Yes, these photos were all taken within ten minutes of each other from the top of the boat, shortly after 11am on the 23rd of January :-). First whirlpool experience in the Arctic Circle!
Today’s one of only two this year when Kirkenes, Amsterdam, Sydney and Nairobi will all get more or less the same 12 hours of day and night each. These last shots taken before we got off the boat on January 26th were taken a week after the sun first popped back over the horizon up here…and of course, for a couple months on either side of June 21st, it won’t pop below the horizon, giving it 2x as much sunlight as Nairobi (nearly on the equator) will get that day. Happy vernal equinox, fellow northern hemisphere residents :-).
So yes, work took me back recently to Beijing for meetings, and before that to Bangkok for other meetings. While in Thailand I also managed finally to get to Chiang Mai, from which came two recent posts where you’d only know what they are if you’re in “full view” mode which shows you the location tags. (Hint: full view will have blue background and white type, and the tags are at the very bottom in small type. Your browser likely allows you to zoom, if you’re on a computer.) This photo above is one of precisely and only two photos I managed to catch during my full and busy week in Beijing. From Chiang Mai – about which I’ve been hearing great things since a friend studied there in the early 1980s – you’ll see plenty more, nearly all from the same temple complex in the center.
The Aurora was, of course, the main reason we decided to take that cruise to the far north in January. I posted the first “skylights” entry early on the 23rd of January, the morning after we first saw them. Then, I showed one of my own very subtle images, plus one Gary had taken with his camera which allowed a much longer exposure. From calendar images, or people who can take truly long exposures with an excellent camera on a tripod, you’ll get a much more dramatic view. But the subtle, ghostly green you can dimly see above and below come much closer to what my own eyes experienced on the three nights when we were fortunate enough to spend time appreciatithe aurora. These were both taken around 18:30 on the 23rd of January, the second evening they graced our skies. One’s eyes need time to adapt – at first, you might think it’s mist or a cloud, but the longer you stay and let your eyes adapt, the more you’ll notice how the lights change shape and move around. Our cameras tend to see the colors better than our eyes do, but we found that bundling up well and braving the wind and cold for a longer time in the darkest place we could find really did the trick to experience these best.
The first “source” entry was a photo I took in Ticino, nearly a week after I took these ice-sculpture photos inside the glacier at the top of the “Little Matterhorn” last November 1st – but seeing the glacier, ice, snow, rivers, frost on the grass around Zermatt in the mornings: all of those experiences helped me decide I’d need to try this series out. What else can be both shelter and sculpting material, cushion if you wall into it when it’s still soft, exercise medium when we swim, absolutely necessity for and source of the life-forms we know here on earth…and so many other things? There are more ice sculptures to come, from Nordkapp. But I figure first I’d show you the ones from Zermatt :-).
King Crab catching on the frozen fjord, our early-afternoon (about 1:30pm, these photos) outing before our overnight on the ice beds (still to come, here) at the Snowhotel Kirkenes, in Finnmark County, Norway.
(so much world, so little time....) 