After leaving Bering Island in the Komondor group of the Aleutian chain we sail in a northeasterly direction back to the coast of Kamchatka and beyond to the district of Russia known as Chukotka. This is the far northeast of Russia, about as remote as it gets!

Green Balls

The only way of getting here is by boat and I can't imagine many ever come! Apart from the remains of a long-abandoned Soviet-era herring fishery/processing plant in one bay that we stop at, we see no signs at all of human habitation. There's the usual flotsam and jetsam of course on various foreshores that we walk along. The usual - but with one exception. In the days before plastic floats, fishermen in this part of the world used blown green glass globes to hold up their nets. Our guides, some of whom have been coming to this part of the world for 25 years tell us that the discarded globes used to be easily found. That of course set off a searching frenzy among our fellow travelers and periodically, we'd hear a yelp as somebody found one. We searched but with no luck. Until.....this time the yelp came from Megan! She'd found a perfect specimen on a beach we landed on in Petra Bay just as we were about to head off on a tundra hike! Kevin & Megan are soon moving house and have been cleaning out years of accumulated "stuff". So in a most friendly gesture and we thought very generously, Megan handed the green ball to Sandra!

NEMI's

It is along this section of our expedition that the birders among our fellow passengers really come into their own. Almost all of our fellow travelers on this expedition are really keen birders. One of our expedition leaders is Peter Harrison, a renowned English artist and expert ornithologist who has produced the definitive guide to the world's seabirds - a two volume work of reference which he is currently updating. Birds of the feathered variety are not something that holds a lot of fascination for me (Peter puts us in the category of "NEMI's - not even remotely interested" as opposed to "BIT's - birders-in-training"!). But if anyone could change that, it would be the super-impressive Peter Harrison. He is not only the world's foremost expert on seabirds, but he actually handpaints (in water colour) each of the birds he describes. His hand-painted plates, looking for all the world like photographs are the illustrations for his books. On top of all of that, Peter is a most entertaining speaker - I said to him that he he could easily develop a second (or is it third or fourth!) career as a stand-up comic!!

But that's not all! Peter and his delightful wife Shirley built up an adventure travel company (coincidentally based in Seattle where they have one of their homes - the other being adjacent to the Lands End national monument in England) which they recently sold. Many of our fellow travelers booked through the company that bought out Peter (and which he still contracts his services to) and have been traveling on adventure tours with Peter, Shirley and their former partners (also part of the expedition team on this trip) for 25 or more years. Peter's protégé and birder-in-chief in waiting Jonathan, a Cape Town-trained physician who's apparently decided that ornithology and adventure travel are a lot more exciting than healing the sick, is also part of the expedition staff. Jonathan, whose ambition he tells us is to spot 9000 different bird species before his 50th birthday (he has just 15 months and fewer than 100 birds to go) is the most enthusiastically exuberant person I've ever met! But then you'd need to be to get excited about spotting a tiny grey bird against a grey rock on a drizzly overcast grey day as we witnessed several times!!

We make several stops along the coast in our journey northwards. Although it's cool and damp (or actually raining) the sea is calm enough to allow us to get off the ship several times onto zodiacs and then to land on the foreshore. And it's not just birds that we see. Kamchatka is famous for its bears and we get to see plenty even if some are little more than distant dots (take a look at the photo.....)!

And then there was the walrus stampede....

....and millions of birds!!