Hornsund, South Spitsbergen, Svalbard
It is our first full day in the Arctic on board National Geographic Explorer. All over the ship excitement bubbled as each succeeding vista revealed a more exquisite and more dramatic backdrop than the last, as we progressed into Hornsund. Weather patterns can be highly localised and unpredictable here, but we left behind dark looming banks of fog, and found instead broken sunshine ahead in the inner recesses of the fjord. Our first stop was near the face of Samarinbreen, our first opportunity for a close look at a glacier front from the ship, surrounded by mountain peaks rising to Hornsundtinden’s 1431m, carved into jagged points by glacial action. After breakfast a ship cruise brought us to the even more extensive glacier front at Brepollen which curved right around the ship. But over in the corner, a small pale shape was seen moving across the snow patches on the lateral moraine. It was a polar bear. Everyone reached for binoculars and spotting scopes and telephoto lenses, and watched with joy as one of the world’s largest land predators moved across our vision. Then another was spotted not far away, two animals in one view; this truly is the land of the polar bear.
It was time for action in the afternoon. We had returned to Samarinvågen, named in honour of a Russian participant in the Arc de Meridian survey of 1900-01, which had established the true shape of the globe by taking detailed measurements across a transect of more than 4º of the meridian through Svalbard. We took to Zodiacs and kayaks to explore the bay, and got an unforgettable sense of the ice as, piece by piece, it calved from the glacier and floated off down the fjord. Here kittiwakes in large numbers fed in the churning waters at the glacier face, a bearded seal drifted by, and a group of beluga whales were seen, barely breaching the surface of the ice-cold water with their finless, ice-coloured backs, while a rainbow intensified overhead. The white whales were accompanied by a darker-coloured juvenile. Then, as we began to make our way out of Hornsund, there was another bear some way inland from the shore, but this time lying asleep and apparently quite oblivious to the delighted onlookers from the passing ship.
