Off We Go Again!

As you can see from the graphic, we will soon be leaving Arizona and traveling to London and then on to Cape Town where we will spend a few days recovering from the 37 hour trip before boarding our Oceania ship for a thirty day cruise ending in Singapore.

We will visit three ports in South Africa, East London, Durban and Port Charles and then the exotic ports of call will begin. First stop, Maputo, Mozambique, then Nosy Be, Madagascar, back to Tanzania for Dar Es Salaam and Zanzibar, and Kenya for Mombasa. After that we will head for the island paradises of the Seychelles and then the Maldives. The crystal clear, warm, blue waters will then give way to the hustle and bustle of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

After Colombo, we will travel to Phuket, Thailand and Penang, Malaysia, new places in familiar countries before ending with a stop in Kuala Lumpur, one of our favorites, and then disembarking in Singapore for a few days of enjoyment in that remarkable city state, but that is not the end.  We will then fly to Manila in the Philippines to get a glimpse of that incredibly complex city and perhaps find the perfect lumpia.

                         

We will complete our around the world trip of twelve countries and seventeen cities by flying from Manila to Los Angeles before our last flight back to Sky Harbor. In a twist of logic, time zones and long distance flying, also thanks to the International Dateline, we will leave Manila at 11:45 AM on Monday, February 10th and arrive in Los Angeles three hours before at 8:45 AM, Monday, February 10th.  That kind of stuff never fails to amaze me.

So that's the itinerary. We are excited about it and we hope it excites you as well. As always I will send an email when new posts are up and at any time if you wish not to receive updates, let me know and you will be deleted :)

Chihully in the Garden

Dale Chihully is arguably the greatest American glass artist and has with a doubt has revitalized glass blowing as an art form in the United States. He is one of our favorite artists and we've been lucky enough to see his installations in several different places. For the second time, which is a rare occurrence, he has done an installation at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix. We visited it yesterday in the afternoon and as a thank-you for reading our Blog, I thought I'd share the beauty of his work with you and as a way to say Happy New Year.

                   

                 

                 

                                            

When we return from our next trip we will visit the Gardens at night to get a different perspective of his wonderful work.

The Polar Bear Experience

The Churchill Wildlife Management area is the gateway to Polar Bear country although as you've already learned they are everywhere around Churchill. The area itself covers 2.1 million acres of frozen tundra. You cannot enter it without a guide. What roads there exist are mainly gravel and often there are no roads, just paths. To get around you need one of these.

The Polar Rover is quite a vehicle. It weighs 24,000 pounds, has six wheel drive, with tires that measure 68"x4 43", carries 40 people, although we only had 16, and costs $450,000. It's heated and quite comfortable for such a beast. There is a viewing platform in the back. We spent eight to nine hours a day crawling around the tundra in these looking for polar bears.

Another way to see the bears is in a Polar Bear Camp. The bears like to hang around these as their sense of smell is so acute, they can smell a seal twenty miles away, and they certainly can smell the food cooking. You stay out in the tundra for three days and eliminate the trips back and forth to town. On the other hand, the rooms are basically a bunk bed and some storage all else is shared, but the bears do come around.

We were lucky to run into these two males alternately sniffing and sparing.

A short distance away, we came upon this female enjoying a rest.

Males are much larger than females weighing on average 1,100 pounds to a females 600. They all have massive paws, necks and hind legs all the better for walking on the snow and being able to pull seals from the water.  They usually amble along at 2.5 MPH, but can hit speeds of 30 MPH for short distances. They are excellent swimmers and can easily cover 50 to 60 miles at a time.  

Bears are usually solitary animals and we covered great distances to find them. The tundra is a sparse place and I can only imagine what it must be like in the winter.

The reward for all the bouncing a round is finding another polar bear. All else is forgotten as you try to get that definitive shot.

These are amazing animals. They basically only eat when Hudson Bay freezes over and they can go out on the ice and hunt seals. Their stomachs can hold 150 pounds of seal in one eating session. To maintain weight they need to eat at least one seal every five days. When the ice melts they continually loose weight until they can hunt seals again. An arctic fox is hardly an appetizer. While other bears hibernate, these don't. That's one of the reasons at the time of the year we were in Churchill you don't see they moving around too much. They are excellent at conserving energy.

As exciting as it is viewing the bears, the tundra can be beautiful as the sun sets.

As I reflect on this trip, it packed so much into such a short time. We learned a lot, got to be up close to some amazing animals and had a brief glimpse of what daily life is like in Churchill while attending a concert in the Community Center and walking around on our last afternoon. Our  guide was excellent and we again met some very interesting people. All in all we were again blessed to be able to have this experience. I hope you also enjoyed this brief exposure to our Polar Bear Experience.

Polar Bears and Churchill

How could one not love these guys? I must admit, however, that writing about this experience has been a challenge and that I started and stopped many times. Perhaps it was the fact that we had just returned from thirty plus days in Africa with a short stay in Amsterdam or that we embarked on this trip a scant two weeks after we returned or maybe it was some nagging health issues or just travel burnout, but while always in the back of my mind, the words just wouldn't come.

We left Scottsdale and spent one night in Calgary, before heading to Winnipeg for another night before boarding our Calm Air, great name isn't it, propeller plane for the two hour trip to Churchill, which is two thousand miles north and slightly east of Scottsdale. It's only five hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, but an astonishing two thousand miles from the North Pole. The world is certainly one big place. As you can imagine it is frighteningly cold most of the year in Churchill with Hudson's Bay being ice free for less than three months. The rest of the time everything is frozen. The current temperature there is minus 31 F. I've become somewhat obsessed with the place and it hasn't been above minus 10 F for weeks. For fun add it to your phones' weather app. No matter where you live, you will feel better about the weather seeing what the folks in Churchill are going through.

As you might imagine, it's not a bustling place. These pictures were taken at high noon on Saturday.

Pictures aside Churchill is a fascinating, if cold and isolated place, that has been inhabited since 1700 B.C.  For hundred's of years the ancestor peoples to the Inuit lived by hunting the seals, beluga whales and polar bears that inhabited the area. Other ancient people inhabited the areas inland in Northern Manitoba and over time they developed healthy trading relationships with the Inuits. What did they trade? Caribou, wood, some grains and furs for the marine animals the Inuit hunted. Why does this matter?

Well, when the first Europeans arrived in the late 1600's to establish trading posts, the Inuit served as the intermediaries to the other native peoples helping the Hudson's Bay Company establish major trading posts on the Bay. The Inuit traded beaver, fox and marten pelts for such things as cloth, blankets and tools as well as guns, tobacco and brandy. Ah Colonialism. By 1717, Churchill was important enough for a fort to be begun to be built there although it took forty years to finish.

Throughout it's history Churchill has been an important trading post and today is vital to Manitoba's grain trade. At one time it had a population of 4,000 and was an important military base and part of NORAD. It was also where Canada developed their first missiles, some of which are still used by NASA. Today only 800 people live there. The grain elevator is the major employer, but that's only for ninety days each year. There is a Regional Hospital and school and a few small shops and motels for the tourist seasons. Not that the tourist seasons are long. Known as "The Polar Bear Capital of the World" that season last six weeks. A few folks brave February for the Northern Lights and some come in July/August for the beluga whales, but that's it. Oh, you have to fly here. There are no roads connecting it to anywhere and the train takes four days from Winnipeg when it runs.

Ok, that's enough about Churchill, we did go there to see the Polar Bears and our first encounter with one was at the Polar Bear Jail. As cute as they may look they are serious threats to humans as they  roam free throughout the town and surrounding area. A person was mauled one week before we arrived in the doorway of a restaurant on the main street and our guide later emailed us that three more mailings happened during her six weeks there. When bears are found in town, if they can't be scared away or continue coming back, they are tranquilized and brought to the holding facility and then transported to a distant spot in the tundra. It was at the Polar Bear Jail we saw our first bear.

The Polar Bear Jail is a large quonset hut building that can hold up to sixteen bears at a time. As luck would have it one was being transported that day to a far off place in the tundra and we were lucky enough to witness the process.

The bear emerges, heavily tranquilized from the facility on a gurney. The helicopter is waiting and the handlers move it into position and place it on the net.

Once the bear is on the net, the process is completed by the helicopter. When the bear reaches it's new   destination another crew reverses the process and makes certain the bear is unharmed. ( I have a great video of this, but after hours of trying to get Blogger to add it, I had to go to stills. ) It was rare to see this and was a great start to our Polar Bear Experience.

They take the conservation of Polar Bears very seriously, but they are a constant threat to the populace. One way they capture nuisance bears is with these traps.

                        

There are warning signs everywhere and when all else fails men like this patrol polar bear areas and are armed with a variety of shells to scare the bears or in the end kill them. It should be noted that there hasn't been a bear killing in Churchill since 2008.

Caution is the watch word at all times in Churchill. We were not allowed out at night without an escort. A siren sounds at 10:00 PM to make certain all children are off of the streets. As playful as they may look they are total killing machines. I don't think you'd want to run into one. They are a little bit bigger than us.

Now it's time to go out in the tundra and see the bears in their natural habitat, but you'll have to go to the next post.