“Good morning ladies and gentlemen, 2 killer whales on the starboard side @ 1.30” was Lisa’s greeting this morning at 7am (the expedition leader).

Have I mentioned Lisa before….she is equally at home wearing Manolo Blahniks at night and during the day, finding a vantage point to survey the landscape when we are ashore/packing a rifle to protect us from hungry beasts! Awesome!

It’s cold today, 1 degree C and now it’s started to snow. But we are going ashore and have a walk through spongy tundra and down rock/scree to some Thule remains and Royal Canadian Mounted Police huts about 6 kms. This is polar bear country potentially up close and personal, so we have been warned to stay in our groups and not venture off on our own. Staff have flares to scare off any bears that surprise us and only if necessary, guns. Saw summer and winter scrat from muskox, different lichen and some wild flowers. Also saw an Inukshuk with 3 rocks piled on each other….this means ‘you can get fish in the lake’; 5 piled rocks is a signpost that you have made this point, for others that are following; the top rock points to where you are headed.

Janice and Frits are a lovely couple from Calgary, with whom I have had lots of fun….they both have a dry sense of humour, are left leaning and critically appraise the lectures we receive, with finely tuned antennae for bull…t!

We were welcomed back on board by Henrik with hot choc laced with whiskey….that was a nice surprise and warmed us up immediately. They do look after us well!

 

“Nanook of the North” a silent/black and white movie classic is showing tonight. What a sad movie….Nanook dies a year after the film was made, out of starvation!