Atlantic Cruise September 2006

With a few days to spare before we began our cruise from England, we chose the charming COTSWOLDS district to explore.  Historically known for its wool trade, it is set amongst rolling hills & vales, rivers & streams, watermills & old honey coloured stone buildings. It is no wonder that foreign celebrities & royalty have bought over stately manor homes of the wool merchants, as their holiday homes.  Villages like Bibury  & Bourton-on-the-Water are world famous as the quintessence of the English rural scene.  We picnicked by an old stone bridge spanning a crystal stream & fed the ducks; we crossed meadows with sheep & said hello to a friendly horse;  & literally crises crossed the countryside on the narrow country lanes, absorbing the peace & tranquility of the Cotswold magic.   We crammed the last 2 days in London catching up with old friends .

The day we awaited had arrived.  We were going on a cruise that would take us to destinations remote & untouched. Our floating home for 16 days was the SEA PRINCESS, 77,000 tons, 1950 passengers & 900 crew to pamper us.  There was enough entertainment to suit every individual taste, & enough food to make our clothes shrink!  During days at sea, watching sunrise, moonrise & rainbows from the decks or our balcony, or the friendly birds that escorted our ship,  or hoping for a whale or dolphin to emerge from the mighty ocean, was my favourite pastime.  Even the fury of a storm in the N.Atlantic had a wondrous beauty about it.  Many a time did I lose myself in the magic of a fiery sunset or the mystical moonlight drenching the sea in all its glory.

We left the port of Southampton, sailed through the English Channel & the Dover Straits to BERGEN, population 200,000, our first port of call.  Set deep in the fiords of Norway, this thriving North Sea oil & fishing port has the distinction of being a Unesco World Heritage Site. The much photographed Bryggen quarter has colourful two & three storey wooden shops & warehouses that were built hundreds of years ago.

Capital of the 100 Shetland Islands, the most northerly part of Scotland, is LERWICK, population 24,000.  Also a N.Sea oil port,, its main industries are sheep farming, fishing & the famous Shetland ponies. Our ship docked here for a few hours before it sailed on to TORSHAVN, population 48,313, capital of the little known FAROE ISLANDS.  Volcanic in origin, but sculpted by glaciers during several ice ages, these group of 18 islands is a province of Denmark.  A local bus ride in both these cities

took us along an excellent road system of tunnels , bridges & roads, hugging a finger like coastline, with views of grazing sheep, towering cliffs or a lighthouse on a craggy headland.  Danish styled colourful homes brighten up the weather beaten landscape, typical are some with green turf roofs for insulation during the harsh winters.  Imagine mowing your roof ?  All these islands in the N.atlantic depend chiefly on oil & fishing for a livelihood, as the harsh weather prohibits farming.  Although someday the oil will run out, the fish will still be there.

Lying just South of the Arctic Circle in the N.Atlantic Ocean is ICELAND.  The island is actually quite green & sometimes warm, so don't be fooled by the name . Once a colony of Denmark, it is now an independent republic.  Resting on a major geological fault, the mid Atlantic rift, Iceland is a young country, where the creation of the Earth is still going on.  One third of the world's volcanoes are located here & lava fields continue to grow.  These are gentle volcanoes, gradual & predictable; enabling residents to move to safety till the danger has passed. 

 In 1963, the world witnessed the island of Surtsey's birth, off the coast of Iceland.  Belching & spewing its way out of the sea, it sent a column of ash nearly 10,000m. into the atmosphere.  By 1967 Surtsey had reached a height of 150m. & an area of 3 square km.

 The union of the cold Northern climate & the explosive fire from beneath the earth has resulted in an interplay of fire & ice - glaciers alongside volcanoes.  These forces of nature have produced icecaps & moonlike lava fields, massive waterfalls & rivers, lakes & green pastures, colourful mountains & eerie natural formations which characterise much of the Icelandic landscape. We actually walked along the rims of a few extinct calderas  - they looked like giant woks ! 

 The grinding of the submarine tectonic plates below Iceland also release vast quantities of geothermal energy resulting in mudpools & geysers.  There are over 800 hotsprings all over the island which reach the surface close to boiling point.  The technologically advanced Icelanders have cleverly tapped this energy to fuel power stations, heat their homes & swimming pools, & greenhouses to grow vegetables & flowers, enough to sustain their small population of only 300,000.  They are also famous for their literary traditions, & locals say that any Icelander not reading a book , is probably writing one!

We sailed twice across the Arctic Circle to the northern little Icelandic towns of AKUREYRI & ISAFJORDUR.  Set deep in the picturesque fiords, the layer cake mountains looked like they had a coat of sugar dusting from fresh snowfall the morning we arrived.  The awe inspiring convoluted coastline is home to many ducks & birds, & the ice cold rivers & seas teeming with fish, making fishing their major industry.  The Gulf Stream is responsible for a milder climate to sustain a diverse vegetation of colourful flowers & trees in the summer.  It was hard to imagine one was only a stone’s throw away from the Arctic Circle!

REYKJAVIK , the capital, was our 3rd & last port of call in Iceland.  It means 'Smokey Bay' named after the steam rising from the countless geysers in the vicinity.  Nearby lies the glacier made famous by Jules Verne in his movie ''Journey to the Center of the Earth".

Blue green algae thrives in  sea water which has been heated after seeping beneath the hot lava.  As the water emerges & cools at the surface, the algae dies.  A combination of this & silica mud & salt results in a mineral rich Blue Lagoon  Spa which we visited outside the city.  We bathed in these literally blue waters & smeared ourselves with the white silica mud, known to have curative powers, hoping for a miracle !  The heat of the water & the atmosphere of 8*C, caused a constant cloud of steam above the waters.  Surrounded by lava fields & black sandy beaches, it was an ethereal experience.

GREENLAND, the largest island in the world, lies locked beneath a thick blanket of ice, and is NOT GREEN!  Early discoverers named it Greenland because they said it would attract settlers if the country had a beautiful name!  This blanket of ice, 3000 meters thick, is so great a burden that the island's interior has sunk beneath its weight into an immense concave basin.  This vast icesheet contains 4 million cubic kilometers of ice, amounting to one billion litres of water for every person on earth - hard to fathom, eh?  Around the edges of this icesheet, the icecap spills down into thousands of valley glaciers which in turn have sculpted the coast into deep fiords & dramatic landscapes.  The seas around it are just a couple of degrees above freezing & are infested with floating icebergs broken off from the glaciers.  Though side by side, Greenland & Iceland could not be further apart geologically.  While Iceland's landscape is the world's youngest & most dynamic, Greenland's is the oldest yet discovered.

Greenland's population of only 56,124  Inuits (eskimos) are found only along some fringes.  It's largest city is the capital of NUUK, on the southwestern coast, just south of the Arctic circle, population 13,445. And they don't live in igloos anymore.

We went to bed with much excitement the night before we were to sail into Greenland.  Sure enough we awoke early to a welcome by icebergs of all shapes & sizes floating around us.  Our port of call was NANORTALIK , on the southernmost tip of Greenland.  It's population of 1,538 people declared a holiday on the occasion of our visit!  Our ship's passengers of 1900 outnumbered them anyway!  We anchored in a protected inlet surrounded by icebergs & icefloes, & as we approched the  little jetty in our tenderboats, we were greeted by flag waving children.  They sang & danced for us, welcomed us into their homes, & warmed our hearts with their hospitality on that sunny but cold (8*C) autumn day. After all, their contact with the outside world is only in the brief summer months, after which they will be blanketed in snow & ice for a long, long winter.

We walked around the little town of brightly coloured houses & visited their museum.  This is a cluster of several old houses converted into exhibition rooms displaying their primitive tools & implements, sealskin kayaks & clothes & their way of life.  A house made entirely of earth & turf has been preserved to show visitors how they lived before Denmark imported modern European basic essential housing.  Even a sealskin tent with a weather beaten, sealskin dressed, real life eskimo seated outside it, was a popular attraction with us visitors.

Though Denmark has aided them in education & housing, their livelihood depends on fishing & a gold mine 30 km. north of Nanortalik.  Reluctant to return to our ship, we sat around watching the fishermen bring in their catch, & sealskin clad young men in a sealskin kayak rowing along the shore.  In trying to reach a small iceberg which had been washed ashore & lodged among the rocks, I found, to my delight, a sizeable piece of ice on that solitary beach.  It could only have been the last breath of a giant iceberg that I held in my hands. I held on to it dearly in a plastic bag, for it must have been a few million years old, until it melted completely .

As they calve off Greenland's glaciers, icebergs drift into the Labrador Sea & follow the Labrador Current.  So, as we sailed away from Greenland towards Canada, icebergs continued to be visible on our departure as if to say goodbye!

Sadly we were now on our homeward stretch southwestward to the city of ST. JOHN'S on the island of Newfoundland, Canada's most easterly province, & the oldest city in N. America..  A  busy fishing port, this charming little town shows strong Irish & Scottish & French influences judging from it's history.  Interestingly we visited Signal Hill, a high point overlooking the harbour, where the famous scientist, Marconi reportedly received his first wireless signal.

Our ship sailed on to SYDNEY, a little town on one of the most scenic islands in the world, Cape Breton.  It is part of Nova Scotia, Canada's second smallest province.  Like all land formations in the N.Atlantic, this island too is riddled with coves, inlets, lakes & rivers, with headlands & promontories jutting dramatically out into the majestic ocean.  During our short visit, we took a picturesque drive to Baddeck, the historic site & museum of Alexander Graham Bell.  Having already invented the telephone earlier, he moved here & continued his work creating the first men carrying kites & planes, the fastest boat, & as a humanitarian, taught the deaf to speak, beginning with his own wife.  Nearby is the stately home where he lived for the last 37 years of his life & where his descendants live till today. 

Our cruise ended in the French speaking QUEBEC CITY, deep in the mouth of the massive St. Lawrence River.  After 16 days & 9 ports of call, we had become accustomed to the gentle rocking motions of the ship, so it was hard to sleep on solid ground again.

We spent the next few days exploring this & the  fine cities of Montreal, Ottawa & Toronto, meeting up with old friends & making new ones, before we flew home.

The use of travelling is to regulate the imagination by reality, & instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. Samuel Johnson.

Though we travelled the world over, to find the beautiful & the interesting, we must carry it within us, or we find it not.

The facts of today were fancies yesterday, & will be memories tomorrow. Practically every material deed was a dream, every invention once an imagination.