: http://poletopole.livejournal.com/19773.html

14 November: http://poletopole.livejournal.com/19579.html

Valparaiso: cacophonious Pandaemonium

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 04:03:51 GMT

Today, the ship was in Valparaiso, Chile. Yes, we dropped below the Equator just as Comet Holmes brightened up and since then have been on the notoriously misty, foggy, overcast (but not wet) northern coast of South America.

After breakfast I take care of some boring paperwork, including giving the ship's doctor a xerox of a form for another expedition that my doctor had to fill out and stamp, essentially testifying that as of May I had a pulse. I didn't receive the Hurtigruten company's paperwork until well after leaving the country, so they and everyone else can make do with a xerox of the one for the people who mailed everything months beforehand.

Lunch is delayed; usually it starts at 12:00 but today it begins at 1:30. The reason is that a very large party of official visitors, including the Norwegian ambassador, is coming to the ship this morning, and all the officers and crew are bustling around, wearing extra-sharply-pressed shirts, and checking their teeth for spinach. I decide not to wait for lunch.

In the "cruise terminal", an enormous empty warehouse, there's a desk with a couple of tourist info ladies at it. They give me a city map and show me a walking route that they assure me will get me over to the funicular up to Cerro Concepción. This is supposed to be a charming, arty neighborhood with good cafes, etc.

I leave the terminal, which is full of hurrying trucks, nimble whirling cranes, and enormous containers being loaded and unloaded or stacked and restacked. At the gate I look around for a moment and realize that except for New York, I have not been in a real city so far on this trip. Valparaiso is a real city. It has buses, trams, a train system labeled "Metro", elevated highways, department stores, and a large population.

Following the route marked on the map, I cross near-anarchic busy roads, and go a little way up Avenida Argentina and turn onto Avenida Brasilia. I can't believe how loud Valparaiso is. Is it the amphitheatre-like geography?

On Av. Brasilia I run smack into the fresh produce market, a vast hall covering a city block (and these blocks aren't small).

It's fantastic. The prices are fantastic too. How about 500 pesos for four kilos of ripe strawberries? It's 200 pesos to the dollar just now. The artichokes are only a little smaller than my head. There are huge sacks of potatoes, oranges, and onions being hoisted onto backs and loaded into triple-parked cars, wooden flats of strawberries and cherries, lots of honking, a few horses standing around, not many dogs, some gainfully employed cats, and plenty of customers.

It's difficult to take photos, there are so many buyers; I'm in the way. The fruit looks excellent. Chile uses enormous amounts of pesticides and chemical fertilizers to grow all this stuff for export. They don't get rain; it's all irrigated. Some of the small growers just sit by the curb with their few cases of cauliflower and cry them. Yes, all the vendors are shouting: "Fruitillas frutillas frutillas quinientos cuatro kilos! Coliflor! Fresca, fresca!" and so on. It's a foodie Pandemonium.

Some buyers are restaurant owners, but many are small fruit and veg sellers from elsewhere in the city, who set up little stands in the squares formed by the junction of a couple of streets where there's probably a kiosk and maybe someone selling food from a cart.

I deeply regret having only the pocket camera; the bigger camera would capture the whole scene, but it would also be very conspicuous and we have all had mugging and pickpocket warnings dinned into our ears.

None of these stalls are huge, but some of the growers are very traditional small market gardeners. Their horses are tied over in the middle of Av. Brasilia or parked at the curb.

Avenida Brasilia is a palm-lined, cratered, dusty, crumbling pedestrian walkway in the tradition of, say, Paseo del Prado in Madrid, but without the graciousness. Valparaiso in general is undermaintained, its physical plant deteriorating. Sidewalks are treacherously broken and uneven, or just missing, as here. There's not the layer of trash on everything that characterized Peru, but it's grimy. The money that the government is sucking out of natural resources is not going into long-term investment on upkeep.

I leave the market reluctantly and continue on toward the funicular to Cerro Concepción.

I don't have a good city map, and it's obvious that a good city map, and probably a trusty native guide, would help me avoid the streets that the tourist office's map walking route have steered me onto. Noisy, busy, crowded, noisy, and with narrow sidewalks, there are few opportunities to take a photograph. It's also plain that the women from the tourist agency have never actually walked or taken the tram, because their time estimate (25 minutes) was about half the actual and their tram directions consisted of "take the tram" even when prompted for a route name or number.

The pavement in this park, with its wavy regular lines, is the most disorienting thing I have ever walked on. The illusion of undulation is irresistible.

A triumphal arch? No, it's the Arco Británico, commemorating Valparaiso's British connections, 1802-1902. I'm in the Barrio Inglés, but I discern no particularly English character.

Trolley bus, non-ironic vintage.

I can't photograph noise very well. But as I take this photograph, I've got my back against a grimy door covered with staples and handbills, engines are revving at the light, people are hurrying by on the pavement, horns are honking, people seem to be conversing only in shouts... It's like being pounded on the head with a 32-gallon galvanized trash can. This is a pleasant-looking older building of the type common in this neighborhood. First floor all along the street is low-end retail (shoes, greasy food, pharmacies, panaderías, etc.) or boarded up. Gratings on windows and shutters on doors.

Interesting ligature.

The passage to heaven is narrow and nearly unmarked.

It costs 250 pesos: two 100s and a 50.

Everything is wood and cast-iron. Everything creaks. The ride lasts less than one minute.

At the top, outside the little booth housing the woman who takes your 250 pesos, it's cool and quiet. There's a flower garden and a long view, instead of the claustrophobia-inducing streets. A clean breeze blows, no diesel.

Yes, that is Fram. It has taken me nearly an hour to get here, buffeted by crowds and halted by traffic lights. Had they opened the gate directly across from the ship instead of sending us to the "cruise passenger terminal" a mile and a half along the port...I would have time for lunch.

The neighborhood is famous for its brightly painted corrugated-metal buildings and arty ambience. Everything is closed, because it is now the time of day when everything is closed, so I can't speak to the artiness. It is mostly behind shutters at the moment. Worldwide, purple is arty.

Arty or not, it looks battered and undermaintained, like the rest of the city.

The steepness has not been exaggerated, however. In the second photo, note the wiring, the tangle in midair, the stray ends dangling. That is really good wiring by Chilean standards.

Possibly the wiring subcontractor?

Toy store and souvenirs. Closed until after the ship leaves, because it is the time of day when everything is closed. Arrrrrrrrgh!

I leave the marked trail and immediately find a far more attractive and pleasant street to walk along, one of those paralleling the shore. Note however how wide it is. Most of the streets along the waterfront in Valparaiso are traffic sewers. Because of the roads and the container port, it is impossible to get near the water---at leaset in this part of town.

To save some time I take a Metro, just to see what it's like. There's a stop at the passenger terminal. It costs 200 pesos for one ride in the center and I have to buy a rechargable card; the card is like Oyster, you tap it on the turnstile to enter and exit. It's a good souvenir anyway. The trains look like they went into service this morning, and they smell like it too. I have never been in such clean trains in my life.

It looks like they bought the fancy new train system instead of upgrading the vintage rolling stock buses. 'Twas ever thus.

Grafitti at the station says Plop!

Just as I arrive at the passenger terminal, so do buses decorated with pictures, balloons, and paper chains filled with dozens of little children in costumes and their mothers and teachers. It is Semana de Santas, week of female saints, and this week is a festival for children, in Chile anyway. They're having a big party at one end of the building, which is divided off from the cruise terminal.

The sky, flat lead grey this morning, has become very interesting.

Valparaiso in a nutshell, at least my experience of it...

A fireboat escorts Fram out of the harbor with a display of virtuoso water cannon play, black puffs from its stacks, and frequent honking. Goaded, finally the Fram bridge crew honk back approximately eleven hundred times louder and someone else honks in as well for a fair amount of repartee echoing off the Valparaiso hills. Fram, however, does not have a water cannon.

At sea, sky and cloud.

Sunset.

On the horizon, veils of rain, which the wind beneath the clouds is blowing sideways halfway down.

greenland, FINALLY finished

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:45:28 GMT

raptor rapture

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:50:49 GMT

The ship's clock is back another hour.

Early this morning the merlin is perched on a piled-up wooden evacuation ladder on Deck 5. He's wet and bedraggled. His head swivels and bobs, looking for anything that might be prey.

He rouses several times, and then someone walking along the deck startles him and he decides it's time to be off. He swoops out and upward.

I look around the ship for him and after taking a turn up the flying bridge find him on the stair on the other side, leading down to Deck 7. It's an excellent vantage point.

He stays there awhile and then shoots off, hunting. He lands a wheatear. He carries the wheatear to Deck 7, just outside the gym beside the sloshing jacuzzi, and eats. The wheatear has probably been blown off course in its migration from Greenland to Africa, and luckily for our merlin the wheatear has had a good summer---it's fat.

He eats intently for fifteen minutes and searches thoroughly for any last morsels on the wings. His crop is noticeably full! Notice his stance---he grips the prey with both feet as he pulls it apart and braces himself with his tail.

The merlin eats even the legs and feet, stripping them through his beak to take the meat off and then swallowing the rest whole in a couple of quick gulps.

He ignores or tolerates the people watching, some of whom have no idea how to behave around a bird---walking up, talking loudly. Crouch and approach slowly and quietly, people...

When he has eaten every edible scrap of the bird, he cleans his feet and beak repeatedly, stomping about on the deck (which has a rubber mat) and from time to time wiping his beak with a claw.

At last he felt ready to go and took off. It has been stormy enough that he may get another off-course small migratory bird today, but if he doesn't, the wheatear should keep him until we reach Canada.

On deck a few feathers, blowing away.

The merlin has many fans on the ship. The captain was among the first up to see him breakfast this morning. I had spoken to Simon about feeding the bird, suggesting dragging a lump of chicken along on a thread, like a mouse, and he said he was going to get some raw chicken and try hand-feeding. I'm not sure the merlin would take that, though it's tolerating the humans well; and on principle it's unwise to habituate wild birds to human feeding. When the merlin had just brought down the wheatear, Simon was on deck with a plate of meat for him and met one of the crew looking for the merlin also, with some meat in a napkin.

the north atlantic crossing; a visitor

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:07:12 GMT

In the morning, we're still off the coast of Ireland. Permission to call at Galway has been refused, no explanation. I have tea and a scone (from Cork's market hall) on the balcony and take a couple photographs of Ireland, receding.

The rest of the day I spend sequestered in my cabin, although I leave to get lunch. It feels like Sunday, partly because I'm reading Sunday papers I bought on the weekend but hadn't gotten to yet. I lounge on the bed, write travelogue, and read.

Simon, our bird-loving guide, announces on the PA in midafternoon that a merlin has perched up near the funnel above Deck 7; it was chasing a pipit. He advises people who want to look to go carefully. I love birds, but I stay where I am. I'm not going to be the one to scare a resting bird off its perch, particularly out here at sea where there's no other stop for many many miles.

Around 19:15, as the housekeeper drops off a chocolate (from the Isle of Man, in the shape of the triskele) and tomorrow's agenda, a striped flutter at the balcony catches my eye. I close the door on her quickly and shut off the light.

It's the merlin. He lands on the floor, has a quick look around, and as I'm worming toward the windows (which I opportunely cleaned this morning with my new squeegee), he hops up onto the chair I was sitting in a few hours ago.

His head swivels around and around, examining this part of the moving cliff.

I watch his chest move, breathing. He opens his beak several times, but the glass is thick and I can't hear him.

He scratches and grooms a little, sending tiny pieces of down whirling off the stern.

Sometimes the nictating membrane covers his eyes for a few long seconds; maybe he's napping. I'm concealed behind an armchair at the window, but he keeps swiveling his head to examine the window and I fear that he'll go after a reflected merlin there. He doesn't.

After twenty minutes or so, he he begins stalking. His head bobs swiftly up and down, triangulating, then swivels rapidly; his body stays motionless. I think it's the flag flapping off the stern, but no! He pounces on a scrap of plastic that's blown from somewhere into the opposite, sheltered corner of the balcony. I daren't move fast enough to get a photo of him picking it up, shaking it, and dropping it in disgust. Not a grasshopper.

He walks across the deck indecisively and then flutters onto the table. Hmph. It's a long way to Tipperary, and he's hungry.

Fulmars are following the ship; he notices them, but they're far too big.

And then suddenly a miracle occurs: a scalloping, swooping flight of a bird crosses from overhead to port, around the ship, and he's off instantly. It's his pipit.

I hope he wins. It is nearly dark.

He stayed for about forty minutes. I have a mute now, a souvenir.

Update: Simon Cook, bird lover & guide, says there were two pipits around the ship today; he had taken one that flew into a window into his room to let it recover (and escape from the merlin, which had been chasing it); around 19:00 he put it in a pile of chairs on deck 7; then went to dinner; around 20:00 the merlin got a pipit outside the dining room. So merlin got a dinner.

Illulissat

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:34:59 GMT

I think that's the right number of L's. The ship has been in the far north and out of touch for a week or so. I've posted an entry for 13 August but am not sure 14 August will be ready before they give me the bum's rush this afternoon.

However, I'll have lots of time in Kangerlussuaq.

I had planned to stay on the Fram for its next scheduled cruise from here to Reykjavik. In May, however, the Norwegian Coastal Voyage office contacted me and explained that trip was cancelled. They couldn't say (and perhaps didn't know) what exactly was going on, but the entire ship, they did say, was chartered for a conference on global warming. The rumor was that Al Gore was involved. Ooooh.

Well, in fact, the entire ship has been chartered. And it is for a symposium about global warming. (Arctic ice will be gone in 23 years. Poor bears. Spare them a tear as you drive that car around.) It has been chartered, I have now heard, by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church and so a lot of priests are going to be, I guess, taking the ship out into the Illulissat fjord (World Heritage site) and praying for, or rather against, global warming. Yeah, very helpful.

The Pope knows a good publicity opportunity and will be here. At first that was a "Greenlandic rumor" but now it seems to be true. The crew are being driven mad with the preparations---all the hurry and scurry!

Let's not do the carbon emissions calculations related to these guys and their attendant retinue of journalists, etc., flying here.

What this means that instead of my ride terminating in Kangerlussuaq at one end of their famous road, the boat stops here. I have travel plans requiring me to actually be in Kangerlussuaq in the morning, a flight at 9:40, and they can't get me there tomorrow morning, so a handful of others on the same flight and I are being shoved onto a charter plane this afternoon and lodged in Kangerlussuaq tonight.

I'll still meet the Fram in Reykjavik.