Mag­da­le­nefjord – 5th August 2016

Fri
5 Aug
2016

Around mid-day we had rea­ched Mag­da­le­nefjord. Going into Mag­da­le­nefjord was not even part of the plan, but as we don’t real­ly have a plan, it didn’t real­ly mat­ter … we keep making decis­i­ons as we go along the way, and as it was quite fog­gy fur­ther north, but clear in Mag­da­le­nefjord, this decis­i­on was an easy one.

During a first litt­le walk on a nice sand beach (no, not Grav­ne­set), we saw arc­tic turn chicks, may­be flap­ping their wings today for the first time, doing their first met­res in flight … the first of many mil­li­on more to come, they will spend most of their life migra­ting back and forth bet­ween the Arc­tic and the Ant­ar­c­tic. So litt­le ani­mals, such an ama­zing life. Some wal­rus­ses were swim­ming around, with a gla­cier front pro­vi­ding a good back­ground.

Not far away, a polar bear was res­t­ing on the shore. We had a good, reason­ab­ly clo­se look at it. It just lifted its head, not giving a sh… about our pre­sence. Or any­bo­dy else’s pre­sence. The­re was about half a dozen of boats drif­ting or ancho­ring in that bay, crow­ding the place. Not that it bothe­red the bear much. But the place was over­c­row­ded, well, it has been very crow­ded for more than a 100 years the­re, it is not­hing new. But not­hing we would want to be part of, so we left soon and hea­ded on.

Gal­lery Mag­da­le­nefjord – 5th August 2016

Click on thumb­nail to open an enlar­ged ver­si­on of the spe­ci­fic pho­to.

We left Mag­da­le­nefjord in good style: hiking. Hundreds of thou­sands of tou­rists have been the­re over the deca­des, but few have done that, lea­ving not on a ship, but on foot. We made a nice gla­cier pas­sa­ge to the north. On the way to the gla­cier, we pas­sed a polar bear just a few hundred met­res from us. We could only see it when we had alre­a­dy pas­sed it. It was lying fur­ther up on the slo­pe, wat­ching us for a moment, then lay­ing its head down again, not taking any fur­ther noti­ce of us at all. Good. We went our way up on the gla­cier, up into the fog, the moun­ta­ins occa­sio­nal­ly coming out bet­ween fog banks … a mys­tery atmo­sphe­re, small melt­wa­ter streams run­ning down the gla­cier, dis­ap­pearing into the ice in lar­ge holes. The com­bi­na­ti­on of a gla­cier, a polar bear and fog made this tour quite unfor­gettable.

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