Tracy
Arm Fjord was my favorite part of the cruise. Four hours of
traveling a box canyon of startlingly tall and steep mountains, in
water of Caribbean blue, while playing the name the ice-berg game.
Haven't played it? It's like name the cloud.
Well,
not quite. You've got 350 balconies whose conversations you can hear
who are also participating. That might sound annoying, since sound
carries well on water and certainly bounces off mountains that look
so close you could reach out and touch them, but it wasn't annoying.
It was one of those bonding things, and the guys on the balcony next
to us let us borrow some of their binoculars, we lent them our
corkscrew, it was all great. I'll let the pictures tell the story.
Balconies to our stern.
iPad guy - NO iPAD! (see last post for story)
We have to make that narrow turn and not do a Titanic...
For scale. that's a fairly good size fishing boat.
Out of which these guys got into a motor boat...
We passed a LOT of icebergs. I'd say this one was the size of a Kia.
The icebergs that calve from the bottom of the glacier, the ones that have been scraping along the bottom, next to the ground for thousands of years, aren't as pretty...but wow, totally cool to learn about.
So here's one of those streams I talked about in my former post, and you can also see that it isn't just big icebergs. Some of those are dinner tray size.
Our first glimpse of the glacier at the end of the fjord. Somehow, I hadn't wrapped my brain around the fact that a fjord ends at the glacier which formed it...and we have to somehow turn this giant boat around...
So here we are at the end. You can't see it from any of my pictures, but with the binoculars from next door, we could see a colony of seals living on the ice which floats a bit away from where the glacier calves. It's a pretty flat sheet, and they lay around on top like little sausages (until you get binoculars) and were really amazing to get to see.
So how did we turn around? We pivoted. He kept us in place, the center of the boat not moving, and just spun the ends around. Then we went back out the way we came, only we got to see all the cool stuff on the other side!
Wanna play the name the iceberg game? I just have two for you since this is getting so long, but let me know what you see in these, and next time I post, I'll tell you the 350 balcony consensus. Ok, there was no consensus. As there cannot be. Beauty of this magnitude is in the eyes of the blessed beholder.
#1
#2 a and #2b (foreground)
If you're still reading, bless you. I know vacation pictures aren't popular, but two people asking was enough for me to want to share this amazing experience with you.