Post card from Norway #2

 This follows on from an earlier post, but it is a work in progress.

Up near the Russian border. there are signs in Cyrillic for the odd border-crosser. We saw a couple of mini-buses coming through, an a girl on  bicycle, who was apparently headed for Russia. Kirkenes was heavily swarmed by Germans and heavily bombed by the Russians, who then liberated it, and apparently behaved nicely enough. For me, the best thing was birch trees,  well north of the Arctic Circle, and more significantly, loads of mistletoe, the clumps in the tree here.

This is a novelty for Australian botanists, because we all know very well that the tree line cuts out where the snow line comes in, and we are far to the north of the snow line. There is even sea ice: not ice bergs as such, but floating lumps.

 

As we came into Kirkenes, we saw our first sea-ice. These are slim planes of frozen fresh water. At first, they were less than obvious, but then they were more numerous and thicker.

Once upon a time,  ports up here were blocked in winter, but this is growing rarer. We knew about this from complaints in Amsterdam that one could no longer skate on the canals. Shortly after, on Saaremaa, a sand island off the Estonian coast, we heard how the moose that bred on the island could no longer escape over the sea ice in winter. 

But climate change is, as we all know, a  myth.

I have been amusing myself catching snow flakes in my beard, and leaving tracks in the snow on the deck. After a first walk on snow, wearing spikes as overshoes, we have now mastered the art of spotting and avoiding slippery ice.

Skate-boarding and wheelchair work would be a challenge up here, but I was very much taken by this snow-ready version of a Zimmer frame, and I saw a man scurrying along on a ski-based push scooter.

Back at Kirkenes, I saw a snow cannon in action, and we asked why in such a place of deep snow, they needed to make more of it, but apparently there will be National championships in a ski-based motocross competition.

We nodded sagely, and went to get what we called a Norwegian hot chocolate. At least our sense of the ridiculous has not yet frozen solid.

Here is yet another port that we called into yesterday. Hurtigruten got started as transport for local people and freight up and down the coast, but now it is mainly for tourists. Even in the time we have known the service, the vessels have grown larger and more luxurious. It is no longer rough and scruffy, but that's the down-side of tourism.

That's enough: more later, perhaps. I thought these were puffins, but they weren't.

These sea eagles, on the other hand, near Finnkirk Rock, were the real McCoy: I will come to tge rock in #3

And that ends #2

I have already created the stub for #3, but nothing much there, just yet.