Just off the coast of Devon Island, the Zodiac is pitching and heaving.
Shannon Fowler, five-foot-nothing in her socks, is in command. She is not,
of course, wearing only socks, but rubber boots too, as we all are, and a
survival suit.
The ten of us have lifejackets. The sea is clear turquoise, a surreally
tropical colour given that the water temperature is a neat 0C.
Despite the team of Russian sailors standing up to their waists in the stuff,
there’s no guarantee that our Zodiacs will be able to run ashore. Things
were fine five minutes ago, when we left the ship; but that’s Baffin Bay for
you.
When at last it seems as if we will be able to hit the beach — but with the
stern, rather than the bow, of the Zodiacs to land, which makes getting out
more difficult — Fowler reminds us that if we want simply to ride back to
the ship and not attempt a landing, that’s OK too. “Remember,” she sings
out, “you’re on vacation!”
Travel to Baffin Island with Adventure Canada and you will have a vacation
like no other. I trust you will have taken the above tale as a wee warning:
if your idea of a cruise includes sun loungers, mojitos and shuffleboard,
then the Arctic — and this company’s way of travelling in it — is not for
you. When you fall asleep on board ship each night you will do so because
you are exhausted.
When you sit down to the table at dinner you will devour everything in front
of you because you are famished after Zodiac trips, long hikes, invigorating
lectures or lessons in Inuktitut . . . or possibly because you’ve dressed up
as a cowboy for a shipboard barn dance (yes, really) or had a quick swim in
the polar sea (yes, really).
I joined the team in Ottawa — an utterly delightful city, and one that I plan
to return to as soon as may be, for its wonderful museums (especially the
beautiful, fascinating Canadian Museum of Civilisation), fine food (elk
terrine) and truly welcoming people.
I didn’t mind staying at the delightful Fairmont Château Laurier hotel either,
a grand place — built at the beginning of the 20th century by the Canadian
Pacific Railway to prove the motto “If we can’t export the scenery we’ll
import the tourists”.
But the delights of Canada’s capital city were not, to say the least, the
point of “The Baffin Expedition”, as the company’s brochure had it. From
Ottawa we would fly to Kuujjuaq, Quebec, there to board the MV Lyubov
Orlova and sail up the east coast of Baffin Island, all the way to
Resolute Bay, the entrance to the Northwest Passage.
Ironically, the passage is a political hot potato again, as it was in Sir John
Franklin’s time 150 years ago — now because the melting of the sea ice by
global warming makes it an increasingly navigable route for shipping. In
Canada and elsewhere “Arctic sovereignty” is in the news.
The hundred or so passengers — almost all of them Canadian, quite a few of
them retired, every single one interested in the world around them — got a
taste right away of why this 20-year-old company calls itself Adventure
Canada.
Our visit to Kuujjuaq was cut short by the announcement that if we didn’t
board the ship immediately we wouldn’t be able to do so at all, because the
weather was worsening; the Orlova was anchored 9km off the coast and
wouldn’t be able to come in any closer. So our first trip in the Zodiacs was
nearly an hour long in an oil-black, choppy sea.
If you have ridden in a Zodiac you will know that they have pontoons, on which
you sit, and flat bottoms that bang up and down on the slightest wave. There
are wet, freezing ropes to hold on to. Sometimes you find yourself grinning
inanely and thinking: “Surely no one’s drowned yet!” as a wave comes over
your head.
OK, you have such thoughts if you are a cissy from the big city, like me, and
you get over it pretty fast. Still, we were all glad to board the Orlova
and towel off. Yet our journey had hardly begun.
How to convey, in a few paragraphs, the wonder of two weeks travelling towards
the North Pole in this way? The once-in-a-lifetime moments are too many to
count. Gliding into Isabella Bay, where the rare bowhead whale may sometimes
be seen — there are now perhaps 300 in the world — only to discover 40 or 50
spouting round the ship.
Stepping ashore, when the weather had cleared, under a brilliant blue sky in
Durban Harbour and learning to look for an abundance of life writ small:
heather, sedge, bearberries, blueberries, gleaming orange jewel lichen; I
bend to drink from a sweet, clear-running stream.
Seeing the print of an arctic hare in the snow or seeing a flock of snow geese
lift off from a mountainside — or a polar bear reclining on a nearby berg,
which for many of our company was worth the price of the trip.
Knowing there has been human habitation here for millennia: this is a land
that seemed harsh and forbidding to southern “explorers”, who died here by
the score, but not to those who lived, and still live, in this glorious
environment.
It’s to Adventure Canada’s credit that it works so closely with the Inuit
communities here; and one of the trip’s greatest pleasures was being able to
stop in places such as Clyde River (pop. 820) and Pond Inlet (pop. 1,300)
and be welcomed by the people there.
In Clyde the kids showed us their breakdancing skills and their parents fed us
seal; we sang Frère Jacques in Inuktitut, which seemed to be
worth a round of applause. In Pond the locals thrashed us at football,
though true to form I didn’t play; instead I found myself sitting on caribou
skins in a sod hut while Marta, an elder of the community, lit a qulliq
— a stone seal-oil lamp — and patiently answered our (translated) questions
about how life was here before aircraft and Ski-Doos. When we sang Nukakuluk
for her she leapt to her feet in astonishment: “Where are you people from?”
Aaju Peter, born in Greenland but now resident in Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital,
taught us that song (and Beautiful Sunday, too, a song I can sing
only in Inuktitut since I don’t know it in English).
She was one of the 17 remarkable staff who travelled with us: and there were
more than “just” the marine biologists and ornithologists you would expect
on such a trip. Matthew Swan, the mustachioed genius behind the company,
brings along artists and musicians too.
Travellers can learn, as they go, to make prints, to paint, to photograph; to
recognise a 1,000-year-old Thule whalebone house or the difference between
sea ice and icebergs. Thanks to the staff — and your fellow passengers,
who’ll become your friends and sit up in the bar with you until the small
hours — you’ll be able, somehow, to balance the glistening, unlikely beauty
of the land and the humbling welcome of its people with the knowledge of the
terrible damage that has been done to both.
The Canadian Government anticipates an Arctic seaway free of ice: the people
who live there wonder what will happen to the ice that they travel across
and the animals that they hunt — and revere.
For all the fun to be had, a spell in the Arctic encourages a different way of
being than the way that city life, quotidian southern work-life, usually
allows. On board the Orlova I re-read Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic
Dreams. Lopez writes: “A man in Anaktuvuk Pass, in response to a
question about what he did when he visited a new place, said to me, ‘I
listen.’
That’s all. I listen, he meant, to what the land is saying. I walk around it
and strain my senses in appreciation of it for a long time before I, myself,
ever speak a word. Entered in such a respectful manner, he believed, the
land would open to him.” Even for those unaccustomed to such a quality of
attention, it’s possible to learn.
Stillness is required, an awareness that this place is as alive as you are,
and that you, the visitor, must learn the way to be here. If you don’t think
that’s true, all you have to do is note that on land, outside the
communities, the staff keep their rifles handy — polar bears are cuddly only
in pictures.
If you, the visitor, get cold, it’s most likely you won’t have any idea how to
warm yourself without recourse to a ride back to the ship; the danger of
exposure becomes rather less theoretical than it is in London. Usually I’m
content to be solitary; here, happy as I was, I missed my husband and son,
because the place itself seemed to remind me of what was truly significant
in my life.
At the beginning of our journey, at the top of Ungava Bay, there was greenery
on the land; by the time we reached Beechey Island, our last stop before
Resolute and where the graves of three of Sir John Franklin’s men are to be
found, the snow was getting thick — and it was only the end of summer.
What would it be like here, in the permanent night of winter, when the
temperature dips to -50C? The thought of such darkness and cold is alarming;
and yet the place is so compelling that I long, someday, to experience it
for myself. Every place in the world, of course, has its own special magic .
. . and yet in some the spell is stranger and stronger.
The Arctic is such a place. “You can sit for a long time with the history of
man like a stone in your hand,” Lopez writes. “The stillness, the pure
light, encourage it.” All I can say is: go.
Need to know
Getting there Adventure Canada (www.adventurecanada.com)
offers cabins on its Heart of the Arctic cruise (Sept 16-26), sailing on the
118-passenger Clipper Adventurer, from $3,695 (£2,475) to $10,195pp. The
company is offering a 25 per cent reduction on these prices. The discount
also applies to its Into the Northwest Passage cruise (August 21-September
1), and Atlantic Arts Float (September 26-October 6).
To book from the UK, ring 0808 1010935 (freephone) before noon. Prices include
full meals, excursions and lectures. International flights need to be booked
separately; flights with Air Canada cost from £709pp. Adventure Canada can
arrange internal flights between Ottawa and the point of embarkation, but
these are not included in the package price.
Further information Canadian Tourist Board (www.canada.travel)
