Close encounters with Arctic wildlife

Travel article for Australian Women’s Health on a kayaking trip to Spitsbergen in the High Arctic in 2006.

By Caitlin Fitzsimmons

The seal reclined on the ice floe, its stumpy flippers looking slightly ridiculous against its tubby body. We stopped paddling and let the kayaks glide in silence for a closer look. The seal lifted its head and then without warning plopped into the water. I groaned softly, thinking we’d scared it off. In fact, the seal had decided to come and check us out.

The eight of us oohed and aahed as the seal surfaced a metre from the cluster of kayaks. “It’s so cute!” I whispered, pointing at its round whiskered face bobbing in the water. Al, our kayaking instructor, had told us that seals were highly inquisitive but we hadn’t dared hoped for such a close encounter. This one was a ringed seal, he said, but bearded seals were also common in these waters.

My delight turned to dread when the curious creature came even closer and dived under our kayak. My paddling partner in the seat behind me was busy fiddling with his camera. Yikes. I gripped the oars and stiffened my knees, trying to remember the brace position. Six months before I’d never been kayaking and now I was sitting with an inch of plastic between me and the Arctic Ocean. The seal was adorable but what we capsized?

I was wearing a dry suit, a rather unflattering blue garment that covered nearly my entire body. At my neck, ankles and wrists was a protective seal to keep out water – though it would do little to protect me from the animal. But if I fell in, my hands, feet and head would be exposed to the threat of hypothermia and there would be a limited window of time to get me out of the water and back to the ship.

Fortunately our friend soon swam off in search of fish, leaving us to continue our paddle to the face of the glacier. Even from a distance, the ice cliffs were immense. As we grew closer, the platinum blue glow became more intense and the temperature dropped. I wore thermal underwear beneath my dry suit and the exercise helped but this was still about the coldest I’d ever been. Just as I was about to turn back, the glacier thundered and a huge chunk of ice calved off, sending bergs out into the fjord. We pointed our kayak perpendicular to the waves and once again I summoned brace position.

The glaciers calve every summer but it’s been speeding up in the past few years. Back on board the ship, Nikolay the Russian captain told us he had taken readings and the glacier now ended 1km further inland than the same time a year before. On another day we even saw a glacier that no longer reached the sea, instead ending in a mess of mud and rock called a “moraine”.

Polar bears
My trip to the Arctic cleared out most of my savings, but I wanted to see this part of the world before it changed forever. Most of all I wanted to see polar bears in the wild. I’d chosen Svalbard in the High Arctic – administered by Norway but technically an international no man’s land – because of the high odds of seeing polar bears.

The road signs here show a picture of a polar bear and the words “gjelder hele Svalbard” – Norwegian for “valid for all Svalbard”. In fact, it took until halfway through the trip before we saw our first polar bear. Viewed through the ship telescope, it was little more than a cream dot moving across a patch of white snow but I was thrilled all the same.

After that, the polar bear sightings came thick and fast – though luckily not as intimate as with the seal. There were strict rules for dealing with the bears. Any time we were on land – to see reindeer perhaps, or admire the delicate Arctic flowers – the guides established a safe zone and stood guard with rifles. If we knew there were polar bears about, we stuck with the boats – the motorised Zodiac dinghies, rather than the kayaks.

One polar bear did take to the water and start swimming towards us but the motors meant we could make a speedy getaway. Most of the time they ignored us. We saw a big old male bear with yellow fur and scars pestering a mother with two babies. Apparently male polar bears will eat cubs given half a chance – and they are absent fathers so they neither know nor care if it’s their own. The minute the male bear was distracted, the mother bolted down the beach, leading her cubs to safety.

Polar bears don’t hang out with penguins like in the Coke commercial but they do occasionally keep company with walruses. We saw a young bear checking out a group of walruses who barely flinched, secure in the knowledge that they had the numbers on their side and their tusks could do some serious damage to a polar bear.

If the tusks don’t get you, their stinky breath just might. When we approached them, we were sure to stand upwind to avoid the pungent odour. The collective noun for walruses is an “uglit” – it sounds like “ugly”, which I thought rather appropriate.

Melting glaciers were not the only reminder of humans. We also saw washed up pieces of plastic on the beaches – the Arctic collects rubbish from the coasts of both Europe and North America. Most gruesome of all, some beaches were graveyards, littered with the skulls of whales and walruses from the days when they were hunted as a cheap source of oil.

Midnight sun
In summer there is 24 hours of daylight in this part of the world. I loved the dramatic skies of permanent dusk – or was it dawn? I could sit on the bridge of the ship at any time of day or night, watching the seascape. There was a telescope for passengers and through it you could see an incredible array of bird life.

I’m no twitcher but even I was impressed to learn that the Arctic tern breeds in the Arctic and then flies to Antarctica for the southern summer, flying roughly 35,000km a year. I also loved paddling out to the bird cliffs – a hundred metres high and streaked pink with snow and the guano – bird poo, basically – of thousands, if not millions, of Brunnich guillemot and kittiwakes. It was like a giant apartment block for birds.

The 24 hour daylight also meant it was tempting to sit up late in the ship’s bar and drink cocktails. One night I even joined the Russian crew for a 25th birthday party for Ludmilla, stewardess cum party girl. Too much vodka left me more than a little worse for wear the next day. Fortunately I discovered kayaking was a great hangover cure.

TRIP NOTES

Getting there

Fly to Longyearbyen, the main town on Spitsbergen, the main island in the Svalbard archipelago. Scandinavian Airlines has flights to Longyearbyen from Oslo and Tromso several days a week. Flights can be booked online, with possible connections from other European cities. There is also a boat departing Tromsø once a week in summer, with a journey time of two or three days.
From Longyearbyen I took an 11 day boat trip with Aurora Expeditions, which included optional kayaking. There are other boat and land tours available.

The cost
Booking for 2009 starts at $AUS5790, excluding airfares. Kayaking is an additional $AUS990 per person.

When to go
Arctic summer – June, July, August. Aurora’s 2009 tours are 23 June to 3 July and 13 July to 23 July.

An edited version of this article was first published in Australian Women’s Health in November 2008. The PDF is available on my professional website. (Please note that, contrary to the impression given in the published version, we actually only landed when we were fairly certain there were no polar bears nearby. Even then we had to stake out a safe area and staff stood guard with rifles, just in case).

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