Sarah Pedersen 26th July 2023
With the Late Night watching the Bear it was a slow morning after having turned the day around again. We had a late breakfast and got our stuff together, so we could go look at London; an abandoned marble quarry established by the English only to find out that arctic marble crumbles when going South.
We did a lot of watching before deciding to row ashore – there is something very unsettling about knowing that one minute you might look at a hill and see a bear walking towards you, especially when a bear was there the day before. But the temperature was high, so they would be likely to seek to colder places.
When walking around these leftover cranes (one from Leicester in the UK) steam engines, train parts and crumbling buildings you wonder why it wasn’t cleaned up at some point in time. But as mentioned in an earlier post, everything left behind from before 1945(ish) is now off limits and cannot be moved or removed. Some of the things makes sense, such as the cranes and quarry building that leaves an unsettling feeling of people having left from one day to the other, but the pile of rusty scraps, glass and bottles seems more like a pile of rubbish.
While walking the fog came and started to make it hard to keep watch so we decided to go back to the boat. We wanted to see if a new bear had found its way to the enormous rotten bear snack, but now it was only the seagulls that were having a feast.
We motored the short trip to Ny Ålesund through the fog using Radar to avoid the larger Icebergs to get diesel before moving further South.
