Europe, with an Arctic cruise, a Balkan tour and bits of France and Malta

[FlyingFiona]

Why salamanders?

They were believed at the time to be able to withstand and even extinguish fire (when you see it pictured with fire it's because it's consuming it not breathing it as a dragon would). Francis I's motto was Nutrisco and extingo (I feed the good fire and extinguish the bad) meaning he protected his people upholding justice and fighting injustice.

Edit: oops, missed seeing that you had replied, Roo. I only had to Google the Latin motto, I knew the rest from my own visit to the Loire valley. Surprised they didn't tell you when you were there. Actually no I'm not, the French can be really bad at providing comprehesive information at historical sites.

 

[RooFlyer]

Then to boarding, abt 4pm. Times will mean less here than most places, as its 24/7 daylight. The usual mucking around on board - hand over health declaration (you could do this abt 2 months beforehand, so useless), photographs, room cards etc etc. I was annoyed at first to find my cabin had changed but later found out it was due to a tech issue and in fact I could hear workers doing something in there; I was in the same cabin type, directly across the hall.

There were only about 140 on the cruise; Le Boreal takes about 260, so an excellent result. The prior cruise was full. There were about 110 French and 30 English speakers - mostly Anglos but a couple of other main language speakers. The French were divided into 3 zodiac groups, the English into one (that's groups, not zodiacs - which take 10 pax).

The separation into French and English groups, although obviously needed and expected, caused a few issues for me. We English only got a rotation of three zodiac drivers/guides for outings; 1 was a Russian polar historian, and she was good; 1 was a Aussie and this was his first Arctic trip and the other was a Kiwi with the best Australian accent I've ever heard! The latter two were 'generalists' and to be honest except for the birds, they weren't very expert. There was a geologist amongst the expedition crew, but she was only in the French group.

As the cruise progressed it was obvious that the French group and the English group were not treated equally. More on that later.

My cruise (except for the dates)

Cruise Fjords and glaciers of Spitsbergen from Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen to Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen - June 2025 | Ponant

Somewhere in the High Arctic, between 76 and 80 degrees latitude North, Spitsbergen, meaning "pointed mountains”, awaits you for seven days of unforgettable travel looking out for wild life. You will lift the anchor in Longyearbyen, where colourful wooden

au.ponant.com

The route is always subject to conditions, but it ended up being pretty well per the diagram




My 'Prestige' cabin on deck 5. I don't remember why I chose deck 5 over 4, as it would have cost more. Maybe it was only a little bit more and being a deck up, took it. Its quite a bit smaller than the SilverSea boat I took to Antarctica 18 months ago. Included mini bar of small-bottle spirits etc. My 100 euro credit, free laundry entitlement and on-board discount were outlined in a letter on the bed reflecting my Ponant 'Admiral' status (2nd ter up, of 4).

Before that, there was the parka fitting. Notwithstanding we were required to take measurements and submit them to Ponant beforehand, we were asked to go to the main lounge where there were racks of parkas and we had to choose. I had an impatient French guy who passed me a 5XL and told me to take kit to the desk for recording. Hang on, maybe I should try ot on, and others? In the end I took a 2XL and that was too big I found later.







Happy to unpack, though - one of the great pleasures of a cruise. here's my zodiac collection ready to go (gum boots and parka not shown)



Waterproof over-trousers, scarf (alternate to the neck gaiter). Foot gloves, thick socks, waterproof gloves, neck gaiter knitted by mrs.drron , woollen beanie. As it turned out, it wasn't that cold and I shed the foot socks and neck gaiter pretty quick and often had the gloves off in the zodiac and on landings. During purely zodiac drive-bys (no landing), I and others kept to sneakers and no thick socks.

Then to the lounge to check out the booze. Booze included, but you could upgrade the spirits and also buy wine by the bottle. There is a menu for purchases there, but no list of the included wines available.

"We don't have that"
"Why not"
"They might change between cruises"
"I'm only interested in this cruise"
<she smiles ....>

Turns out there are 3 reds and 3 whites and they get 'rotated'. Unlike SilverSea, you can't ask for one that's not on the day's rota; and you never knew what was available on any given day. Quite annoying. This was there the first day and it appealed to me. But when I was allowed it going forward seemed a cough shoot.



Champagne of course# - I'm not a Champagne drinker - any good?



# Well, not necessarily of course - see later.

 

[RooFlyer]

A bit of terminology.

The Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz gave Spitsbergen its name when he discovered it in 1596. The name Spitsbergen, meaning 'pointed mountains' at first applied both to the main island and to the associated archipelago as a whole. Now its just the main island and the collection is Svalbad, meaning 'cold coast' in old Norse.

We departed down the Longyearbyen fjord and it was only a few hours later at about 9:30pm that the call came over the PA that there was a polar bear to see!! Huge excitement. Polar bears were more expected on the sea-ice to the north, so it was everyone on the rails to see.

It was about 0.5 km away. By Norwegian Law (introduced last year) we can't go closer than that. We watched as it paced back and forth, for 30-45 mins.



This where you need a proper zoom camera, not an iPhone. I had 65x optical zoom Canon; the top one is zoomed and the one below enlarged from a zoom.



The sides of the fjord were a promise of things to come

 

[RooFlyer]

The artic is different from the Antarctic in its relative paucity of wildlife. No penguins, very few seals. We were after polar bears (rare), walruses (rare), Arctic Fox, seals (rare), reindeers and whales. Hopefully belugas (very rare). Oh, and then there are the birds. Lots of them. One of the expeditioners - a Swiss with a wonderful British accent was the birder. A fanatic and relentless. On the sighting of any bird, no matter if the first or 10th time that day, we would get the whole bloody story. What's the speed of that glacier - don't know. How wide is it? Don't know. Do any shellfish grow in the waters? Don't know. But wow, that's another arctic terms <give the story again...>

Cruises at this point in the season stick to the west of the archipelago, as it benefits from the Gulf stream current which melts the sea ice a bit faster. Later in the year, cruises may get to the east - where there are more polar bears (still more sea ice). So there's a tip as to what time you might go, but I don't think they will predict in advance of they'll get to the east.

We went south overnight (rather slowly) to the southernmost large fjord of the island.



It 'dawned' a bit overcast and grey. View from my balcony.





The morning's activity was a landing on a rocky shore and a walk up a snowy hill. I had left my walking pole at a castle in Bosnia, so I decided not to do that, just explore along the shore. The Anglos were the last group of zodiacs (which was the case every day except 1) , which was fortunate in the case, as the weather started improving.



Bit of excitement - was this a polar bear track? Inconclusive.





The weather was cheery so I allowed our expeditioner that day, Sasha (a lovely Russian polar historian) to take my picture. Its hard to pull your stomach in under that parka (with the lifejacket squeezing across the top).



I amused myself by checking out the rocks.



Back to the ship for lunch. I was feeling the effects of the mounjaro appetite suppressant, so after a light breakfast I was usually still not very hugry for lunch, but was tempted a bit by what the chef was cooking up on the pool deck. Spicy baked halibut in this case.



A nice lunch scene. It was warm-ish in the sun and not to bad in the shade outdoors today, but most of the pax never went near the outside tables the entire voyage. Their loss.

 

[RooFlyer]

Arrrrgh. There is a problem with my photos. I take both iPhone photos and shots on my Canon SLR. I then sync the Canon with my iPhone directly, so they should all be there and then the iPhone syncs with iCloud. All done in the evening.

As I do my trip report I then pull down all the pics from iCloud to my HDD. but I’ve just noticed that a bunch of good ones from the day in question aren’t on iCloud. They appear to be still on the SD card of my Canon so I’ll have to wait till I get access to my card reader to get them off again.

 

[RooFlyer]

Sorted that out.

In the faternoon of the first full day the clouds completely cleared, the wind dropped and it turned into probab;y the best day weather-wise of the cruise. Although one other day came close.

We were deep in the fjord, at the toe of a massive glacier. Out came the zodiacs for a cruise.



Thats all glacier, wth some sea ice. Sea ice is frozen seawater but its not salty - the salt gets 'squeezed' out as it freezes.



The zodiacs nosed up against the sea ice, but it was too thin to get out on. That would come in a couple of days.






On the left is the annoying cruise 'camera crew' - taking pics and videos of us to sell back to us. Often got in the way of a nice shot.





Whassat? A seal! A seal! Wildlife!

 

[RooFlyer]

I guess I have to put in a couple of birds - but that's it.

I think this is an eider-duck (as in eider-down)



Something else.





Returning to the ship. Step straight onto the landing at the stern. The two guys there to help you up never used the 'classic' boatman's grip of mutual hand to forearm (if you've done it, you'll know what I mean) to help you up, which was a bit confusing for me for the first couple of days.



After we were all boarded, we got underway pretty slowly and the captain introduced his senior officers. The pool is heated to abt 28 degrees and yes, some went swimming - but not at this moment.





Then we cruised out down the fjord and it was the most surreal experience - all the glaciers and snowed peaks on both sides, in full sun.





White sand dunes?



White pyramids?



This glacier looked like fog coming down a valley.



The effect of condensation appearing in the lea of a wind-swept mountain top was all around us. Explanation of this phenomena:

2. Banner clouds
You will only ever see banner clouds over proper mountain-shaped mountains with pointy summits; never over rolling hills. When high winds strike such a mountain, they hit a solid wall and the air is compressed on the upwind side. The air can’t escape, and this means there is a corresponding area of low pressure on the downwind side of the summit. Here the air cools and forms clouds in the shape of banners streaming off the summit. These banners indicate the direction of the wind as plainly as any flag waving on its pole.

 

[RooFlyer]

Overnight, we moved north a bit to enter the next fjord, which splits into two. The frst stop was the bottom leg, which is fed by some big glaciers



Attaction here was an old miners hut. Absent a lot of critters, the cruise trips onto shore did struggle to find interesting things!!



Whenever we go ashore, about 6 of the exped crew, armed with rifles with exploding bullets, fan out in a perimeter abt 500m from us, to guard against polar bears. Thorough recce first. The bears are lethal of course and the tricky part is that they may be, or may be asleep, behind any mound!! The instructions to them are first to warn us to retreat, but if the bear is a real danger "shoot to kill" (the bear).

This is Lars, a good Norwegian guy.





Other feature here were reindeer. They are not afraid of people, but you keep your distance.





I wouldn't choose to lie down there, but



Evidence



Easy to follow the trail



Of course the birders climbed up the scree slope in the cold and wind, to check out the little auks, or something..

 

[RooFlyer]

After lunch we moved to the northern leg of the fjord that had an extraordinary bedrock bar across most of it. How that managed not to be bulldozed away by the glacier, no-one could explain#





We crept through and the scenery was much the same as we have seen already, but the weather was decidedly uninviting and I decided not do that afternoon's zodiac.





Usual glacier



Another hut



And the expeds on point duty, as usual.



So now I can get something off my chest. Readers of my TRs will be used to me railing against lack of knowledge by the expeds of the geology around us, be it in the Kimberly, Antarctica etc. This is mainly sort of self-pi55-taking, but it is annoying where there is a great geological feature that would interest people and the expeds are clueless.

On this trip, the exped leader, French of course, was very good - he did the evening recaps and was always on the ground for a chat on land trips, with his rifle. He in his briefings, and the cruise literature both highlighted the geology of Svalbard as a feature of the cruise; amazing, etc etc. Said there would actually be a geology briefing!! I looked forward to it!

So what happened? Rien. Zilch. Bugger-all. Not a whisper for three days. There was a geologist on board and later I found out that she was very good - the best I've come across on a cruise. Being French, she was always on the French zodiacs and was never sighted on board except suited-up on her way to the French zodiacs. So I left a message for her asking when the geology briefing would be. She called me in my cabin. TL, DR - she was far too busy to give a geology briefing to the English-speakers. She had given two to the French group and didn't have any more time. WTF? After a bit of prodding by me, she said she could probably be able to do one at the end of the cruise - how would that be? Not very good, I said. Sort of giving a curatorial talk on a gallery exhibition as you left the building. She didn't like that!!! Anyway we parted and I knew I had made an enemy. Quelle domage.

So, imagine my surprise that we got a geology briefing the following evening . A bit short, but very good. Made what we had been seeing make sense. Others said so too. I happened to pass her the next day and she asked, a bit awkwardly, how the briefing was. Excellent! I think she was a bit surprised at my level of technical knowledge. But the damage had been done. Never spoke to her again.

# All the other exped crew were even more clueless about the geology than in my previous cruises. Later, I'll show a mountainside that was completly folded up - amazing sight, for anyone, I'd think. May as well be a blank wall for the interest of the expeds. I chatted to the Aussie exped once and lamented the lack of geology talks - noting that what we saw was 38% geology, 60% water and less than 2% flora and fauna and maybe there was an imbalance? He didn't mind me saying that - saw what I was getting at (in a friendly way).

Don't get me started again about the bloody birders!!

 

[RooFlyer]

Overnight, we headed north beyond the archipelago, to the edge of the sea ice around the north pole - 80 deg north, as it happened.



There it is - very exciting - the idea is to land us on one of the ice floes



So we nose in. The vessel isn't an ice-breaker but is 1C ice class, which means

C ice class refers to a classification for ships navigating in easy ice conditions, typically first-year ice with a thickness of 0.15-0.3 meters

Some videos

We reach a patch of thicker ice so the expeds check it out



Whoo-hoo!



But ice means possibility of polar bears. So the lovely Sacha takes up position, again. And the others too.



Always offering to take your pic



Sacha was my favourite exped; a polar historian not a naturalist; speaks very well and if she didn't know something, she offered to find out and get back to me (hardly any of the others did that). She's from Russia; I first asked 'Oh, where?' Slight pause. 'Crimea'. Moving on ...

I like this one:





counting all the Groups, we spent about about 3 hours on the ice. After everyone was packed up and aboard, We nosed through the ice for awhile and eventually veered out of the ice floes..

 

[RooFlyer]

We sailed south to one of the large fjord at the north of Svalbard and in particular to a place called 'Texas Bar' in the morning. It had nothing to do with Texas and wasn't a bar. This day was one of the least interesting for me, but them's the breaks.











There is booze inside and the 'tradition' is that you have a drink (its topped up by the ship', but I didn't bother.



Back on board for lunch and the chef's special on the pool deck was a roasted leg of brontosaurus. Or something. The biggest haunch of meat I've ever seen. Was delicious.



In the pm we had a zodiac cruise amongst some ice which had calved off the huge glacier



Blue ice means its old and compressed and dense - air has been squeezed out.









We saw a bearded seal!! You can tell how rare these sightings are - in Antarctica we'd see a hundred seals a day.

 

[RooFlyer]

The next day was probably the best of the cruise. Beautiful weather like the first full day and the walruses we were 'promised' came though! And more.

We went round the corner to another fjord (natch). PS catch the 'sunset at present position'. ' - ' is the correct answer.



We did a zodiac cruise in front of a glacier amongst sea ice and it was wonderful.








Sacha was our pilot again and it was such a nice experience she even convinced me to have a pic taken









I almost lost it in a big way however. The cruise 'photo/video' zodiac that goes around taking pax's pictures to sell back to them was about to cut across the reflections; they've intruded into a few shots before but this would have been criminal. Fortunately I was able to point this out to Sacha, who quickly got onto the radio and told them to bugger off.

This bearded seal was a long way off, but Sacha manoeuvred around the sea ice nicely.

 

[RooFlyer]

Back for lunch





... while we moved across to where the walruses should be. We were told no perfume, no noise, be very calm.



Jackpot!

 

[RooFlyer]

The place is an early 17th century Dutch whaling station, Smeerenburg which I think means 'Blubber town'. Of course bears a ;possibility (we hope!) so the usual precautions.



The debris is recent





But this is original; I think a trypot holder?



The gut sailed past. @Flashback and @k_sheep and others are on it in August, in Greenland.

 

[RooFlyer]

We had just returned aboard which means peeling off the jacket, waterproof pants and boots, when a call came over the speakers. A bear!! Get yerself into the zodiacs! It had been seen moving about while we were at the zodiacs, but it disappeared. Here's why. This shows how easily it would be to stumble around and walk into it. Hence the exped recces and point duty.



Just having a snooze. Mine was the best pic amongst the Anglo group I hung out with.










End to a great day.

 

[RooFlyer]

We still had 2 nights to go, but this night was where they wrapped up the 'formalities. Everyone in the theatre for a bilingual presentation of the non-officers crew. Very slick by the presenter - rapid alternation between French and English.



The exped crew. The geologist 4th from the left. In the slinky black dress ...



Afterwards was the gala dinner, in the a main restaurant, hosted by the captain, of course I only had been there once, when it was 'dinner with the expedition crew'. These were good, although you couldn't choose your exped person. It was Lars the Norwegian, who was good company.
Otherwise the expeds ate as a group in the buffet, where I and the Aussies I often hung out with also ate. Mine was usually a small and quick affair as my appetite suppressant was still working.

The other Aussies and I found that we had the same intention - couldn't be bothered with a gala dinner, so we ate in the buffet restaurant together. We were told it was much the same food! And we also got the special wine for the night