This is a rough journal written and posted on-the-run, material posted will be reshaped and ‘written’ on return to Melbourne. Some notes will be short and others may appear as longer raves in need of a good edit! Please note, it will more than likely be difficult to post much material when in the High Arctic due to the Satellite connections and limited access to email and the web. I will endeavour to email Hugh at Trinity Digital Solutions; he has undertaken to post any text if I am unable. Please enjoy our journey with us.
August 10, 2005 | Melbourne – Tokyo
Jenni and Mervyn left Melbourne in the early hours of the morning for Tokyo. This is the first stop in our journey to the Arctic.
August 11, 2005 | Tokyo – to New York
Resumed our flight to New York where we will spend a few days visiting galleries enroute to Ottawa and onto then the Arctic Circle. The flight path from Tokyo followed north to the Bering Sea and over Alaska where we looked down onto the lights of Anchorage. We flew over parts the Northern Canadian landscape and saw vast regions of water in the form of lakes and rivers. Arrived New York and into the summer humidity.
August 12, 2005 | New York, USA
Needing to readjust our body clock for Northern Hemisphere and date line, we are still living in yesterday. New York architecture is fascinating, great style and lack of visually assaulting advertising material. New York is full of wonderful galleries with some of the greatest art in the world readily available. We are foot-sore from walking streets and galleries, including the Whitney gallery of Contemporary Art and the Guggenheim gallery. There are commercial galleries everywhere too with it appears an equal emphasis on contemporary abstract and figurative work. The New York humidity intense after leaving the coolness of our Melbourne winter.
August 14, 2005 | New York to Ottawa
Our flight out of New York was scheduled for 5.00pm. Storms had been forecast across the United States for days. We made it to the airport before the rain arrived. The heat and humidity level had been rising all day – we were looking forward to arriving in Canada; it at least sounded cool, and closer to the Arctic.
Arriving at the La Guardia airport the required two hours before departure, time passed quickly as we checked in baggage and cleared customs. The air-conditioner had broken down in the departure lounge. This was the only departure lounge I’ve been in where you cannot have a view onto the runway and watch the activity.
After a while flashes of electric light and water sprayed onto the high windows and the familiar sound of thunder told us the storms had arrived in New York. Not long after the ‘weather’ had set in the first announcements came of cancelled flights to Canada; Toronto and Montréal. It is only a week or so since the Toronto disaster where a plane ran off the runway in similar weather and burst into flames. Our flight was still OK to Ottawa. Then more flights were cancelled and passengers re-scheduled to stand-by. Ottawa was still OK. And then it wasn’t. Our flight was cancelled and we too joined the lengthening queue of hopefuls attempting to leave New York tonight. The storm was right over the airport; claps of thunder and light were crashing around and shaking the departure lounge. We remained confident. We were re-scheduled to a plane to Toronto tonight with a late connection to Ottawa; reassured we had a good chance to arriving tonight. There were 50 passengers on standby before us. I was not confident.
Several hours later and when all flights for the night had been cancelled due to weather and erratic storms that was also shaking Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal we began to wonder how we would get to Ottawa in time to connect with the Arctic group. We were now informed there was not a chance of catching a plane out of New York tomorrow now because of the number of people ahead of us trying to leave the State. We could be placed back on stand-by for the day after tomorrow and take my chances of which city to arrive and then connect to Ottawa.
The airport by now was complete chaos. People from all the Canadian afternoon flights were in a state of panic. Most of the New Yorkers had given up and headed home until the storm passed while other passengers were running the mobile phones hot and there were queues to all of the public phone boxes. Meanwhile, the purple electric storm light flashed as the thunder rolled, and this will be our experience of a New York summer.
We joined the panic and gave up on catching flight to Ottawa and began to consider alternatives. We rang Amtrak and enquired about catching the train to Ottawa. This involved catching a train tonight, out of town to Albany where we would have to book into hotel and catch the morning train which would take us to Montréal by 6.30pm tomorrow night, then we would have to take a train, bus, flight to Ottawa and god knows what time we would arrive at Ottawa. That sounded too painful.
More phone calls and we settled on getting a Greyhound Bus to Montréal tonight and then a bus onto Ottawa.
After collecting our luggage again, (it had already been checked in) we hailed a taxi.
Couldn’t believe the rain – those few hours we had been inside the airport and outside the world had changed. There was total street traffic chaos, roads were flooded and cars were broken down on roadsides. After a nightmare journey of weaving at much too much speed, our taxi driver, Mohamed Osama deposited us at the bus station with warnings of ‘if anyone offers help, refuse it – don’t trust anyone’. OK…
Osama had risked life and limb (I had prayed in the back of the taxi) to get us to the terminal for the 9.30pm bus. He need not have bothered. We bought tickets and joined another long long queue of people hoping to leave New York tonight. And this is just one storm! We had at least been on another grand New York tour of Broadway at night, (the rain had not deterred the crowds) and seen the city skyline.
Eventually the bus company put on extra buses and we were out of there, feeling much safer looking onto the flooded streets from the large comfortable windows and height of a greyhound bus. It was nearly 11.00pm when we pulled out of that bus terminal.
All night we dozed to the rhythm of the road and the windscreen wipers. It was soothing and reassuring to be moving. In our cramped space we must have slept on and off, for the eight hour ride did not seem too bad. Sometime during the night we had stopped at the border, woken and asked to get off the bus and take everything. Custom’s clearance. Out came the suitcases and half asleep, we filed into the offices for border passport checks. Nobody was searched, seemed it was too early for such activity.
August 15, 2005 | Ottawa, Canada
In the dawn light we experienced our first foggy glimpses of Canada. The soft atmosphere was gentle to the trees and farm buildings against the grey dawn, I could envisage this landscape in paint. I am sorry I am so tired and can barely stay awake to absorb it.
The bus pulled into Montréal around 6.00am and it was time to move again. Lovely to hear the announcements in French and English and to read the signs in two languages. The women’s toilets had a French touch too – along with the usual vending machine offers of condoms were voiles of perfume.
Connecting bus to Ottawa leaves at 7.00am, just in time for coffee and croissant, eaten in another queue. Montréal, from the shortest tourist journey looks inviting, polite and calm. I hope one day I will be able to return and explore.
So here we are at Ottawa at the Lord Elgin Hotel, just one day late. The search this afternoon for gum boots for the Arctic voyage is another story. We had expected, being Canada and a place of the nine month winter to be able to buy gumboots easily. Wrong. More taxi and bus rides to way out of town. The specialist camping and outdoor shops don’t stock gumboots out of season – it is summer we were reminded… ‘Canada is divided into two types of outdoor enthusiast’s’, another store keeper informed us ‘there are those who camp and enjoy the nature and those who hunt and kill it’. It was the hunters who produced the gumboots. We had to take ride miles out of town to an Angling shop, and this, after many phone calls from the helpful outdoor sales clerk. We are almost ready for the Arctic. The felt lined gum boots will be necessary for traversing the zodiac from ship to shore.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005 | Ottawa to Resolute, Canada
Our early morning First Air flight departed Ottawa after some delay. The Captain indicated there was a chance the flight may not land at Resolute due to heavy fog conditions. After one refuel stop and several foggy flying hours we did manage a break in the sky and landed roughly on the dirt runway at Resolute. The population of this tiny Inuit town is somewhere between two and three hundred, dependent on who gives out the figure. Resolute is not a tourist destination. Steel buildings and flaking painted buses I thought initially were relics from a museum bussed us to the hotel for lunch and then onto the harbour for our embarkation to our ship Kapitan Klebnikov by zodiacs. The ship was anchored out to sea. Luggage and supplies were ferried ship to shore by the two helicopters.
***
It is now Tuesday August 23 and we have been at sea for a week. This is remarkable journey and just so good to be back at sea. The ship has sailed across the Baffin Sea to Quaanaaq in Greenland where went ashore by zodiac and met the Inuit people of the village. Of Danish descent, these people live the traditional Inuit life of hunting wild food such as polar bear, seal, walrus and narwhal as well as embracing modern technology such as computers and DVDs. There first language is Inuit. Some English is spoken and this as one boy told us was learnt from watching television. Husky sled dogs wander the town at will, often wearing their harness. Dogs are generally not treated here as pets or even shown affection, they are working dogs. Having said this, I had a lovely experience with one of the local men who beckoned me to follow him to his house where he spoke his language and pointed to an outside kennel with a female sled dog and a family of it seems liked a dozen pups. The tiny pups did not have their eyes open. The man pointed to my camera indicating I should take their photograph, he was so proud of his litter. The architecture was colourful – timber houses, no fences and painted bright colours of blue, red, brown green with mostly white trim. The steep pitched roof line gave the buildings a decorative quality.
We have seen some spectacular landscape and sailed through fields of exquisite icebergs. Pack ice has been sparse for this time of year. Yesterday’s strong winds of 50 knots are probably responsible for the lack of ice in Hells Gate, the region we sailed through last night after leaving the community of Grise Fiord. Grise Fiord is back in Canada and we had to clear customs again. This involved the customs officers having to fly in from Ottawa via Resolute. By the time they return home they will have been away one week. Remoteness, distance and flight schedules make movement here both time consuming and expensive. Then there is the possibility of these small airports being closed, as Resolute is today due to fog.
I connected with a woman artist at Grise Fiord yesterday. An Inuit who was born at a village nearby, she is a painter who is inspired by ice. We vowed to keep in contact and share our desert and ice passion. The photograph below is of Peepeelee standing before the polar bear skin she cleaned after her husband caught the animal.
Tomorrow we reach the northern most part of the voyage, the Tanquary Fjord.
Temperatures have been moderate and somewhere between -2 and 6 degree Celsius. They are cooling as we head north. The Arctic is not as cold as the Antarctic, this is quite noticeable and in fact feels like a mind day. The wind chill is what gets to you.
Highlights so far have been the helicopter flyovers – and wow, what an amazing perspective to view a glacier or an ice field – weaving down amongst the bergs and peering into their crystal caves. The whiteness and intense beauty of these towering ice sculptures is awe inspiring. From the helicopters we saw a pod of narwhal – rarely seen by ship; the noise and vibrations alert them to the danger of hunters. Their long probe could be seen through the deep clear arctic waters.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
We have been to the top of the Tanquary Fjord and are now a couple of days from the end of the first voyage, currently travelling through the Wellington Channel.
The weather has been kind for most of the voyage; blue skies and calm seas. Yesterday was good ice and the Kapitan Klebnikov did it’s work as an ice-breaker should; we smashed through thick pack-ice and watched deep cracks fracture the ice into angular shards which in turn rolled and grinded against the ship’s hull. We followed polar bears – a mother with two cubs. We watched as the bears leapt between ice-floes and sometimes jumped into the water to swim between ice-floes, the cubs being less confident as the mother.
The evening at sea turn on the most stunning shows – as the arctic sun dips low to the sea and then lifts into the sky barely touching the horizon. Last night’s sky was a kaleidoscope of colour, deep carmine, orange through to yellow spread the breadth of the horizon with the occasional wispy cloud silhouetted against the subject.
At the top of our journey, Tanquary Fjord, we landed by zodiac and hiked across the tundra. This is a bizarre landscape of inches thick soil above the permafrost line. The ground was soft underfoot and the end of a fruitful season of summer flowers was evident by the seed heads and drying grasses. Marshy areas indicated melted permafrost and glacial streams. Sense of scale is difficult, the mountains are enormous and the landscape seascape wide. It is not until you look back at the harbour and see our ship you have any visual sense of scale.
We met with Park Rangers who have spent the last three months living in the tundra – the snow has begun and in a day or two they will leave the park and it will be devoid of people for another season. There appears to be a lack of wildlife, the Rangers told us an arctic fox has been around the camp, but there have been no bears and little else. This seems to be the story everywhere we have sailed.
The weather turned sometime last night and today we woke to 40 knot winds, grey skies and choppy seas. Calm in relation to the high seas of the southern ocean! The landings planned for today have been abandoned, too rough for zodiacs and too much wind for the
helicopters.
Monday, August 29, 2005 | Beechey Island – Island of Lost Souls
Beechey Island is only an island at high tide. At low tide it is joined by a sandbar. It is well called the Island of Lost Souls. We landed early in the morning on the island and walked along the stony beach. Wooden markers showed the graves of three men who lost their lives while wintering with John Franklin at Beechey Island during his search for the North West passage. Remnants of other buildings and storehouses exist further along the island as traces of Franklin’s time. The island is typical of the region; stony beaches leading into tundra and hills with glacial ice filling every valley and indentation. The tundra has limited vegetation and lots of the fascinating polygon stone formations. These are created by the melt and freeze of permafrost pushing the stones against the surface of the earth from below creating the circular stone patterns. I walked along the island on my own and felt a real sense of melancholy. Probably the grey day, light rain and the sun obscured by cloud and mist helped create the atmosphere; not to mention the presence and knowledge of the people who have been here before and spend the dark season trying to keep warm. I imaged a large moody painting of this landscape – cannot wait to get back to the studio to make the painting.
Tonight is the last night on the ship for the first lot of passengers. Tomorrow we will be back at Resolute – and all being well, Mervyn will come aboard with the changeover passengers.
Captain’s dinner tonight and the dining room staff don traditional gear and bring out a desert of Alaska with flaming sparklers. I move into a new cabin after tomorrow, one with a window when Mervyn comes aboard. Cannot believe the artist was put in a room
without a view!
Tuesday, August 30, 2005-10-13 | Resolute
It is much colder in Resolute now than when we embarked on this voyage two weeks ago. The passengers left by zodiac early this morning, into a choppy sea. The new passengers will arrive later in the day. I have chosen to stay on the ship all day rather than disembark and return; will give myself a quiet day of painting and resting. Ship staff is frantically cleaning the ship in readiness for a Canadian health inspection. The few of us from Quark that have opted to stay on board have to go without lunch – we cannot even get a cup of tea – machines are being scrubbed and polished!
I have been helping staff distribute new parka’s to cabins in readiness for the new passengers.
New passengers arrive in late afternoon. There is a large French contingent with a French translator for ship announcements; last voyage was predominately German; with the translator. I am feeling like an ‘old ship hand’ now… feels more like a second voyage than I would have anticipated.
Mervyn arrives and we have a cabin on the eight floor, just below the bridge; and a port hole. It feels like luxury to sit on the bed and watch the ice pass by from the cabin.
There is a new sense of excitement on the ship as the new passengers find their cabins and explore the ship. I am looking forward to re-visiting some of the places the first voyage stopped at and looking at the new places.
There is also a Canadian artist-in-residence who has joined this voyage; David McEwen. David works predominantly in watercolour.
