Adventure Travel Blogs

Wednesday, 20th July, 2011

I have a barely coherent Ruth next to me in the communications room, it is 35 minutes past midnight and to quote her (as she is still incapable of speaking) ' this was unquestionably the best moment of my life'

She and 100 others have just had five bears on ice, the last one that paraded on a small ice island literally in the midnight sun, it was 5 metres from the hull.

This is gold, this is an exodus charter, they are different a...

Tuesday, 19th July, 2011
Hinlopen Strait

“Never doubt the ability of a few committed people to change the world, in act it’s the only thing that ever has”. Margaret Mead

Play safe and follow timetables, play safe and visit post offices, play safe and die wondering, gamble and you at least give yourself a chance of touching the elusive grail.

Monday, 18th July, 2011
Northwest Spitsbergen

“This grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere.  The dew is never dry all at once, a shower is forever falling.  Vapour is ever rising.  Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and glowing, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn as the earth rolls.  And for this I am forever grateful to be alive.”  John Muir

Flat calm waters,  balmy temperatures, cameras locked and ...

Sunday 17th July
Longyearben

A wise man once said ‘it’s not the arriving, it’s the getting there’. He was wrong, but who cares now, the lines are thrown and the bow noses purposefully North. One hundred arcticians are aboard and 99 bags, but I’m over that.

Right about time you read this, the signal will flicker then die on your cell phone. There is no internet, no Twitter and no injunctions, and also no ghastly, insidious, duplicitous Murdoch, be thankful fo...

Thursday, 23rd June, 2011
Northern Spitsbergen

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation . . .  I wish to live deliberately and face only the essential facts of life, and learn what it has to teach and not, when it comes time to die, discover that I had not lived"                                                 

Henry David Thoreau

A post-breakfast Zodiac date was kept with half ...