NORTHERN EXPOSURE
Ever dreamed of visiting another planet? Get a taste of the extra-terrestrial in the High Arctic. From Greenland to the most northern stretches of Canada, this region is home to people, animals, and landscapes like you’ve never seen before.
Apolar bear’s world is silent. This is what I think to myself as we stand on the bow of our ship, engines cut, conversations stopped, the quiet stretching in all directions across the ice. The clicking of camera shutters, a sound that’s usually so soft, seem ridiculously loud – but our first polar bear of the trip keeps walking towards us, pausing occasionally to sniff the air and consider her next move.
It seems that every little thing she does is magic. The fluid movements of her feet over the ice; the way the bright blue pools of water in the ice floe capture her reflection as she walks through the pretty puddles. And when she jumps from one piece of ice to the next – oh my!
But then someone drops a lens cover. She pauses. A door slams. And just like that it’s over. She decides curiosity isn’t going to kill this cat, then turns and heads back in the direction whence she came.
Fortunately our first polar bear is far from our last – in the days to come we spot them on the ice and on the shore. We fall in love with a bear that sleepily looks at us, yawns and snuggles back down on a pillow of snow as our ship approaches, and we abandon an excursion mid-hike when we spot a mother and her cub sharing the path ahead. And then there’s the polar bear that makes us feel as if we’ve stepped into a David Attenborough documentary. The one that leaps off a rocky shore and starts swimming towards us, its eyes on a prize we can’t see until the bear reaches it, latches on, and we spy the long tusk of a narwhal break the surface of the water.
We’d been standing on the bow of our Lindblad Expeditions ship for an hour, watching bubbles in the water and hoping to see one of these ‘unicorns of the sea’. The odds of seeing a narwhal are so long that it would be easy to simply stay inside and not even bother trying. The odds of seeing a polar bear sink its teeth into one? Unfathomable.
Even though there was no struggle in the water, which suggested the narwhal was already dead when the polar bear found it, the struggle was about to become real when the bear swam the narwhal to the shore. For almost an hour we watch as the bear attempts to drag more than 500kg of narwhal carcass up onto a rock, trying different angles, different footholds, and then swimming it to a different
spot before deciding the first rock was the best option after all and dragging it back again. The fight with gravity is still going strong when we have to leave – but a week later, when the ship returns to the scene with new guests, I see a photo of our polar bear on the Instagram of our ship’s photo instructor, Doug Gould.
The now very well fed bear was on the same rock we left it on, with the skeletal remains of its prize.
FUN & GAMES
Over the course of 15 incredible days, our ‘Exploring Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic’ journey with Lindblad Expeditions gives us a chance to experience one of the most remote parts of the world.
As well as the wild side of life, with walruses, musk oxes and humpback whales joining our polar bear memories from the trip, we also have a chance to see the human side. After starting with pre-cruise excursions in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, we fly to the small town of Kangerlussuaq in western Greenland – where we join Lindblad Expeditions’ flagship, the National Geographic Explorer.
In Greenland we visit small towns with colourful buildings, and as locals guide us through the streets we discover the pops of colour are more than just decorative. They are part of a system developed to communicate with passing fisherman: supply stores, schools and churches are painted red; hospitals yellow; and municipal buildings blue.
After crossing over to Canada, we visit the tiny town of Pond Inlet (or Mittimatalik, as it’s called in the Inuit language of Inuktitut), on the northern tip of Baffin Island. Despite only being home to around 1,600 people, up here Pond Inlet is as big as it gets. At over half a million square kilometres, Baffin Island may be Canada’s largest island – but it still only has a population of about 11,000 people.
In Pond Inlet, around 95 per cent of the inhabitants are Inuit, and after stepping out of our Zodiacs, friendly locals lead us up to the community centre and introduce us to local traditions – including games and sports the likes of which I’ve never seen before. The lip pulling competition – where children put their arms around each other, hook their fingers in their opponent’s mouth and start pulling hard against each others’ cheeks – looks like it could end in tears and a dash to the hospital. But the children and the parents are laughing so hard I release my over-protective fears and see the funny side.
Then there’s the knuckle hop.
Competitors start off in a push-up position, except they are on their knuckles. In a test of endurance, they must ‘hop’ as far as they can, touching the floor with only their toes and knuckles. And no, it’s not just something people do with friends after a few too many drinks. The knuckle hop is an event in the Arctic Winter Games, with a world record of 58m. It’s one thing in theory, but when a teenage boy assumes the position and starts to hop forward on his knuckles, I find myself oscillating between horrified and fascinated. I flinch at the sight and the sound every time his knuckles hit the hard wooden floor, and breathe a sigh of relief when he stops, stands up and smiles.
Baffin Island is part of Nunavut, which is the newest, largest and most northerly territory of Canada. As well as being able to meet some of the locals, we share our journey on the ship with Canadian politician Eva Aariak, who was the second premier of Nunavut as well as the territory’s first languages commissioner.
It was Aariak who, when asked to select an Inuktitut word for the internet, settled on ‘ikiaqqivik’, which literally means ‘travelling through layers’ and refers to the traditional Inuit concept of a shaman travelling through time and space to find answers to spiritual and material questions. We may have ikiaqqivik access on the ship, but it’s even better to sit down and talk to Aariak about her territory and its people.
Aariak is one of two Global Perspectives Guest Speakers on board, where we are also joined by former astronaut and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
administrator, Kathy Sullivan. The first American woman to walk in space, Sullivan was also part of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission that launched the Hubble Space Telescope.
There’s something surreal about having a casual drink with a history-making woman whose fingerprints are on Hubble, but as our ship only carries up to 148 guests, when they’re not giving talks in the lounge, the guest speakers join us on excursions, at the dinner table and in the bar.
And while only one of us has actually been in space, by the end of the trip we’ve all been to the island that NASA says is the closest thing we have to Mars.
The largest uninhabited island on Earth, Canada’s Devon Island is only slightly smaller than Croatia, and since 1997 NASA has been using the island’s barren terrain, freezing temperatures and isolation to mimic the conditions on Mars, to develop new technologies and operating protocols for its deep-space missions.
OUT OF THIS WORLD
The High Arctic may not be another planet, but there are times when it feels like it. For the majority of our trip the only humans we see are the ones we came with, and the icy alien landscape is nothing like what we know at home. And then there’s the midnight sun.
I laugh when I read the ship’s daily programme and see the words: “Sunrise: Yes, it is still up. Sunset: Nope, not going down for a few days yet”. And when a group of us decide to look for polar bears after dinner, I find myself popping back to my cabin to reapply sunscreen at 11pm.
Towards the end of the trip the sun does start to go down for a quick nap, and on our final night it actually becomes dark enough that we are treated to a display by the dazzling aurora borealis, with red streaks joining the bright greens as they dance over the ship.
It’s a moment to get lost in rather than try to capture on film – but if I had wanted photo tips I was on the right ship. In addition to the ship’s photographer, we also have long-serving National Geographic photographer Phil Schermeister on board, who not only gives photography talks in the lounge but also comes out and about with us, helping us take the best photos possible in whatever conditions we are faced with.
And while we are all busy taking photos above the surface, some of the most fascinating photos of the trip actually come from the water beneath us.
Lindblad is the only expedition company to have an undersea programme, and every day our undersea specialist, Shaylyn Potter either takes to the Arctic waters in a drysuit (similar to a wetsuit, except it keeps water out), or sends a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to even deeper depths than she could possibly dive. Then over drinks in the lounge she treats guests to photos of kelp forests, colourful starfish, and species of fish that are new even to Potter and her fellow marine biologists on board. Potter says she loves breaking down misconceptions about Arctic waters being too dark and cold for things to live in, with her photos of vibrant sea life showing just how teeming the water really is.
ON THE ICE
As much as I love the wildlife, human life and sea life that the Arctic introduced me to, truth be told I’d really travelled here for something else. After falling in love with the ice in Antarctica, I had dreamed of being surrounded by icebergs, bergy bits (small icebergs) and growlers (chunks of floating ice) again – and when I saw my first iceberg on the opposite side of the world, my eyes filled with tears.
Sitting in our Zodiac, weaving between bergs of all different shades of blue, I am in the happiest of places. And when we arrive in the coastal town of Ilulissat in western Greenland and hop into small wooden boats to go look at the ice, I feel like a kid on Christmas morning.
Home to the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, which dumps around 20 billion tons of ice into Disko Bay each year, the Ilulissat ice fjord is filled with huge hunks of ice that have calved off the glacier.
As I get lost in the shapes and colours of a cliff of ice that forms the corner of one of those massive bergs, I hear a familiar and exciting sound. A humpback whale has surfaced behind us, and thanks to its blast of air we have time to turn around and see its tail fluke silently slip back into the water.
And as our boat gently chugs along, the flurry of camera shutters sound butterfly soft once again.
I GET LOST IN THE SHAPES AND COLOURS OF A CLIFF OF ICE