A small disadvantage of the holidays Anja and I like to do is that you can hardly ever really relax – travelling to remote places to watch wildlife means that anytime might be the one time to spot that one special animal or have that beautiful light for your photo!
This trip around Spitsbergen is no different as the Arctic is big, really big in fact, so the chances of seeing any animals are actually not great. But there is light all day round and we are travelling through places not too many people have seen and we might never see again – so we are trying to get as much as possible out of it and tell ourselves “we can sleep later”…
Anja seems to be taking this to the extreme, looking out of the cabin’s window every hour or so at night, checking for whales and beautiful icebergs and glaciers that we might pass.
The expedition team and the Russian captain are changing the ship’s course and our daily plans pretty much every night to react to changing weather conditions, so you have to be quite flexible and trust that they will take you somewhere nice. So far this has worked out very well, and we have indeed seen some beautiful places!