Long weekend in the British Virgin Islands

Well I've just had my first long weekend out here in the BVI, and also the first weekend when I haven't been running around doing administrative things all weekend.

Friday ended with a few drinks and some grub at The Dove - a popular ex-pat hangout which has a restaurant and bar. I had a rather good take on the old classic of macaroni cheese. This one had truffle oil, gruyere cheese, crispy proscuitto and sun dried tomato paste on it! Managed to get a decent night on Friday though - was in bed by about 10:30, and then had an early start.

Saturday I drove over to Nanny Cay on the South-West side of Tortola and got on a motorboat with some friends I had met the previous week at a cricket match who had invited me out. There were 4 boatloads of people who were out for the day, so there were lots of people to meet. First stop was Sandy Spit, a small island just off the coast of Jost van Dyke, then after a nice swim around there we headed over to the Soggy Dollar bar on Jost itself.

The Soggy Dollar bar is named so because there is no dock in the bay, so you have to put your money in your swimsuit and jump in to swim to the shore. Hence your dollars are soggy...
Had a nice meal there and enjoyed the beach and soaking up the sun.

Sunday I got up at about 7 am to go and play basketball with some people at 8:30 near the (seldom used) racetrack. We played for about 2 hours (in the rather hot sun), and then went for some beers and lunch.

Monday was a bit more lazy, and in the mid-afternoon I drove over to Smugglers' Cove (pretty much the farthest point on the island away from my apartment!) and spent the afternoon on the beach and doing some snorkelling.

All in all a pretty nice way to spend a long weekend!

Ken

Greenland

Greenland has been a revelation for me. It was more of an afterthought when picking this cruise as we were more keen on seeing the "true" Arctic of Svalbard, but it is an incredible place, and the Inuit who are native here are equally fascinating.

To give you a brief introduction to Greenland, it's the largest island in the world, yet it has the least population density of anywhere in the world. If you look at a map of Greenland, you just see a white blob with a bit of detail around the edge. What you probably don't realise on a cursory glance is that it's not just a map-maker leaving out small details, it is that the vast majority (81%) of Greenland is covered in a massive ice cap. After Antarctica, it is the second (or third if you count the two Antarctic ice sheets separately) largest ice sheet in the world. One statistic is that if the whole Greenlandic Ice Cap melted, the sea level would rise 7 metres globally.

Nuuk is the capital of Greenland, and that is where we were today. Nuuk has approximately 15,000 inhabitants (just about a quarter to a fifth of Greenland's total population), and also boasts a grand total of two traffic lights, the only university in Greenland, and is the only town in Greenland with suburbs. No two towns in Greenland are connected by roads, so the only transportation options are aeroplane, helicopter and ship.

Greenland still has very close ties with Denmark, only relatively recently having been granted self-rule, and there are significant subsidies given by the Danish government to the Inuit people. As a hang-over from the Danish rule days, Denmark decided at the time to try and house all of the Inuit people together in order to make it easier to deal with them. As a result, in Qaqortoq where we stopped yesterday there were relatively uninteresting rows of what in effect are council flats. In Nuuk today we saw some absolutely soul-destroying almost Soviet-style housing blocks. There were 10 of them, labeled "Blok 1, Blok 2" etc. next to each other, then the most famous Blok P which was a short way away. In Blok P (which I took a photo of - see Facebook or Flickr when I'm back and able to upload them there), one percent of the entire population of Greenland is housed.

As with so many indigenous peoples, alcohol abuse has proved to be a significant problem, leading to a knock-on effect on the children when their father may spend all the money for food on alcohol. There are rehabilitation programmes, but they seem to be insufficient. That said, the problem is by no means universal, and we had a very interesting guide today around the old city of Nuuk who told us about the culture and the traditions and the modern way of life.

His father became a teacher and went to study in Denmark, but insisted that he learn the traditional way of life - hunting seal without any modern aids, and the responsibility and tradition that went with it. If two birds were caught, one would go to the elders of the family, the other to the hunter. He emphasised that he did not go to hunt seal, he went to take seal. If he was not meant to get a seal that day, he would not. He hunts seal because he loves the meat - he says it's the best meat in the world. He doesn't hunt any more than he needs - he says he takes three, maybe four seal a year, and sometimes he will go along with others and hunt whale too, but it is not for commercial exploitation, and it is all very much sustainable.

It's easy to forget in the hustle and bustle of everyday life that there is still a world out there where modern life hasn't taken over and tradition still continues, and in Greenland it very much felt like being in a place where two worlds had collided. On the one hand there is a culture rich in history and tradition, but on the other hand, they have been pulled into some of the modern life. They now hunt seal with rifles, drive "Inuit Rockets" (small boats with oversized engines) and live in appartment blocks, but every Inuit will own a beautifully hand crafted National Costume which they will wear on very special occasions, and they still speak Greenlandic.

Tomorrow we have another stop in Greenland at Maniitsoq briefly, then the next day we disembark in Kangerlussuaq before I fly to Copenhagen for a night, then on to Prague for a Radiohead gig (then by train via Berlin to Poznan in Poland) for a second gig, then back to London.

Jan Mayen Island, Iceland, and a taste of Greenland

I've once again been a bit lax in updating the blog, but better late than never. We did manage to land at Jan Mayen Island despite some fairly heavy winds making the Zodiac landing a bit hairy...

Jan Mayen is set up as a meteorological station, but it is run by the Norwegian military. We were greeted by the base commander and given a little tour of the facility. It's actually fairly luxurious considering it's in the middle of nowhere, and it seems that it may still be of military significance. Interestingly it was the only part of Norway that was never captured by the Germans during the war.

After Jan Mayen, we had another day at sea and then docked in Akureyri in Iceland. Akureyri is in the North of Iceland, and we had a full day there. One nine hour bus tour later, we had seen Goddafoss - the waterfall of the Gods, Krafla geothermal power station, the sulphurous steam vents, some nice natural hot springs (which we had an hour to bathe in) and some other sights. Iceland is quite an interesting place - contrary to the name there's not much ice, but it's a volcanic island, and still has active parts, allowing them to generate copious amounts of geothermal energy, and resulting in the steam vents around the place. The town itself is fairly small, but has some cute little quirky buildings - corrugated tin nailed on wooden frames and other odd little places.

After Akureyri we sailed along the North coast of Iceland to Vigur Island, a small privately-owned island that houses a farm and a lot of nesting puffins, as well as "Europe's smallest post office". The farmer and his family have a pretty good business sense - somehow they manage to get a large number of tourists every year to visit their little island. They have about 80,000 nesting puffin each year, and they catch 8,000 a year to supply Iceland's restaurants (as puffin is a local delicacy). It was an interesting few hours on the island, but possibly not exactly what we were after from an Arctic cruise.

From Vigur Island we had another day at sea and today arrived in Greenland and spent the day in Skjoldungen Fjord on the East Coast. Today was the first day it really felt like we were in the Arctic. Greenland is covered in a massive ice sheet, and as a result, the glaciers calve off massive icebergs, so on our way in we sailed past some beautiful specimens. Bizarrely, there are a LOT of midges in Greenland, despite the cold weather. We went for a walk on the tundra which was a lot of fun. There are some beautiful little alpine plants there. All of them are fairly low to the ground (due to the thin layer of soil available to grow in and the permafrost layer underneath the topsoil). In the evening we sailed out the southern part of the Fjord and onwards towards our next stop tomorrow at Prins Christian Sound.

Arctic Cruise - ice bear, walrus, whales and dolphins

Since my last update, we got on our cruise ship in Tromso and have been to Bear Island and spent three days around Svalbard (if you google map it, you'll see it's a long way North of Norway at around 78 degrees latitude). The cruise has been a lot different from our trip to Antarctica last year - not least because we are on a luxury cruise ship this time rather than the
basic ship we were on before. Additionally, the wildlife in Antarctica was a lot more abundant and fearless. Because there are predators (the Arctic Fox and the Polar Bear), the birds and mammals are all a lot more shy and hard to see. As such, we had not seen much. We were lucky and saw one polar bear (which one of the crew spotted from over 3 miles away!), but only saw
one walrus on an island where there are normally hundreds. It was a bit disappointing, but then today made up for it. In the afternoon we were called to the bridge and decks as a whale and some dolphins had been spotted. I dashed up to the bridge, and for the next hour we watched between 50 and 100, or possibly more white-beaked dolphins jumping out of the water and
stirring up a giant bait ball of fish to feed off of. Some of the dolphins broke off and started playing in the wake of the ship and swimming ahead of the ship.

30 minutes after we had left the bridge, we were called again, a sperm whale having been spotted. I got up to the bridge in time to see it dive, and then we were treated to several dozen fin whales breaching all over the sea around us. Fin whales are the second largest whales in the world (the largest being Blue Whales), and these were large whales that we saw.
Backtracking, we had had a few disappointing days as the fog had set in fairly heavily and stopped us going ashore in various places, but as I said earlier, the whales and dolphins today were fantastic.

We are now at sea and are heading for Jan Mayen island - very remote and apparently it only sees a hundred or so visitors a year, so we are very privileged to be able to land there. On from there around Iceland.

Arctic Circle

This morning we crossed the Arctic Circle and continued North along the Norwegian coast. The scenery is pretty amazing, and I think it is only now really beginning to sink in. I guess it is sort of overwhelming to begin with and you don’t entirely appreciate the scale or the beauty of what you are seeing because it is so “in your face” and all around.

We got off the ship at lunchtime in a place called Bodø (in an effort to get some better food than is available on board the ship), and found our way to a nice little café (with a little venue downstairs) called the Café Kafka where we did have a nice meal for a slightly more reasonable price.

This evening we disembarked to go to a “Viking Feast” in the Lofoten islands. Given the cringeworthy “Arctic Baptism” that we had witnessed earlier which consisted of a crewmember dressed up as King Neptune pouring ice water down people’s backs, we didn’t leave for the Feast with very high expectations. Fortunately we were proved wrong and the meal was very nice – roast lamb with rutabaga, carrots and a very tasty oat dish. We had the meal in a replica of the largest Viking hall that has ever been discovered, which was situated about 20 metres away from the hall we ate in. There was an open fire and mead to drink during dinner and it was an altogether good evening.

The drive before and after dinner (we had to drive to a different town afterwards to catch up with the ship) was breathtaking. There are silvery-grey mountains covered in lush green plants and a lovely purple flowering plant that is probably a weed, but looks stunning. There is a subtle purple haze in parts over the landscape. The water that you pass is all crystal clear, with a few quartz-sand beaches here and there and mudflats and rocky beaches elsewhere. The visibility looks incredibly good – you could see down at least 5 metres through the water. Unfortunately I’m still unable to upload any photos (hopefully will be able to do so tomorrow), and in any event, taking photos through the window of a moving bus is rarely productive!

The average temperature in July is 12 degrees C here, but today it was high 20s, and in January averages minus 1 degree. For its position above the Arctic Circle, this area benefits from temperatures 25 degrees higher than anywhere else on this latitude. All of this is because of the Gulf Stream (the same ocean current which keeps the United Kingdom relatively warm for its latitude). As such, farms are very productive, and fruits and berries can be grown readily.

This evening we sailed into the Troll's Fjord which is a narrow (100m wide) Fjord...the ship sails down to the end of it where it does a pretty nifty little about face and sails back out. It was about 11:30pm when we got into it, but because we're so far north it was still fairly light. Just as we got to the end a Fish Eagle flew past over the boat. I got a few photos, but because of the relatively low light they are just silhouettes.

Tomorrow evening we disembark in Tromsø where we stay overnight and then board our cruise up to the Arctic. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to upload a selection of photos from Norway.

Ken

Norway - an extended update

Here’s a bit of an extended blog post as I’m unable to upload any pictures and we’ve seen quite a lot in the last few days.

Oslo is a bit of a strange city. Norway as a whole in fact is a bit odd in a way. By way of background, a third of Norway’s export income comes from oil. Oil has made Norway rich, but of course that could run out at any time, and with it Norway’s main source of income. Norway is one of the few countries which still engages in whaling (along with Japan and possibly Iceland), but this is no longer the moneyspinner it used to be in the days of mass Arctic and Antarctic whaling. Not only does it carry with it the stigma of killing the whales, but there is no longer the need for the whale byproducts as so many synthetic alternatives have been developed.

With that as a background, Norway is expensive. Very expensive. Even taking into account the weaker pound against most currencies, alcohol (which is notoriously expensive in Scandinavia) works out at around ₤10 for a pint, and food is similarly priced. At the last port stop on this fjord cruise, we bought two medium pizzas (one pepperoni and tinned pineapple, one ham and tinned mushrooms) and it came to ₤33. This is from “Peppe’s Pizza” which is pretty much on a par with Pizza Hut (except the pizzas aren’t as good!).

While Finland and Sweden seemed fairly comfortable in their identities and cultural backgrounds, Norway seems a bit lost. Oslo was a strange mix of very historic and rather culturally bland (with the exception of the new Opera House that has recently been built). In the relatively small area that we walked around, there were 6 McDonald’s and 5 Burger Kings. Norway also seems to have its own fair share of chavs, which had been thankfully absent in Finland and Sweden.

In Oslo we arrived late in the evening at about 9 o’clock, having taken the rather useful airport express train pretty much to the door of our hotel. We wandered out to a restaurant that was in one of the guidebooks only to find that it was closed for the summer holidays (a rather common but unfortunate trait all through Scandinavia). We headed straight to one of the other hotels in Oslo which had a restaurant, and ended up having a very nice meal there.

The next day we walked over to the opera house which is an angular white marble construction that is meant to (and does) resemble an iceberg coming out of the sea. It’s pretty impressive, and apparently has great acoustics. I uploaded pictures to Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenokumura/sets/72157621887097696/ (but won’t be able to upload any more for a while – lousy connection on this ship).

After that we walked along the waterfront past the old fort and then took a ferry over to another part of the mainland which houses a Viking ship museum, the Fram museum and the Kon Tiki museum. All pretty landmark things in the history of shipping. The Viking museum was pretty neat. There were two and a half ships in all…all fairly well preserved, having been used in burial mounds and therefore preserved by the clay around them. The Vikings certainly built ships fit for purpose – relatively shallow so they could be beached easily, enabling stealth attacks and quick getaways.
Next to the Kon Tiki museum. This museum is dedicated to the ships and journeys of Thor Heyerdahl who decided to prove popular thought wrong and make a series of voyages using primitive craft (such as a papyrus raft he built and sailed from Morocco to Barbados), and the Kon Tiki, a balsa wood craft he sailed from Peru to the Tuamotu islands in the Pacific.

Finally the Fram museum where the Fram (the ship Amundsen used to beat Scott to the South Pole) is situated. The Fram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fram) is (so the museum says) the only ship to have gone as far North and South as it has and is alleged to be the strongest wooden ship ever built. Over a hundred years old, it really feels like it could be dropped into the water and sail away with no problems. You can walk the decks of it and go inside to see what the living quarters were like, and it really gives you a sense of how the expeditions must have been. The Arctic expedition lasted three years at sea!

After a good day’s walking and museum-going, we headed back to the hotel, dropped off our stuff and then went out for a meal. On recommendation of some of the staff at the hotel, we went to a Chinese restaurant in town (having had our fill of fish and other such typical Scandinavian fare and wanting a change). We didn’t know what to expect, but having been squeezed into a table downstairs, it turned out to be a great meal. So if you’re ever in Oslo and fancy going for top notch Chinese food, go to “Dinner”.

The following day we hopped on a train to start our journey to Bergen on the West coast of Norway. The trip is called “Norway in a Nutshell” and consists of a 5 hour train ride through some pretty interesting scenery, then another hour on the Flam railway (the steepest cog railway line around I think), two hours by boat along one of the Fjords, and then another hour and a half by train to Bergen. It’s a pretty epic day by anyone’s standards, and it is interesting the changes in scenery you go through from Oslo out. Parts of Oslo (particularly around the museums) were like Cape Cod in the United States…then on the train you went through farmland, and then into mountains which in parts looked like the Lake District, the Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia, and Switzerland. Eventually at the end of the day we pulled into Bergen (which some Norwegians argue should be the country’s capital), and checked into our (rather ancient) hotel. The first room we were given was a poor excuse for a broom closet, and we got moved to a larger one, the bathroom of which was the same size as our previous room.

Bergen is a lovely little city (although we only really had a whistlestop tour of it on one of the tourist motorised trains. It’s got quite a history, and one of the areas called Bryggen is oozing history. It’s the oldest part of the town and the buildings are all still made of wood. There was great debate as to whether the whole area should be demolished (due to the predeliction of it to burn down in fires!), but fortunately it was saved. The area is suffering from subsidence (mainly due to the fact it is on reclaimed land), and the wooden buildings are all wonky and leaning into each other.

Bergen has a good fish market – stalls are set up in the main part of the harbour and tarpaulins are draped between to keep off the almost inevitable rain (Bergen gets 2m of rain each year). There are Norwegian King Crab, crab, and lobster which are cobalt blue in colour – quite striking and I have pictures which I will upload in due course. You can also get whale steaks cooked for you, elk hotdogs, reindeer burgers etc.

After a day’s sightseeing in Bergen we hopped on the Hurtigruten ship which is a mix between a ferry and a proper cruise ship. It goes up the coast of Norway and even as far over as Kirkenes which is on the border with Russia. It’s a 7 day trip if you’re going the whole way, but we will be hopping off in Tromso after day 4 in order to start our Arctic cruise from there.

We cruised the Geirangerfjord which is a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s an undeniably impressive fjord…but it’s almost difficult to appreciate the scale of it all with little in the way of reference points. Fjords were formed by glacial movements in the last ice age, and what is interesting is that they tend to be deeper at their most landlocked point and along the fjord than at the sea mouth. Some of the fjords we have passed through have been over a kilometre deep in places, and only 12 metres at their shallowest.

Along the Geirangerfjord are dotted farms which have long since been abandoned and turned into summer homes. Some of them are 300 metres above the water, and the mind boggles at the effort required to climb up what looks like sheer cliffs in places to get to these houses. The majority have no road access, so it must be a determined person to spend a summer up in one of them and lug the provisions up there as well.

Tomorrow we dock at Trondheim for a few hours, then on up the coast. The following day we are going for a “Viking Feast” in a reproduction of the grandest Viking hall that ever stood together with traditionally-brewed mead to drink. After that we’ve got a day in Tromso before we hop on the cruise up to Bear Island, Svalbard and the Arctic!

I hope to be able to upload some more pictures in Tromso, but no guarantees.

Be seeing you

Ken

Scandinavia

It's been a while since my last update, and I'm now part way through my latest trip which is to Scandinavia, the Arctic, Iceland and Greenland.

Mum and I flew from London over to Helsinki some days ago. We got in late and so just got a taxi in from the airport and went to bed. The hotel was pretty funky...it's all about the Finnish design I guess. It's called the Hotel Klaus K (http://www.klauskhotel.com/). Breakfast was a pleasant surprise - instead of your normal derivative breakfast fare, they had a selection of various dishes from around Finland as their breakfast buffet. Excellent food!

We only had the day in Helsinki as we were booked on an overnight ferry to Stockholm, but fortunately downtown Helsinki is eminently walkable. We started early, walked around and had seen most of the downtown area including the lovely market by the harbour and the Russian Orthodox church on a little hill (you almost forget that St Petersburg is a short ferry ride away from Helsinki until you see it). We had a nice lunch and looked in various design shops and the Moomin shop!

In the evening we got on board the Viking Line ferry to Stockholm. Big big ship - think overnight ferry from England to France or similar...duty free store, bars, slot machines etc. and the Finns and Swedes seemed to be taking full advantage of it. Cabins were extra, and although we had one, there were clearly people who just stayed up all night partying.

On the way into Stockholm in the morning it was a bit surreal. We looked out of the window of the ship and the scenery, islands, foliage and buildings were almost identical to the cottage country in Canada where we spend some summers. It was almost as if we'd woken up on the lake we go to, but in a oversized ferry.

Stockholm has something like 24,000 islands in its immediate vicinity, so there is a lot of water. The city itself is spread out over a number of islands, but you never really get the impression of being on top of it like you might in Venice. While there is a lot of water, the islands themselves are solid rock, and don't appear to be reclaimed land.

In Stockholm we walked around a bit and took a boat over to the Vasa Museum, which is a large purpose-built building which houses the incredibly well-preserved remains of the Vasa battleship - a 17th century ship which sank in Stockholm's harbour on its maiden voyage. A combination of the brackish water and the pollution kept it incredibly well preserved (95% of the ship has been recovered), and it was only rediscovered in the 60s. It was painstakingly raised up, treated to stop it decaying, and exhibited in all its glory. It is incredibly imposing, and you can walk all around it, both above and below it in the purpose built galleries in order to get a feel for the sheer scale of it. Highly recommended if you find yourself in Stockholm.

Yesterday we went to Skansen which is an outdoor historical area - I'd say a village, but it's pretty large (300,000 square metres) and it's made up of lots of different buildings and so on from different areas and periods in Sweden and its history. They've also got a good selection of Scandinavian wildlife - elk, bears, wolves, lynx etc. I've put pictures up on my flickr account (link at end of blog).

Today we went to a modern art museum in the morning, then flew to Oslo in the evening. It was supposed to be the afternoon, but due to a mix up, we had been booked on a flight leaving a month today. As a result we had to switch flights and wait at the airport for 5 hours...

Anyway, we finally made it to Oslo, had a quick wander around and had dinner and here I sit now back at the hotel. Tomorrow we sightsee, then the following morning we take a train, boat and bus out to Bergen on the South West coast of Norway.

Pics of the last few days here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenokumura/sets/72157621741351589/