Done cruisin'

---

Hi all

After 12 days on the good ship Academik Sergey Vavilov from Svalbard then Greenland and finally Iceland, we are now much better informed about glaciers, icebergs, Arctic wildlife including bears and history, and ready for a close connection with Iceland over the next week.

Good group on the ship including quite a few Australians, but amazingly at least eight children among the 100 or so passengers -- Irish, Italians and English. Can only assume that the parents were pretty well heeled -- although the flights to get to these parts from the UK or the States are much cheaper than from Australia. One Australian in the party was the Ambassador to Mexico who reckons Mexico City is a great place -- he rated it five on a scale of one to five, compared with minus 17 for Bagdhad his previous posting.

Seeing I had been doing paddling classes for about 18 months, I paid extra for a paddling option, for which there were 10 places. We actually got out on the water eight times over the voyage, and while I was a bit nervous to begin with in transferring from Zodiac to kayak in mid-fiord, it was actually pretty easy. In the High Arctic if you land, there always has to be someone on guard with guns and flares in case a polar bear appears out of nowhere, so the water transfer is much preferred to a beach where someone needs to land first, check out the surrounding territory and generally keep guard while everyone gets organised and into the water.

Poor old bears. With climate change and fewer icebers, there are fewer seals which are their main food source, and therefore life is much tougher. Some accounts of cannabalism among bears, males attacking and eating smaller weaker females, which is really alarming when each female takes about two years to rear cubs.

We had a lot of warnings about the danger of polar bears, but actually saw only one, in the Scoresbysund fiord complex (biggest in the world) in East Greenland. A sharp eyed American spotted a patch of yellow some distance away on an iceflow and the identification was confirmed by one of the naturalists on board. We were able to turn the ship around and get quite close before the young female (so we were told) finally got bored with our attention, slipped into the water and swam away. My pics weren´t great but some others had longer lenses and the best images have been shared around.

It was a close thing that we saw her at all, but were more successful with reindeer and walruses on Svalbard, musk ox in Greenland, sundry seals and occasional whales. But having chosen the paddling option, I probably saw fewer interesting animals up close than the others who spent more time tramping the tundra.

After the pristine Antarctic, the Arctic is very different. Most of the glaciers and icebergs are much dirtier because it is less frozen although further from the equator. And therefore the water in the fiords is often quite muddy rather than clear and green in the south.

On our final day of the voyage we visited Haiemaye (spelling wrong) the largest of the Westmann Islands, off southern Iceland, where a volcano erupted in 1973 burying hundreds of houses. ´Pompei of the north' is still in its infancy, but it was very interesting to see where they are excavating some of the houses buried many metres under ash, and also to feel the hot ground in the crater still.

However, that´s enough geography for one day. We pick up our hire car in the morning to hit the roads around Iceland, but I could be doing a lot of driving as Heather managed to leave her licence in a tourist shop in East Greenland. But as navigation has never been my strength, this may all be for the good.


Cheers

Georgie

---

Photos

Svalbard beach
Old whaling station on Svalbard

Walruses on Svalbard
Togetherness is the go!

Town in east Greenland
Scorsbysund makes us realise how dull we are