Category: travel

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

Please send your photos, as I have only one set left!

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is here with photos of a trip to a special place in Greece. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Between Heaven and Earth

Meteora (Μετέωρα) is a majestic rock formation comprising countless peaks, caves, crevices and overhangs in the Thessaly region, northern Greece, a 3.5-hour or so drive from Thessaloniki:

These pillars were formed about 60 million years ago, when the seabed receded and exposed the rocks to winds and waves. Thanks to its remoteness and inaccessibility, Meteora for centuries has been a magnet for misanthropic characters seeking salvation in solitude or common folk escaping from marauders and assorted enemies:

Hermits and monks from all over the Byzantine Empire converged on the area to build proto-monastic communities, which with time grew into monasteries. Out of the 33 that were founded throughout the centuries, six are active today:

The word meteoron (pl. meteora) means ‘between earth and sky’, ‘lofty’ or ‘elevated’. Meteora was a bastion of Greek Christian orthodoxy during the 400-year Turkish occupation (for a gripping account of how the occupation ended, see The Greek revolution: 1821 and the making of modern Europe, by Mark Mazower):

The first monks climbed up Meteora’s peaks by using scaffolds propped up by joists that were wedged against holes in the rock. Later, rope ladders and nets were deployed until the first stairs were carved into rocks in the early 20th century:

Until the 1920s, many monasteries winched visitors tucked inside nets, a 370-m journey in one case. According to tradition, a wary visitor asked a monk whether the rope of his transporting basket was ever replaced. ‘Yes’, he answered; ‘when it breaks’. Bridges and stairs chiseled into the rocks have made ascent a lot easier, but supplies are still hauled up in some monasteries:

Here, a group of tourists (highlighted) cross a narrow bridge, the single access to a monastery:

Meteora comprises the most important group of Greek monasteries after Mount Athos. The six active ones (two are now nunneries), the massif and the village of Kastráki (in the distance) are a UNESCO World Heritage Site:

If you live on the narrow top of a mountain, you need to be resourceful and imaginative with your gardening…:

….and your booze supply. This 16th-century oak cask once stored up to 12,000 l of wine:

The monasteries’ churches, in typical Byzantine fashion, are packed with priceless frescoes, icons and mosaics depicting Christ, the Virgin Mary and assorted saints in a jumble of gold, colours and shapes. Alas, photos are not allowed inside the churches, so you will need to look up online to find out more. This photo was taken from the outside, so no sin was committed:

The monasteries are not for people with impaired mobility or couch potatoes. All but one require moderate to hard climbing – up to 300 steps. Too hard for many visitors, who stay put by the road and pass the time photographing the landscape:

Now the bad side of Meteora. If you are thinking about visiting the monasteries for peace and contemplation, forget it: they have been turned into mega-tourist attractions. The narrow access road through the mountains is lined with coach after coach disgorging hordes of tourists and rude pilgrims, there are long queues for the entrance fee (5 Euros, cash only) and the buildings are claustrophobically crowded. Having said that, Meteora retains its magnificence. If you go, pick a cold, rainy day outside the religious calendar, and get there early:

To the Arctic, part 7: A cliff packed with guillemots

October 4, 2025 • 10:15 am

On July 12, while heading south towards Jan Mayen Island, we got off the ship to take a long Zodiac trip along one of the most amazing animal habitats I’ve seen: Alkevfjellt (“Mount Guillemot”).  It is a geological feature that happens to have provided hundreds of narrow rock shelves for one species of bird to nest on. And nest they do, by the hundreds of thousands. From Wikipedia:

Alkefjellet is a cliff in Lomfjordhalvøya in Ny-Friesland at Spitsbergen, Svalbard. Alkefjellet is a bird cliff facing towards Hinlopen Strait.

Alkefjellet (‘mount guillemot’) is the nesting location for over 60,000 breeding pairs of Brünnich’s guillemots. The cliffs are made of basalt columns up to100 m high, interspersed with a dark layer – a dolerite intrusion. The molten rock, as it intruded caused the limestone in the contact zone to re-crystalize and form marble.

Here’s the ship’s map of our trip again (in this post we’re at number 6), and then a map of the Hinlopen Strait where the cliffs are

You can see that Svalbard is not an island but an archipelago, and we’re in a strait separating two islands.

Wikimedia Commons

First the bird:

The thick-billed murre or Brünnich’s guillemot (Uria lomvia) is a bird in the auk family (Alcidae). This bird is named after the Danish zoologist Morten Thrane Brünnich. The very deeply black North Pacific subspecies Uria lomvia arra is also called Pallas’ murre after its describer.

This species was first described by Linnaeus. There are four subspecies, and the one on Svalbard is U. l. lomvia,  Here’s a photo of some thick-billed murres in breeding plumage, which is the stage when we saw them:

By USGS – USGS, Public Domain

 

. . . . and its range:

Cephas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

We cruised along the base of the cliffs in the Zodiac; photography was a bit hard because the water was choppy and it’s hard to photograph birds on a cliff when the boat is rocking and focus changes.  Plus there were so many birds (I would guess over 100,000) that it smelled TERRIBLE from guano. But you ignore the smell when there’s a site like this.

Further, we had to be constantly aware of them pooping on our heads.  I mostly knelt in the bottom of the rubber boat, and once when I got up from the edge to kneel down, a juicy murre poop landed exactly where I was sitting one second after I left. I was lucky, though a woman next to me was not so lucky and got a good dose of murre excreta on her head.

The birds have only, it seems, about a foot to nest, and I think they incubate eggs right on the rock ledge, without a nest. Wikipedia says this:

Thick-billed murres form vast breeding colonies, sometimes composed of over a million breeding birds, on narrow ledges and steep cliffs which face the water. They have the smallest territory of any bird,[requiring less than one square foot per individual. A breeding pair will lay a single egg each year.[Despite this, they are one of the most abundant marine birds in the Northern Hemisphere.

Here they be:

The cliffs. There must have been more than a mile of breeding birds along the ledges. It’s impossible to estimate numbers; there might have been close to a million.

First, approaching the “bird cathedral,” you see a place without many ledges to give you an idea of the geology:

The birds:

These are nest sites! Look how crowded they are:

Less than a square foot per pair!  They go out fishing, with one pair staying on the egg, so, as you cruise around, the air above is filled with thousands of wheeling, calling murres. See video below.

Two videos from the ride (filming was tough in a boat with nine other people, all trying to film or photograph):

Thousands wheeling above in the blue air:

This short video shows why I call it a “bird cathedral”. Truly a stunning site.  A few days later we saw another murre cathedral on Jan Mayen Island.

A visit to Christina’s for ice cream

September 30, 2025 • 10:30 am

It is a tradition that when I visit my friends in Cambridge, we all go to Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream, which, in my view, is the best place in America to get the stuff. Not only is it truly homemade on the premises, but it’s fantastic and creamy AND comes in a gazillion flavors. They had 45 flavors of ice cream yesterday and additional flavors of sorbet.

When you see the selection below, you’ll see the difficulty of choosing a flavor.  This time I had a lot of trouble, as they had my favorite flavor (burnt sugar, which is ethereal) but there was so much more!

Some photos:

The entrance, same as in years past:

A panorama of the inside (click to enlarge), which also never changes. (There is only one store.) Betsy can be seen eating at the left side, while the ice cream selection is on the striped board to the right:

Below: the Big Board (click to read)!  There were 45 flavors yesterday. Some of the ones I considered ordering included mango, burnt sugar (the best!), sweet cream (yes, that’s what you taste), ginger, ginger molasses, chocolate lavender, chocolate banana, malted vanilla, banana cinnamon, dulce de leche, chocolate Chinese five spice, and orange pineapple. In truth, I would want them all!

Please put in the comments which ones you’d order (maximum three flavors). You can have them in either a cone or a dish, but cones are drippy and it was hot yesterday. Plus my theory is that you get more if you get it in a dish.

Tim always gets the same thing: mint chocolate chip, and I always razz him about it.  And he gets only one scoop, even when I’m paying!

BORING!

Betsy got two scoops of salted caramel; I consider it a great shame not get only one flavor if you get two scoops, but at least it was an excellent choice of flavor:

My haul: three scoops. From nine o’clock clockwise: sorghum ginger snap, green tea, and adzuki bean.  The sorghum ginger snap was just as you might expect: a superb Indian Pudding of ice cream. And when I get green tea, I always get adzuki bean, as it makes a nice Japanese combination of flavors.  They were all terrific, though I much mourned the absence of burnt sugar. If you go to Cambridge, you must go to Christina’s and get that flavor, which they always have.

Me and my haul.  I’m a happy complacent man! (For a lugubrious Jew, complacency is the highest state of being.)

When you go to Christina’s and order burnt sugar ice cream, tell them that Jerry sent you. They’ll have no idea what you’re talking about.

Cambridge and Boston: more travel photos

September 29, 2025 • 10:06 am

Today is my last full day in Boston/Cambridge, and tomorrow evening I’ll be back in Chicago.

The other day my friends Andrew and Naomi took me to Oliveiros’s a Brazilian steakhouse in Somerville. If you haven’t been to one, they all work the same way. There’s a big salad bar with stuff you largely want to avoid so you can eat more meat, and then the servers bring skewers of freshly-cooked meats to your table, and you indicate which ones you want. It’s mostly beef (sirloin, flank steak, etc.), but also lamb and sausages. They slice a long, thin piece from the skewer and you grab it with your tongs. This can go on forever, or until you’re sated.  If you like meat, it’s a great experience, assuming you pick the right steakhouse—like this one.

Below: a famous pre-drink cocktail, the Brazililian caipirinha. It’s delicious, and here’s Wikipedia’s take:

Caipirinha (Portuguese pronunciation: [kajpiˈɾĩɲɐ]) is a Brazilian cocktail made with cachaça, sugar, lime, and ice.  The drink is prepared by mixing the fruit and the sugar together, then adding the liquor. Known and consumed nationally and internationally, caipirinha is one of the most famous components of Brazilian cuisine, being the most popular national recipe worldwide and often considered the best drink in the country[3] and one of the best cocktails/drinks in the world, having reached third place in 2024, according to the specialized website TasteAtlas.

Cachaça is distilled sugarcane liquor. It differs from rum by being made from freshly squeezed juice of sugarcane, while rum is made from fermented molasses. Cachaça also is not aged as long as is rum.

Doesn’t this look good? It was.

The buffet (aka “salad bar”). In the second photo, my friend Andrew is trying to rile me up by taking all the platanos, or fried ripe plantains. We both agree that that is the only item you should get at the salad bar (I also got a bit of potato salad).  I can eat many, many fried plantains.

Andrew trying to deprive me of platanos. Look at that evil expression!

Where’s the beef?  Here it is, and skewers of various meats keep coming:

A visit to Dorchester the next day, where my hosts Tim and Betsy used to live. (We all lived together on Beacon Street in Boston for my first two years in graduate school, inhabiting the tiny basement of the man who founded the New Balance Shoe company. I then moved to Cambridge and Tim and Betsy to Dorchester.)

Tim needed a pastry cutter to make real Southern biscuits, and we found a lovely, crowded kitchen store in Dorchester. It also sold cat clocks. I used to have one of these, black and looking like Felix the Cat. The tails wag back and forth with the seconds:

Lunch at the Steel and Rye Restaurant in Milton, right across the small Neponset river from Dorchester (Dorchester is formally part of Boston, while Milton is its own town). I had the Italian sandwich: “coppa, salami, mortadella, provolone, shredded lettuce, chili vinaigrette, ciabatta.” Quite tasty.

The restaurant was right by the Dorchester-Milton Lower Mills Industrial District, The old factory buildings remain, especially the one where they made the famous Baker’s Chocolate. They’re now apartment or office buildings, but are still lovely. The area as described in Wikipedia:

The Dorchester-Milton Lower Mills Industrial District is a historic district on both sides of the Neponset River in the Dorchester area of Boston and in the town of Milton, Massachusetts. It encompasses an industrial factory complex, most of which was historically associated with the Walter Baker & Company, the first major maker of chocolate products in the United States. The industrial buildings of the district were built between about 1868 and 1947. They were listed as part of the district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, with a slight enlargement in 2001. The buildings have been adapted for mixed industrial/retail/residential use.

Here’s one pair of buildings from 1905 with a nice metal bridge connecting the parts:

Back in Cambridge, you see this sign towering over Porter Square. I’ve not seen the likes of it before. It’s not far from Harvard.

My big doings yesterday consisted of going to the Japanese restaurant Yume Wo Katare in Porter Square. Although the link says “This is not a ramen shop,” it certainly is. (It’s the equivalent to Magritte’s “This is not a pipe.”) In fact, the only thing they serve is ramen.  You get a very large bowl in a delicious, rich, porky and garlicky broth with bean sprouts and pieces of pork (choose two or five big pieces). Your only other choice is whether you want extra garlic (you don’t need it; the broth is plenty garlicky) or a more spicy broth.  It’s delicious, with plenty of hand-pulled noodles and big pieces of juicy pork.  But the restaurant is also known for something else (see below, noting the “dream workshop” on the window):

The inside. I was heartened by the almost exclusively Japanese clientele, which testified to the quality of the ramen. There are no tables—only benches.

Below: my bowl. It was HUGE (I chose the five pieces of pork). I was able to finish everything except a cup or two of broth, but my stomach was absolutely distended: full of noodles sloshing around in broth. I had to take the bus home though it was only a 20-minute walk, simply because I was too full to walk. Needless to say, I had no dinner.

Each customer gets judge by the staff when they’ve finished, rated on how much food is left. I got a “good job!”, but I think everybody gets that.

My giant portion. This was the first time in my life I did not completely empty a bowl of ramen. But I ate all the solids!

The aspect of this restaurant that has made it especially well known is that customers are asked at some point in their meal to tell everyone in the restaurant their Big Dream. (They ask you if you want to recite one when you enter, and if you do they put a placard saying “Dreamer” at your place. ) Three people recited their dreams during my lunch: one woman wanted to visit all of America’s National Parks (there are 63), and a guy said his dream was to participate in an Ironman Triathlon, which includes a full marathon, a 2.4-mile swim, and a 112-mile bike ride. I can’t remember the other dream.

When they asked me as I entered the restaurant if I wanted to recite a dream, I said I was too old to have dreams, but of course that was not true. I still have them, but I am too shy to recite them.

Later today: a visit to Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream in Cambridge, the best place to get ice cream in America.

Random photos from Cambridge

September 26, 2025 • 8:15 am

It’s been raining here, so I haven’t got out much, but when I did I dined with old friends, and I won’t show those photos.  So far I have only a few pictures of Cambridge, MA, and here they are.

The city (once a town):

A panorama of Harvard Yard. Click twice to enlarge. The group of people in the middle are tourists (mostly Asian) waiting to get their photo taken with the statue of John Harvard.

The center of the picture above:

. . . and across the street from the Yard is the Coop, Harvard’s official bookstore.  In truth, they don’t have nearly as many books as they should, but a surfeit of Harvard memorabilia to fleece the tourists. I don’t have any Harvard tee-shirts (though I have over a hundred college tee shirts); I looked at one in the Coop, but it cost $35!

There was this book, though, and perhaps it bears reading:

Why Evolution is True has historically been on sale at the Coop since 2009, but now the biology section is PATHETIC, and my book is gone. But looking for it alphabetically by author in the tiny, tiny evolution/genetics section, I found Matthew’s last book on prominent display:

Out to lunch in Harvard Square, we passed the house of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a house also used as George Washington, headquarters:

This historic yellow mansion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was home to one of the world’s foremost poets, scholars and educators. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived here from 1843 until his death in 1882 and produced many of his most famous poems and translations here. Geneneral George Washington also lived in the yellow house and used it as his headquarters during America’s Revolutionary War, planning the Siege of Boston here between July 1775 and April 1776.

Here it is on Brattle Street, which is flanked by many fancy and famous mansions. Longfellow must have made a good income from his poetry.

. . . and a statue of the poet in an adjacent park:

A nearby Quaker meeting house. I went here once in graduate school, as my adviser’s assistant was a Quaker, and she invited me to go. I went since I was curious about how the services went. They were very strange to me. The preacher (or whoever was in charge) asked us to introduce ourselves and explain why we were there. I was flummoxed as I hadn’t expected to speak, but I stammered a few words. Then there was a long period of silence until finally one member stood up and said what was on his mind. Then another person spoke, and so it continued. (You’re encouraged to say whatever you’re thinking.) This creates a sense of community without too much mishigass, so it was an enlightening experience.

However, as you see, the Quakers are “progressive”. This isn’t so bad but I’m told by one of them that they are also anti-Israel.

Finally, breakfast at my friends’ house, where I’m staying.  They eat healthy, as you can see. No, this is not my breakfast; I had two pieces of cold pizza and a mug of coffee:

As I brushed my teeth this morning, I noticed that the faucet looked like a face—not just the face, but the face of a Fat Bear:

To the Arctic, part 6: Ice day

September 20, 2025 • 9:45 am

On this day the captain and expedition leader decided, since we were in the area, that they’d take the ship as far north as it would go before encountering the Arctic sea ice that would prevent further progress. (The Ultramarine is a polar ship, but it can’t plow through thick sea ice).  We made for point #5 below where the ice stopped us. (This map was provided by the ship.)

The view from my cabin window when I woke up.

We’re approaching our northern limit.

As we headed north, I had a hearty breakfast in the main dining room.  Look at all that food (it’s buffet style, of course). I often had a made-to-order omelet, as I almost never eat breakfast, much less eggs, when I’m at home. I avoided the “Healthy Corner” except from fruit juice.

As we got closer to the edge, passengers went out on deck to watch our approach:

Ice everywhere (click to enlarge the panorama). And yes, it was that blue:

About as far north as we can go:


Floating sea ice, broken off the shelf, was everywhere:

Meanwhile, the bridge was active as the ship needed to stop dead before it hit the ice. Second from right is the captain.

Sarah, the expedition leader, is facing me. She was always upbeat: a great leader:

As we headed north, the ship stopped because a polar bear (Ursus maritimus) was sighted off the starboard bow. And, sure enough, there was one, and it was eating the carcass of what we were told was a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus). Who knows how that whale got onto the ice floe, but it was surely a bonanza for the bear, which was feasting on the best part: the whale’s blubber.

I had my Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot camera cranked out to the highest magnification (30X) and the boat was rocking, so this is the best I could do. Still, it was a fantastic sight: my first polar bear sighting and my first sperm whale sighting (if that’s what the whale was). This, to me, was the highlight of the trip. What you see is the world’s largest living land predator eating the world’s largest living marine predator!

I took a lot of photos. In reality, the photos are better than what I could see because they’re zoomed it. I was kneeling on the deck propping my camera on a rail:

Elsie Holzworth, a neighbor, touched up the photo above using computer magic:

 

There were plenty of birds around hoping for a nosh:

The bear walked away for a while, but then returned. I suspect he wasn’t going to go far lest another bear find the carcass. It was a fantastic sight.

We still weren’t as far north as we could go, so I went to look at our position in the lounge, and then had lunch in the informal spot. At this point we were at 81°53.89′ N, not quite as far as we’d get (red rectangle is mine):

After a big breakfast and no hikes onshore, I had a light lunch: a bagel on which I put the equivalent of lox. Some salad for the requisite greens. And, of course, several desserts, one of which—rice pudding with cherry sauce—was fantastic:

Too many to eat them all!

I had a large portion of rice pudding, as it wasn’t a normal dessert onboard:

And then we stopped, as far north as we could go. I was the first person on the bow, so I got to hold the sign and have my photo taken:

82 degrees north latitude!  This was the farthest north the ship had ever been, the crew and captain had ever been, and of course the passengers had ever been.  An AI question says that at this point we were about 332 miles (534 km) from the North Pole.

There were celebrations with champagne, and some of the naturalists dressed up as Arctic animals:

We then turned around and headed south (see map at top). Little did I know that the next day was going to be absolutely spectacular, seeing hundreds of thousands of seabirds nesting on a precipitous cliff, and watching from Zodiacs below. That will be in the next installment.

To the Arctic, part 5: Landfall and vegetation

September 13, 2025 • 11:30 am

NOTE: I scheduled a big Caturday Felid post, but, as occasionally happens, it didn’t automatically post. It will be up about 1.5 hours after this one.

This post occupies one day of our trip in Svalbard, again traveling around the big island of Spitsbergen, where’s there is a lot to see.  And again it was one of those lovely days when we had activities both in the morning and the afternoon. this time two short hikes on the land.

First, a map of the Big Island of the archipelago showing our travels. Spots 3 and 4 mark where we were on this day: Woodfjorden (yes, a fjord) in the morning, back to the ship for lunch, and then another hike (and a drinking opportunity) on a branch of Woodfjord, a “subfjord” called Liefdefjorden.  These sites are shown in the second map below from the official Spitsbergen website.

This map was sent to us by the ship to document our peambulations. Each pointer is one stop:

The first hike was on land at the northernmost fjord, Woodfjorden (point 4 above).  There were no animals to see, but plenty of plants, many in bloom. I can’t pinpoint where we landed, but the fjord itself is described this way in Wikipedia:

Woodfjord is a fjord on the north shore of Spitsbergen island in the Svalbard archipelago. It is the fourth longest fjord in the Svalbard archipelago with the mouth facing north adjacent to Wijdefjord, and goes 64 km (40 mi) into the island, west of Andrée Land.

Random photographs. First, the terrain, rather barren and gray. The only life you can see in this photo are the orange lichens.

Our ship in the fjord (we took Zodiacs ashore):

One of our naturalists/guides from the ship. Since you never know where there’s a polar bear, and they can appear quickly, they always carry guns:

But there were plants aplenty, if you looked down.  I loved this mossy plant; the moss is not really moss, but, we were told part of the flowers. I wrote down the name but now can’t find it. If you know Arctic flora, please ID it.  We did not step 0n any plants as they take a long time to grow this far north (here we’re about 79°30′ North latitude):

 

Another flower I can’t identify:

And yet another unknown:

And another (these may be color variants of the flowers two photos above:

Lichen is everywhere, and since it grows so slowly in this climate, you don’t touch it or step on it.

We were asked to guess what this is. Do you know?

It’s a trap to catch arctic foxes (their pelts went for good money years ago). Apparently the ladder bit was propped up with heavy rocks in the slats and bait was put underneath. The foxes would take the bait, spring the device, and, yes, get SQUASHED TO DEATH.  Apparently this was an efficient way to get pelts without marks, as shooting the fox would make a hole in the fur. OY!

Kayakers in the fjord below.  They prefer to paddle than to land and see what’s ashore. I don’t really get the thrill of that, at least in a place like this, but when we got to see the birdies a few days later, they had a huge advantage (except they were pooped on more readily). Note the glaciers across the fjord:

A panorama with the ship before we returned for lunch. Click to enlarge:

After lunch and a short rest, we put on our rubber boots and headed back to a different landing spot, this time on Woodfjorden.  This one had a trapper’s cabin. The landscape was similar to that of the morning.

Here’s a group following single-file behind the gun-toting leader, which prevents falling off a cliff and also stepping on plants. Our rubber boots, which were high, prevented us from getting very wet as we crossed the creek (you have to put them in a scrubbing machine when you enter the ship to avoid contaminating either the ship or the land).

A lovely flower; I don’t know what it is!

. . . and a predatory bird, which flew off as I photographed it. What is it? A skua?

After hiking around, and in truth seeing little that was new (but still enjoying some exertion), we went to the trapper’s cabin, called “Texas Bar”, described this way by our itinerary:

 Texas Bar is a trapper hut in Liefdefjord, not actually a bar at all. It was built in 1927 by Hilmar Nøis and Martin Petterson Nøis who spent 38 years of their lives on Spitsbergen. The cabin remains in very good condition. Now it mainly serves as a point of reference and shelter from polar bears. Inside, there is a stove, firewood, cooking utensils, two beds, a first aid kit, and some food items.

Men of Sea adds this (and a photo of the cabin:

Despite being very modest and resembling more of a sturdy shed than a proper dwelling, the cabin remains in very good condition. It now mainly serves as a point of reference and shelter from polar bears. Inside, there is a stove, firewood, cooking utensils, two beds, a first aid kit, and some food items. It has become a tradition for visitors to use the supplies left here, but in return, they should also leave something for the next guests. It is mandatory to sign in the Guest Book and take a picture. Opposite Texas Bar there is a bay where yachts can anchor safely.

We didn’t use any of the “supplies.”

Photo below from Men of Sea (for some reason I didn’t take a picture of the cabin). Note the rifle.

A quick photo of the inside, as there was a line to see it. There are some recent “supplies.” You have to be stalwart, I think, to spend any time there, much less a long time. It was bloody cold, and we were there in the summer. (I expect the residents didn’t overwinter there).  Two beds, some shelves, and a table are pretty much all it has. I wonder how they entertained themselves—or perhaps they slept after arduous days of killing foxes.

They served us shots of hard liquor at the end of the walk in a real bar in front of Texas Bar, but, as usual, I had no appetite for alcohol when I’m traveling. (I think I had one beer the whole trip, and given that booze was free on the ship, that tells you about my strange change of habit on the road, though I never drink very much under any circumstances.)

Back to the ship for dinner, and here are the evening menus (I suspect I photographed them and then headed upstairs to the cozy buffet). Click to enlarge:

The menu has two pages and, as you see, you can really pig out. This is served in courses, not as a buffet, which makes it more formal. Wine is of course free, and I tasted a bit; the quality was generally high.


My desserts (plural) in the buffet upstairs. The eclair was especially good.

Some post-dinner reading and then to bed, for I wanted to arise early as we headed north to point (5) on the map above—the furthest north our ship (and everyone on it) had ever gone. We were going to the edge of the sea ice until the ship could move no more.  That proved to be the most exciting day of the trip, as you’ll see in the next installment. Not only did we go way north, but we saw the most amazing thing of the whole trip: a polar bear gnawing on the carcass of a sperm whale that had somehow made its way onto an ice floe. Pictures in the next edition!