Greenland

When we first heard about this cruise it was the chance to see Greenland that appealed to me most. I've always wondered what that big white blob at the top of the globe was really like. And here was a chance to find out in relative safety and comfort.

Usually we've found that it's dangerous to have high expectations for a place. Some of our best experiences have been in places we expected to hate - Warsaw, for instance. But not this time.

We got to Greenland after two bumpy days crossing the North Atlantic. Nosing into the shelter of Prince Christian Sound at the southern tip of Greenland, our ship suddenly found itself in calm, smooth water. For nearly six hours we drifted at canoe pace between high rocky walls, past noses of glaciers that spilled down from the main ice sheet, avoiding small icebergs calved just days before. The only green was moss that had found a foothold on the scoured rock. The rest: rock and water and intense blue sky. Until we actually entered the Sound we had no idea if we'd be able to do it - the last ship that had tried to make the passage had encountered fog and ice that made it turn back. But we had great weather and were able to see this landscape that is beyond incredible.

When we left the Sound we sailed right into a dense fog bank that stayed with us until the next day, when we reached the small settlement of Qaqertoq. But as we entered its harbour we sailed into a bright sunny day and a view of cheerful little houses scattered over the rocks. The ship had to anchor and send us to the small dock in the lifeboats. And for a couple of hours the patient Greenlanders endured (with great cheerfulness) an invasion of mostly friendly tourists. We saw a nice little museum, a pretty old church, and Greenland's only fountain. I was most impressed with the colourful and skillful beadwork. The traditional Greenland Inuit woman's outfit includes a huge bead collar that drapes down around the shoulders. There were several for sale by women who'd made them, but I managed to resist - they're heavy.

Back into the fog again as we moved further up the coast to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. And again we came out of the fog bank as we entered the harbour and had another radiantly sunny day. This was a somewhat bigger town that's been growing fast since Greenland got home rule. It had the apartment blocks to show it. Our ship circled around in the bay for awhile, and I could see and hear the captain on the flying bridge: "But we confirmed that we were coming two weeks ago!" he was saying on the telephone. Finally the pilot boat showed up and we backed through a narrow entrance to dock in the inner harbour. Pretty impressive!

The town's buses were commandeered to take our small horde into the pretty part of town and we wandered around a bit, browsing through the tourist shops (expensive!) and the museum (very good, complete with mummies and many other interesting things). I finally found some qiviut (musk ox wool), and thereby hangs a story.

I'd seen some spun qiviut in Qaqertoq, but it was more expensive and not as nice as what's available in Banff. So I was pleased to see a cardboard box of unspun stuff in a funny little tourist shop packed with interesting junk. It was even what I thought was a reasonable price - 1.5 kroner for a gram, which is a fair chunk of this light stuff. So I got a small plastic bag full. But after we left the shop (I also got a musk ox horn and a labradorite pebble) there was a woman with a musk ox hide spread out on the grass, selling a few little things she'd made. To pass the time she was working over some musk ox fur, removing the guard hairs to get the undercoat that's qiviut. We got to talking, and I told her how much I'd paid for the stuff I bought. She was shocked and ashamed that I'd be charged so much, so she took a big bagful of the fur she had and gave it to me. Free. So now I have lots, and lots of work to do to clean it, too.

We sailed out into a fog bank again, but this morning dawned clear and lovely. Sailing down the coast we passed by quite a number of icebergs and realized what our captain and navigator had been dealing with in the fog the day before. We got quite close to one lovely berg - circumnavigated it, even - that obligingly shed bits of itself into the water as the assembled multitude of tourists filled their camera memory cards. What a show!

So now we're back into rough water heading for Iceland again - we'll spend Saturday in Reykjavik - completely satisfied with our Greenland experience. I don't know if we'll ever go back - probably not - but it was an experience I'd recommend to anyone.

From Norway to nowhere

I've been falling into the trap of waiting until there's a good solid internet connection to write about what's been going on. That's not going to happen very soon, so what I'm doing now is writing something on my computer when I can and uploading it when the ship is in contact with a satellite for a few moments. 'Cause most of the satellites - why am I surprised? - are positioned to make communications easy for the largest number of people. And there sure aren't many people where we've been going.

So where have we been? I left off, I think, just before we got to Oslo. Which we did, a week ago Saturday (the 19th, I think). That's where Ron and I left the ship to go across Norway by train, boat, bus and train again, taking a couple of days to do it. We followed the Norway in a Nutshell tour that the Norwegian travel people make easy to arrange over the internet so we could see a little more of what Norway might be like.

The biggest surprise came on the first train leg. We set out from Oslo and travelled through nice green countryside, a bit like the East Kootenays of BC - trees, rounded mountains, some lakes and fast-flowing rivers, farms wherever possible. Nice. Pretty. Finally we came to a large, busy ski resort full of German and Polish tour buses, and then disappeared into a tunnel. When we came out we were on the surface of the moon. Rocks. Lichen. Struggling grasses and a few bent bushes. Lakes with rivers rushing to the Oslo side of the country still, but definitely a different climatic zone. And it was foggy and rainy, not the lovely mostly-sunny day we'd left behind. And it stayed like that for the next couple of days.

We spent the first night in an isolated former sanatorium reachable only by train (a tiny train that clung to the cliff face). The next day we took this train through spiral tunnels and switchbacks to a fjord-side town to catch a car ferry to another little town a couple of hours away. That's when we saw the Norway you see on post cards. Our pictures (to be uploaded to Flickr when there's a bit more internet) aren't post card quality thanks to the rain. Am I ever glad I got my coat waterproofed before we left, because I couldn't stand to spend any more time than necessary inside. By the end of the trip we got to feeling about waterfalls the way we feel about Roman amphitheatres - "Another waterfall? Yawn" - but it took a while. There must have been 39 gazillion of them in every possible arrangement.

We landed in a small town that seems to exist now mostly to look after the tourists like us who miss the bus for the next stage of the tour, but that was okay. Time to get a little lunch and to walk around the perimeter of the Viking fair they were holding that weekend. It was kind of like the Indian Village at the Calgary Stampede, complete with tents and campfires and people dressed up to look like their ancestors. They seemed to be having lots of fun, but we felt a little nervous as we walked along beside the archery pitch - not everyone had a Viking's skills with the bow. Fortunatly the organizers had figured out how far a novice can shoot and had cordoned off the appropriate area outside.

Finally we were in a bus climbing up an incredibly steep one-lane two-way road past a couple of superb waterfalls to a modern hotel overlooking the valley. I think one of my pictures there is postcard quality - I'll stick it in here when I can. The view was incredible. The hotel was expensive, not terribly friendly or well run (except for the young wait staff from Finland, Poland, Spain, Australia, everywhere but Norway), and boring for those of us not suited to trekking over hill and dale (I know, we should - but it hurts!). Back on the bus in the morning to another lovely little town with a gem of a 13th-century church and people parasailing on the lake, then onto the train for the trip to Bergen.

Bergen was lovely, sunny and warm (weather the ship had been experiencing all the time we were away) with a fantastic view from the top of the funicular. It had a good wool shop, too.

Impressions of Norway? Expensive! Everything is at least twice what I felt comfortable paying (except the wool I got on half-price sale in Oslo). Very pretty. Not hugely friendly, and you'd better remember your Turkish ways when trying to board trains or buses. I think that it's one of the few places we've seen enough of on our travels. We don't feel we need to spend more time there, but it was good having seen what we did. And Ron was finally able to realize there his goal of having three different kinds of pickled herring for breakfast.

Next stop, after a couple of days at sea: Iceland. First Akureyri, on the north coast at the end of Iceland's longest fjord. Sharper eyes than mine saw whales and puffins. I enjoyed the scenery and the bright sunny day. We took a bus tour to Myvatn (which our travel companions had figured out means "lake of midges" and had brought bug spray for) and the lava fields around it. It was everything we'd hoped for. We stepped over one of the many cracks where the European and North American tectonic plates are separating; didn't get splashed by boiling mud; and went to Hell and back (an extinct crater near a large geothermal power plant is called Hell - and the water in it freezes over in the winter, too. Our American friends were delighted: if Barack Obama becomes the next U.S president a black man will be inaugurated when Hell is frozen over).

The next day we moved along to the sort of claw that sticks out on the northwest coast of Iceland - a bunch of spectacular fjords - and spent an afternoon walking around the tiny town of Isafjordur. Nice place on the sunny day we enjoyed, but I can imagine how dismal it must be in the winter.

Got one small hint of how things have changed since Viking days. I walked into a lovely little craft store where the young lady behind the cash was knitting. I asked her where I could find wool, and she gestured vaguely along the main street. I wandered all over town and couldn't find the place, so I came back (bought a nice knitted hat for a shockingly small amount of money) and showed her the rather good map we'd been given on the boat. She couldn't read it! Had no idea how to make sense of it. What would her ancestors have thought?

Anyway, we liked Iceland. We're back again in a couple of days, stopping in Reykjavik, and I'm looking forward to it. So far it's a place we'd like to come back to. Maybe spend a couple of weeks near Akureyri exploring and getting to know the people a bit. So our list of places we'd like to go back to continues to get longer.

And now we are really in the middle of nowhere, on our second day at sea heading to Greenland. We finally had a glimpse yesterday of the North Atlantic my father experienced on corvette duty during WW II - near-gale winds and 2-3 meter waves. The biggest surprise so far has been the many birds - kitttiwakes and fulmars - following our boat even way out here. People say they've seen whales, but I've had to settle for the birds. Oh well.

Petrels at sea

My GPS seemed to think we were walking on water at lunch today. That reminded me of a recently-learned useless fact: that petrels (sea birds) are called that because they seem to run along the top of the water like St. Peter. So we must be a pair of petrels. Or a boat-full.

We boarded the MV Prinsendam yesterday at Dover, bound for Amsterdam via Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Shetland Islands and Edinburgh. It's a Holland America Line ship, but our fellow passengers include fewer elderly whiners than usual because the destinations are so adventurous. There are even a few kids!

It's a nice old ship. Our cabin is positively huge, especially considering we're paying just about the cheapest fare (we don't mind the lowest deck, but we do insist on having a view of the outside). She was built about 20 years ago for a Norwegian line that was bought by Holland America, so the layout is quite different from what we're used to. She's also quite small, with not quite 1000 passengers. So far the food has been just a notch less superb than we've had on other cruises and the crew is just a little less experienced, but the next three weeks look quite promising all the same.

The week or so in England was, as usual, a good experience all told. The weather was the pits, cold and rainy most of the time. We even had to stay indoors one afternoon because the rain was bucketing down. But we still managed to see a few new bits of England. Penzance, and Cornwall in general, made a great impression - scenic little villages beside the ocean, fishing boats, standing stones and all kinds of delights. And almost no North Americans! Most tourists were English, with some Germans and Dutch thrown in. Some day we must come back and spend a week or two.

We had a little more than a day in Dover, too, to see the white cliffs and other exotic sights. Dover's history goes way back. The Romans landed thereabouts and fortified the cliff east of town - the castle they began turned into a major structure under the Normans and was still being used in WW II. Even before the Romans it was an important port. The museum has an excellent display of the oldest sea-going boat ever recovered, a 3500-year-old wreck found in a hole being dug for a new road near the waterfront. They did an amazing job of restoring it and displaying it with lots of information and interactive stuff to do about the Bronze Age.

Dover still shows signs of the intense bombardment it endured during WW II. You can see the coast of France from the cliffs above town, and there were guns that could fire that far. Made life pretty hard for the people, but those English are tough souls. I was moved to tears by the memorials in St. Mary's church in the center of town - memorials to the people who manned the little ships to rescue the troops at Dunkirk, to the fishermen and others who turned their boats into minesweepers and died by the hundreds, and to thousands of others who died in the Channel during war or peace. It's not been an easy place to live. And now it seems to be going through tough economic times with the Channel tunnel taking away a lot of ferry business. That's probably why they're turning it into a cruise port, and it makes a very good one. Close to London with good train and road connections, but not so close that it's part of the huge congestion around the city. So good luck to them.

Tomorrow we arrive in Oslo. Ron and I will be taking a train across Norway to see the scenery inland. We hope, all going well, to catch up with the boat again in Bergen. Fingers crossed!

A Week and a Bit in England

As usual I'm days behind in updating people on our whereabouts - and almost out of minutes on BT OpenZone, which is one of my least favourite ways of getting at the internet. Anyway... We're in Exeter, in southwest England - Devon - just back from a less-than-lucrative day at the races at Newton Abbott. It was a good day nonetheless.

So far we've done plays and concerts in London (Hairspray, the Monteverdi Choir's wonderful performance of music by Schutz, Durufle and others, and Spamalot), spent much too little time exploring Penzance and the rest of Cornwall, and have poked around Exmoor with a couple of locals who run "Southwest Safari" - very much worth doing if you have a chance. I've been uploading pictures to Flickr as possible, so have a look there at some of what we've been doing. Time's almost up - over and out!