Whales are the largest mammals on the planet, can travel thousands of miles each year and some species can hold their breath for up to two hours. They are magnificent beasts to behold. At least so I am told.
Let us pick up this story where we left off last time, in a little village called Stø, where a whale safari was about to leave. My three travel companions and I, along with 20 other people, were led onto the small boat that would take us out on the open ocean.
The North is a pretty cold place and temperatures often struggle to reach 10°C, even in the height of summer. Out on the ocean however, temperatures can easily drop another 5-10°C, which according to physics is damn close to freezing, and not generally known to be very warm – Captain Obvious, at your service. Yet half an hour into the trip my girlfriend at the time was standing outside in her T-shirt, breathing heavily and firmly clamping the handrail.
Seasickness is a funny thing – at least when you are not experiencing it, by the looks of it; apparently it can make someone cold-resistant. Now that might sound like a superpower, but I’m guessing that none of the Avengers were particularly jealous of my girlfriend feeding the fishes yesterday’s sandwiches; the hard way. I do have to mention that she embraced her superpower like a trooper, when after four hours of throwing up and withstanding the cold in a way that would have made a Siberian prison guard proud, and we arrived back in Stø, she spoke the legendary words: “Well that was not so bad, was it? Shall we go again?”
While you were reading the previous sentence, you might have noticed that gnawing feeling of your subconscious trying to figure out what it has just read. Go again? your subconscious might be wondering. Why would she want to go again? Let’s jump back a couple of hours, to the safari, because that is where this part of the story takes its first unfortunate turn.
It is true that my girlfriend could get seasick standing on damn grass. However, when we were out there on the boat, there was plenty of reason to let seasickness get the best of us. By the time we reached the whale spotting point, about two hours after we left the harbor – though it would be offensive to harbors around the world to call that thing in Stø a “harbor”, so let’s perhaps settle on “pier”, the waves had at least a two metre amplitude. For people allergic to physics, the amplitude of a wave is the vertical distance between the lowest and highest point – wait, that didn’t help your allergies, did it?
For a boat as small as the one we were on, that was scary high! When the boat turned into the waves, just as we reached our destination, it was basically a two metre free-fall with every passing whitecap. Let’s just say that it was an incredibly rough ride that would have beaten even the best trained roller coaster fanatic’s stomach.
The whales must have noticed the high waves as well, and had probably taken their breathing business elsewhere, because they were nowhere to be found. Even after 15 minutes of scanning the ocean with the boat’s radar equipment, we still had not spotted a single whale. What was worse, the captain then decided that it was too dangerous to stay out there with waves that high. So after 3 days of waiting to leave on a whale safari, after having driven over 300 miles to get there, after two hours of nausea on a wobbly boat in the cold and 15 nerve-wrecking minutes of scanning, we did not get to see a single whale. Not even a small one. Not even a fin or flipper. Not even a blowhole.
I will not deny that we were incredibly disappointed when the whales remained absent, but this story is not all sarcasm and melodrama for the sake of comedy. We were actually lucky enough that the whale safari leaving from Stø also passes by an island called Anda on its way back.
Anda is inhabited by a number of other animals indigenous to the cold North. For example, during the four hour boat-ride we were constantly accompanied by “puffins” that nest on the island. If you are just as clueless about what a puffin is as I was at the time, then try to imagine a bird that looks a lot like a penguin, but the size and shape of a mango, with a bright orange beak and flippers, and comically small wings that surprisingly keep the little bird up in the air. Picture a black and white cannonball propelling itself forward by furiously flapping dorito sized wings. It’s hilarious to watch.
What was less hilarious for the puffins, but very spectacular for us, was a sea eagle hunting the little birds on the island. The giant bird of prey, with a wingspan that easily exceeded two metres, patiently circled the island and took a nosedive every few minutes to grab an unsuspecting victim. The only thing missing was David Attenborough narrating the whole experience for us to start doubting if this was real life or a BBC documentary.
Next to a dozen other bird species, the island also houses a group of harbor seals, which are brown spotted and very fluffy – so fluffy I’m gonna dieeee! The boat stays quite far away from the island though and the seals unfortunately have the same color as the rocks they sit on. Good camouflage of course, but not very adaptive towards tourism. Perhaps someone needs to teach the seals about the basic principles of tourist attractions? Sometimes we’d find ourselves staring at a rock and wondering why it was not moving as much as the other seals. Rocks possess a remarkable immobility and sturdiness when you expect one to be a fluffy mammal; a little known fact that might require some further investigation by a better geologist than me.
A little later we docked at Stø and got offered to stay another day to go on the next safari, free of charge, because of Arctic Whale Tours’ 50% whale guarantee. We politely declined this offer by asking half of our money back, jumping into our motorhome and fleeing Stø as fast as our wheels permitted. We did not want to sacrifice another day of our journey on a gamble. Frickin Stø.
You might have noticed that unlike my previous stories, this second part of the whale tale has no pictures. Unfortunately that is not by accident. During the safari I snapped about 500 pictures of puffins, seals, eagles, the wobbly boat and of our travel party. But when I tried transferring the pictures from my camera to my laptop afterwards, something went horribly wrong and all 500 pictures ended up being destroyed. Not a single picture from the whale tour survived the massacre and is left to show you.
In our friend group, the phrase “Frickin Stø” has become somewhat of an iconic, sentimental statement. It’s a statement that takes us back to those days right before the safari, when we were still gleeful in prospect of spotting whales, when we still had neatly plastic-wrapped sandwiches, still kept most of our stomach contents to ourselves, still had pictures to look at as a souvenir and still had some idealistic view of this little town called Stø. Frickin Stø.