Author: Jenna Kinghorn (page 1 of 4)

Iceland Highlight #1: The National Museum

If your time in Reykjavik is limited, skip the Saga Museum, which is a funky-smelling waxworks, and go straight to The National Museum of Iceland.

The permanent exhibition takes you on a journey through the 1200 years of the country’s history. Remarkable artifacts help tell the story from Viking settlement through the Black Death to the country’s current leading role in renewable energy research.

It’s one of the stops on the Reykjavik Hop-On-Hop-Off Bus Tour, which gives a recorded commentary as it drives you on an overview of the city, stopping at other spots, such as the Harpa Concert Hall and the Harbor.

China’s Terra Cotta Warriors Came to Seattle

Some friends and I had a chance to visit the traveling exhibit of China’s amazing Terra Cotta Warriors. It was fascinating.

Excavations have been ongoing for 40 years, and there are many decades of work still ahead. Several relatively small pits have been opened on a site that measures 22 square miles. It will be fascinating to see what more time reveals.

Crossing Denmark Strait

Motoring south and east out of Greenland, we battened down our belongings and prepared to spend long hours in our bunks, since the Denmark Straight had a reputation for being full of storm-driven waves and stubborn icebergs.

But our crossing was flat and easy, with temperatures so warm we left the doors out onto the decks open for hours at a time. It took less than the projected 36 hours before we arrived in Iceland.

In between packing bags, exchanging contact information, and settling our bar tabs, we celebrated our first genuine sunset with a round of photographs, and drank in the increasing darkness of night with relish.

My Last Day in Greenland

It’s taken me nearly a year of “digesting” the experience to figure out what to say about my last day in Greenland, and the trip in general. In the end, the day was a sort of miniature version of the trip as a whole: adventure, enlightenment, beauty, and disquiet.

A Private Yacht in Romer Fjord

A Private Yacht in Romer Fjord

Having motored south along the coast after poking around for several days in vast Scoresby Sound, we entered the tiny indentation of Romer Fjord planning to go ashore. Like so many ambitions this trip, those plans were scuttled when someone spotted the tiny white dot of a polar bear’s head swimming across the sound. I could barely make out the v-pattern of the bear’s wake through my telescopic lens, but sharper-eyed spotters watched the bear clamber ashore at just the spot where our Zodiacs were supposed to land…thus making it unsafe for us to disembark.

So into the Zodiacs we clambered, to slowly scour the shores of the fjord for almost two hours, straining our eyes for a glimpse of the polar bear. But the poor thing, terrified by the sound of our engines, had vanished inland, and there wasn’t another living animal in sight.

The crew kept a careful lookout for polar bear activity ashore during our lunch back aboard the ship. When the shoreline remained lifeless, we were allowed to land and walk along the beach to explore some thermal springs.

The first glimpse of geothermal activity was an odd-looking bump of rock that at first seemed to be a seeping boulder. It was in fact a mound of stone that had built up grain-by-grain around a small fountain of mineral-laden super-hot water that bubbled up from the earth. Damp with water percolating over its surface, it was like an artist’s pallet of “earth tones”: the black and gray and white of minerals streaked here and there with a brownish scum of algae.

As we made our way along the rocky shoreline, we found low-growing vegetation in a rainbow of colors that dazzled our eyes after days of dull tundra and basalt and blue-white ice. Magical little gardens of low-growing plants thrived around burbling streams and steaming pools of too-hot-to-touch mineral-laden water.

The climax of our excursion was a hillock of land built up by mineral deposition fifteen or so feet higher than the beach, where the water bubbling out of the highest mound was warm, but cool enough to touch. Someone had built up a low wall of small boulders to dam up the trickling water one larger pool.

Between these little vegetative oases bleached white bones stood out stark and haunting against the brick-red rocky shoreline: vertebrae and ribs, long bones and skulls, the remains of polar bears, musk ox, pinnipeds, and beluga whales. No wonder the polar bear had scrambled for the safety of the steep hills inland when he had sensed the presence of humans.

My boots crunched along as my mind reeled at the juxtaposition between the geologic wonder, the vegetative beauty, and the deathly brutality. The day seemed a fitting last stop, a rendering in miniature, a small-scale synopsis of the conflicting emotions provoked in me by my exploration of Greenland.

Book Review: A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

I’ve long been a fan of mystery writer Elizabeth Peters’ series chronicling the fictional adventures of Victorian-era Egyptologist Amelia Peabody. So when a friend recommended this first book in Marie Brennan’s fantasy series as reminding her of that series, but with dragons, I didn’t resist for very long.

I opted for the audio version of the book, figuring it would keep me company while I worked on some home improvement projects (including long commutes to and from Home Depot) over the weekend. I accomplished much more than originally planned, simply because I didn’t want to put the book down!

The fictional memoir is told by an aged Lady Trent, who has made a name for herself as a dragon researcher, overcoming everything from societal disapproval to wide-spread misunderstanding of dragon science to do so.

This first part of this memoir paints a quick picture of Isabella’s privileged and overprotected upbringing, complete with its family expectations and societal presumptions. These are very much in opposition to her natural curiosity and sense of adventure, which are painfully curtailed during the years of her adolescence, leading up to her “coming out” season.

Isabella does her best to suppress her natural inclinations during the all-important hunt for a suitable husband. Just when she thinks her hopes have been dashed by a momentary lapse in lady-like-ness, she is rewarded with a suitable match. Their relationship grows as he allows her to borrow natural history books from his library and even funds her amateur researches on “sparklings,” an insect-sized version of dragonkind.

Eventually Isabella and her husband join an expedition to a far-off country to capture and study a type of cave-dwelling dragon. Author Marie Brennan does a wonderful job of capturing the flavor of a Victorian-era natural history expedition, augmented with marvelous imaginary beings, languages, and places. Isabella survives everything from professional jealousy to dragon attack to kidnapping and beyond in this first, fast-paced adventure.

But it’s not all swashbuckling and feats of derring-do. Isabella also grows as a natural historian and as a human being, enjoying moments of blazing happiness and periods of tremendous loss, forging emotional connections with beautifully rendered supporting characters, gaining insight into her own weaknesses, and tapping into her deepest strengths.

I can’t wait to read her next adventure.

Book Review: Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine

One of the pleasures I take from attending scifi conventions is finding new-to-me authors whose works I want to try out. David D. Levine was one of the finds I made at NorWesCon 40 in SeaTac this March.

I just finished reading his steampunk regency adventure, Arabella of Mars, the first of a projected series. In 1812, Arabella Ashby is an upper-class young lady of sixteen living on English-colonized Mars with an uptight mother and liberal-minded but distracted father.

Arabella and her older brother Michael are cared for by a native Martian nanny who trains them in survival and Martian customs. Like other Martians, Khema is a strong land-dwelling crustacean-like being approximately seven feet tall, toiling as a servant for the colonizing English. The planet is harsh but habitable with an atmosphere, rivers, and native plants and animals — the setup reminds me of stories set in 1800s African colonies. There’s regular trade between Mars and Earth via airships that use a combination of sails and hot-air bags to traverse a route that can take anywhere from a few months when the planets are at perigee to years when they are at apogee. Soon after the book begins, an extremely unwilling Arabella is dragged “home” to England by her mother.

Within weeks of their arrival, sad news from Mars combined with the male-only entailment system of inheritance provokes Arabella to return to Mars. To do so she must pose as a boy and crew on a merchant ship run by an Indian captain. Arabella shared her father’s passion for automatons, and Captain Singh hires “Arthur Ashby” to help him with his mysterious clockwork navigator.

Most of the story is a compelling tale of Arabella learning the ropes, and Levine does a fabulous job painting the imaginative details of life aboard a regency spaceship. The reader cheers as Arabella masters everything from serving tea in zero gravity to repelling pirates and understanding the workings of the clockwork navigator. Every new adventure brings with it both increasing camaraderie with her crew mates, and greater fear of exposure as a female.

Sometimes it seems like Arabella overcomes one obstacle after another a little too easily; I would have liked a few more “fails” in the try-fail sequences Levine sets up. And the schoolgirl romance is rather predictable…but then, this is a regency! These are small and forgivable shortcomings in an otherwise enjoyable adventure, and I look forward to the next in the series.

Ittoqqortoormiitt Visit: Part 3: Amazing Art

Art seems to flourish in the tiny town. We had a wonderful conversation with the woman who runs the gift shop of the Piareersarfik art school that teaches Ittoqqortoormiit’s inhabitants a mix of traditional and modern crafting techniques. We assumed that the crafts on display were made by teenage students, but the school actually serves adult learners.

As our hostess explained it, Ittoqqortoormiit isn’t big enough to have a high school, so teenagers are sent away to state boarding schools. Overwhelmed by being away from their close-knit community, they don’t always do well in school, and many drop out. After they come home, the school gives them a second chance to learn, at whatever age they decide they are ready to try again.

Items crafted from sealskin.

Items crafted from sealskin.

Many of the crafts on display at the school and the Tourist Office gift shop used traditional materials: walrus tusks, narwhal “horn,” sealskin, musk ox wool and leather, animal furs, bones, teeth, and sinews. These materials are actually easier for the local artists to get than are the glass beads, metal, wood, and plastic that were used in some of the artwork!

Viewing the pillows, mukluks, and other admittedly beautiful wares crafted from sealskin was much more than an aesthetic experience for me.

Coming from the U.S., where marine mammals of all types are protected at the federal level, I was appalled to see their skins being used as crafting material.

 

I must not have been the first tourist to react that way, because a note on the display informed me that at 12 million, the seal population of Greenland far outnumbers the approximately 50,000 humans who call the place home.

It also noted that the sealskin is a mere byproduct of seal hunting, which is done primarily for food. The artists take pride in being able to use the whole animal after its death.

Although there were no sealskin crafts among the souvenirs I purchased, I appreciated the change of perspective. The abundance of seals versus the number of potential human consumers of them made me realize that some resources have to be considered regionally, not globally. And such changes in perspective are, of course, one of the reasons I travel.

For more information, contact ittartshop@yahoo.com

Ittoqqortoormiitt Visit: Part 2: Puppies!

The ground is covered with snow from October until mid-June, and there were still big banks of it all over when we arrived in mid-August. Young sled dogs wander at will and we were greeted at the boat launch where our Zodiacs arrived by an enthusiastic pup who enjoyed belly rubs. One of the highlights was going to a “dog yard” where we got to handle the still-nursing puppies of two very relaxed mama dogs.

I hadn’t heard of Greenland Dogs until this trip. Draft animals with a lineage that stretches back thousands of years, these sled dogs are highly prized possessions, able to work in conditions with which mechanical snow machines just cannot cope. They are not tied to the sled in joined harnesses like the dogs that run the Iditarod, but instead each is attached by it’s own long lead. This makes it easier for the sled driver to release all the dogs if there’s come kind of emergency — falling into a crack in the pack ice, for example — or to release selected dogs to keep a polar bear at bay.

I was surprised to learn that no dogs can be imported to Greenland to protect the breed from having its characteristics watered down. In fact, if a Greenland Dog has to be taken abroad for medical treatment, it is not allowed to return. That’s a big problem in an isolated community that doesn’t have a vet, let alone the kind of veterinary specialists my dog Boomer is all too familiar with! (If you know of a vet interested in making a volunteer visit to Ittoqqortoormiit, have them contact ittartshop@yahoo.com.)

Ittoqqortoormiitt Visit: Part 1

After leaving Svalbard on August 7, our only contact with humans not associated with the Polar Pioneer was a few hours of exploring a tiny town with a big name: Ittoqqortoormiit. (It’s not as hard to pronounce as it looks if you say it quickly: i-tok-a-tor-mit.)

It’s the youngest town I’ve ever set foot in, having been founded in 1924. Tourist ships visit two or three times in summer, and passengers come ashore to learn about local history and the traditional Greenlandic ways of life.

On the east coast of Greenland, overlooking the mouth of the Scoresby Sund system of fjords, this hamlet of less than 500 inhabitants is about as far off the grid as you can get. The Greenlanders who live here have electricity and satellite service including Internet connectivity.

But they have no running water or sewage system — the permafrost penetrates so deep into the ground that such infrastructure is impossible to construct. Dirt roads connect the colorful little houses and commercial buildings that climb up several hills in photogenic ranks.

Let Them Explore…Cake?

One of my favorite excursions in Greenland was what the Polar Pioneer‘s crew called “Gateau Point,” although I think the formal name for the place is Segelsällskapet Fjord.

The nickname was apt, since the definition for the French term gateau is “a rich cake, typically one containing layers of cream or fruit,” and the geological formations we explored were a visual feast.

They were also almost a BILLION years old! This was not the only stop where I wished we had had a geologist aboard who could have given us more information about these amazing structures.

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