Just saw
our second bear.
We worked our way far
north through the ice, well past the 80th parallel, until we hit the pack ice leading towards
the pole.
The bear
was closer than the last one.
I took
turns watching it through the binocs (huge, yellow, muscular, fat!) and trying
to capture it on camera/video.
It's hard
to explain the feeling in the air; I feel like I held my breath for 45 minutes,
watching the bear as it lumbered along.
My body is still tingling.
* * * * * * * * * * *
This
morning we kayaked with harbor seals in a cove that used to be an old whaling
camp named Hamburgbukta. (Old graves on the ground,
collapsed buildings.) It was great fun
-- they swam close and seemed not to mind our presence. The land around there was covered with deep
moss and lichens, soft like a mattress.
In the
afternoon as we traveled north we cut our way through deep fog.
I stood alone on the bow for a long time,
watching the white pass by.
It was
beautiful.
At times you could just make
out the blue sky above us and the sun shining down would cast a pale but
beautiful rainbow right in front of our ship like a white and faintly colored
halo.
Tom, one of
our naturalists, joined me out there after a while.
We talked about his job and the changes he'd
seen (mostly in the Antarctic) as a result of climate change.
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