By Corey Sandler
I’ll have more photos and commentary in my blog next month.
But as I look back on 2024 for significant signs, I began to think about auld lang signs, old markers like these from travels past.
By Corey Sandler
After a year that included two long adventures in the frozen north of Norway, Iceland, and Greenland, we just returned from a cautious defrost cycle.
A pair of cruises took us on an unusual itinerary, from Montreal in Quebec to Los Angeles in California. Although it would have been interesting to see how many miles per day we could sail across the dry plains of Manitoba, that was not the course we took.
We stayed on the water: the Saint Lawrence River, then the North Atlantic, into the Caribbean, made a transit through the passage between the seas in Panama, and then hung a right into the North Pacific.
Oh, and along the way we swung wide to safely skirt a hurricane coming at us across lower Florida.
All told, one month at sea on a repositioning cruise that brought Viking Neptune from Europe to Montreal to conclude in San Pedro, part of the port of Los Angeles. The ship was due to continue its peregrinations in the Pacific, heading to Hawaii and the South Pacific. But we flew home in shirtsleeves, carrying a warm coat in preparation for a return to chilly Boston.
For reasons unknown to me, our month-long trip began with a predawn flight from Boston to Montreal. The taxi came at 4 a.m.
After settling in aboard ship we went for a groggy stroll in Montreal, one of our favorite places. We once again discussed plans to come back in the cheery, frigid winter.
Our first port of call was lovely Quebec City, which is in many ways more French than France. They use an old dialect of the mother tongue and hold on to tradition dearly. But there was something new in the old town along the river:
We took a turn to port to sail up the beautify Saguenay Fjord, which heads north toward Quebec’s interior. The sun was low in the sky, lighting up the delightfully named Baie des Ha! Ha!, or Ha! Ha! Bay. (The funny name is derived from an Algonquin term that means, “The Place Where Bark is Exchanged.”
In Saint John, New Brunswick we caught some glimpses of the fall colors. The leaves turn first here in the north and then work their way down the coast of New England. But it’s a fool’s errand to try and predict the best day or best place to see them. And eventually a cold rain will turn the page very quickly from autumn to winter.
After stops in Charlottetown, PEI, Bar Harbor, Maine, and Portland, Maine we made the first of two canal transits on this bicoastal journey: through the Cape Cod Canal that connects Cape Cod Bay to Buzzards Bay at the bottom of the mainland of Massachusetts. The sea-level canal shaves six to eight somewhat difficult hours of sailing below Nantucket Island.
We arrived in New York harbor before noon, and I had the privilege of narrating our entrance from the Navigational Bridge, one of my favorite assignments.
And then we headed out of New York and due south down the coast with the intention of docking at Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Except for this:
I am often asked by cruise-wary travelers about sailing in hurricane season, and the answer I always give is this: if you are in a hotel and hurricane is headed for you, that could be trouble. But on a modern ship, with all of the satellite and radar technology we have, we could see the storm way before it could have been a problem.
Our captain chose to speed up our passage down the east coast so that we could get below the storm before it passed over Florida. We had a few bumps in the night, I am told; we slept through it all. The only effect on us was that Florida closed all of its ports as the storm made landfall, and so we were treated to an extra day at sea making a circle below Key West and above Cuba. And then it was gone, and we were safely at the dock.
A day late, but safe and well-fed, we departed due south across the Caribbean Sea to Cartagena, Colombia, a city whose central core is little changed from Spanish Colonial Times. And they do love to party.
None of that is shocking to us, since we have been to Cartagena La Heroica many times, but the serious heat and humidity set us back on our heels. We sought the cool shade of a small animal preserve.
Our itinerary called for us to end the second cruise in Los Angeles (the Port of San Pedro to be specific) and thus we had to get through the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific. We spent the night in the industrial port of Colon on the Caribbean side while we waited for our assigned time to enter the Panama Canal.
I went with a group of guests deep into the south-central jungle to visit one of seven nearly untouched communities of indigenous people struggling to hold on to the old culture One of the ways they do that is by welcoming small groups of tourists.
The last leg of our trip to visit Parará Purú, a settlement of the Emberá people, was in a long and narrow dugout canoe, called a piragua, the only way in and out of the community.
Parará Purú is within the Chagres National Park above the banks of the Río Chagres. Further north the Chagres feeds into Lake Gatun, which is both the engine for lifting and lowering vessels and the waterway for passage between the Atlantic and Pacific.
We were told that the small tribe did not make much use of clothing when they are on their own. Alas, they dressed up–a bit–for us, and performed some tribal dances.
The next morning we arrived at the entrance to the Panama Canal, a transit I have made dozens of times and is still one of my favorite experiences. I was up on the Navigational Bridge giving commentary as Viking Neptune was lifted up about 86 feet in three locks.
Later that afternoon, after we passed through the Continental Divide at Culebra Cut (also known as Gaillard Cut after the American engineer in charge of the digging there) we went back down the stairs through three locks. At Miraflores, two grandstands were filled with tourists watching us watch them.
Thrilled with the excitement, we headed north toward our goal at Los Angeles. In celebration, the sunset that night was extraordinary.
At Puntarenas, Costa Rica I visited an animal sanctuary filled with creatures of all sort including speedy birds and jaguars, and very slow sloths, which for some reason reminded me of our children when they were teenagers.
Our final port of call was scheduled to be at Cabo San Lucas, which is a beautiful setting that has been all but completely recast as a tourist resort. When we arrived, though, the sea swells were too high for us to use our ship’s tenders to come to shore and so we had to leave.
Instead, we added a call at Ensenada, just below the border with the United States at Tijuana. No one could confuse Ensenada with Cabo San Lucas, although I find its gritty reality more interesting.
To bookend our trip which began at dawn in Boston, I was up early to photograph a stunning sunrise at Ensenada.
The next morning we came back down to reality, with a long cross-country flight from Los Angeles to Boston. It’s time now to catch up on some sleep.
All text and photos (except where indicated) are by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
If you’d like to order a copy of my book, “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” you can obtain a Kindle or PDF version by clicking here: HENRY HUDSON DREAMS AND OBSESSION
Or if you would prefer to purchase a printed book in hardcover or paperback (personally autographed if you’d like) please send me an email for details. Click here to contact me.
We’re out of the ice, headed to the heat.
In my previous blog post I mentioned how Iceland and Greenland basically have two seasons: Winter and Not-Winter.
On the unusual trip we’re sailing now, we’re headed from Montreal down the American East Coast into the Caribbean and then through the always-fascinating Panama Canal and up the coast to California.
The annual average temperature in Panama is 75.2 fahrenheit…and going up. So, a Greenlandic iceberg doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance.
(Way up north in the cordillera near the border with Costa Rica is Volcán Barú, an active stratovolcano and Panama’s tallest mountain. With an altitude of 11,398 feet the peak sometimes catches a bit of frost or ice.)
But down at sea level and the Panama Canal, the seasons are Summer and Not-Summer, or more accurately Rainy and Not-so-Rainy. We’re expecting rain.
So while I reflect on our voyage, I thought I’d search through my photo collection for unusual views through my glass: the lens on my camera.
I love to peep through or at windows. No, no. Not in that way. Here’s what I mean:
Photos and text copyright 2024 by Corey Sandler. To obtain copies or otherwise use images, please contact me through my website at www.coreysandler.com
To see portfolios of some of my travel photos visit www.coreysandler.myportfolio.com or www.coreysandler2.myportfolio.com
By Corey Sandler
After two days in Svalbard, the last significant populated area short of the North Pole, we sailed out of Longyearbyen on the Adventfjorden and turned south.
(If you could somehow shrink yourself down to subatomic size and perch on the exact point of the geographic North Pole, every direction you face is south. But once you leave, the ordinary rules of navigation apply.)
And so we set sail slightly west of south through the Barents Sea to the island nation of Iceland. The trip was relatively smooth, and after two days we were ready to exit the Arctic Circle for the first time in more than a week.
Our goal was Isafjörður on the remote west coast of Iceland. Almost everywhere in Iceland other than the capital region of Reykjavik is remote; some are more remote than others. The West Fjords of Iceland are in a corner that is off the famed Ring Road.
The seasons of Iceland can perhaps be described as Winter and Not-Winter.
Isafjörður means Ice Fjord. Is that enough of a hint?
The west side of Iceland faces Greenland, divided by the Denmark Strait which is what they call it in Greenland.
Denmark is far away, but still politically linked to Greenland. Just to make things even more confusing, in Iceland they generally refer to the stretch of water as the Greenland Strait.
I’ve been to Isafjörður many times, but as I thought about it, never quite this early in the year.
The night before our scheduled arrival, we began to see pieces of ice in the water. Scientists classify ice in the sea thusly:
It was, of course, a very large iceberg–almost certain broken off from Greenland–that met up with the S.S. Titanic near midnight on the night of April 14, 1912 and I trust you know that was not a happy ending for the souls aboard.
The difference between then and now include the fact that we have satellites, aircraft spotters, radar, and the internet. Our captain and the officers on the navigational bridge were carefully studying the conditions.
And though it was most definitely not in my job description, I was also studying the reports for for days ahead of our intended entrance in the Denmark/Greenland Strait.
So we passed by the growlers, and then by late afternoon we began to see bergy bits. And the wind began to pick up, blowing from the south which meant that the ice was moving toward us.
Modern ships like ours have sophisticated television systems that include a map that shows the vessel’s location and course. Watching that screen–or just looking out the windows–or indeed, just tuning yourself to the inertial movement of the ship told us something notable happened. We suddenly made a wide but determined U-turn in the sea.
Soon afterward, the captain came on the speaker system to tell us that the growlers and bergy bits were being followed by icebergs. And also, the ice shelf extending off the east coast of Greenland was getting a bit close for comfort.
The good news was that we were safe and in good hands but our scheduled call at Isafjörður was now off the books. After a few hours the wind calmed down and we successfully negotiated our passage to the intended final call of this cruise, the capital city of Reykjavik.
Out of the ice and off the ship for the day I made an unplanned circumnavigation of parts of the capital city not often visited by outsiders. Eventually I made my way back to the harbor and found my bearings to locate our ship.
On the outskirts of town is the handsome Harpa, a concert hall and conference center in the Austurhöfn district. It was originally intended as a major banking, shopping, and housing center. Construction came to a screeching halt in 2008 with the onset of the Icelandic financial collapse.
The concert hall was finally completed in 2011, and more recently–as Iceland has once again begun to boom–other elements of the building have been completed.
My favorite part is the view from within, looking out the window wall.
I made it back to the ship and prepared to sail the final leg of this set of voyages. We had a mostly uneventful trip back around Iceland, headed for the top of the island nation and once again through the Denmark Strait.
Our visit to Akureyri, Iceland brought us back to the indistinct diving line between Winter and Not Winter; it was reasonably warm but there was still snow up on the hills, and our ship was shrouded in indecisive fog in the early morning.
That evening we set sail and the next morning we successfully made it to Isafjörður. Ahead lay the Denmark Strait.
Our plans for Greenland called for a transit of the Prince Christian Sound which cuts the southeast corner of that nation; the northern side of the sound marks the edge of the huge ice sheet that covers three-quarters of the entire country, the only permanent (for now) ice sheet outside of Antarctica.
From there we were due to call at two small communities on the southern edge: Nanortalik and Qaqortaq. These are not place most people get to visit; I do, but I guess I do not qualify as “most people.”
But I could see on the online weather and ice reports that growlers, berg bits, and icebergs were carpeting the sea.
And so we skipped the sound and the two small villages…but our captain and the special ice pilots we had on board consulted the charts, worked the radios, and came up with Plan C.
Sunday morning we rounded the bottom of Greenland and proceeded up the west coast just a bit to an even-less visited place called Paamiut, home to about 1,300 brave and mostly isolated souls and not at all a regular port of call for cruise ships.
Once again, the clue lay in the meaning of the name. Paamiut means “Those who Reside by the Mouth (of the fiord)” in Kalaallisut or Western Greenlandic.
There was no dock for us, but that was beside the point. The fact that the town was near the outside reaches of the fjord meant that our ship did not have to leave the open ocean. That’s important because there was little chance that our ship might become embayed, trapped in a harbor because wind or tides had moved icebergs across our exit route.
At the end of the day we made a careful exit from Paamiut and moved to Atlantic Canada. A planned stop at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland had to be scrapped; icebergs once again. But we enjoyed a glorious day in handsome Halifax, and a day later made a triumphant procession up the Hudson River to our dock on the west side of Manhattan.
As you read these words, we are preparing for our next set of voyages, an unusual routing from Montreal to Los Angeles. We’ll head south, then west to pass through the Panama Canal, and then north to California. Forecast for icebergs: slim to zero.
All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
If you’d like to order a copy of my book, “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” you can obtain a Kindle or PDF version by clicking here: HENRY HUDSON DREAMS AND OBSESSION
Or if you would prefer to purchase a printed book in hardcover or paperback (personally autographed if you’d like) please send me an email for details. Click here to contact me.
By Corey Sandler
We’ve made it to August, usually the hottest month of the year in the part of the world we call home base.
But my mind keeps drifting back to mid-June when our ship was swarmed by icebergs in and around Greenland.
Ships and icebergs are not natural buddies. It was, of course, a large chunk of ice–almost certainly moving in the East Greenland Current–that brought about a night to remember for the S.S. Titanic near midnight on April 14, 1912.
Today, modern ships have satellite monitoring, radar, radio reports, and GPS and other technologies that pinpoint location to within a few feet. And in our case, we also brought aboard two Danish ice pilots who knew the local waters like the back of their refrigerator-freezer.
But we’ll get to the icebergs in next month’s blog post. I promise.
First, let’s resume our voyage from the top of the mainland of Norway to the last significant piece of occupied land short of the North Pole.
I know this part of the world pretty well; I spent several years researching my book about the four known voyages of Henry Hudson and in the process I made several voyages–on a much more comfortable vessel than the one captained by Hudson–to the Svalbard archipelago which reaches to 81 degrees North latitude.
My role on this trip was as a featured speaker on a luxury cruise line and one of the talks I gave was about Hudson. At the conclusion of the talk, I told guests I would be heading up to the ship’s navigation bridge to give commentary as we made a sail-by of Bear Island.
When Hudson and the other explorers of the 17th century were headed north to Svalbard in search of a passage to Japan and Asia they were navigating with only the most basic of instruments.
They had a compass which could tell them the direction of the Magnetic North Pole, although the further north they went the less valuable a compass becomes. At the top of the world, every direction becomes north.
Sextants and astrolabes had been in use by mariners for centuries, but there is a huge problem in using them in the summertime of the far north: the sun never sets and the stars are not visible. The Midnight Sun is a very disorienting experience.
GPS? Satellites? Radio? Radar? Nope.
All that Hudson had were some very crude, mostly inaccurate hand-drawn charts and some written orders: sail out of London on the River Thames, cross over to find Norway and then head North from its top. And then: look for the unusual signpost in the middle of the Arctic Sea.
The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz had noted the island on his voyage in 1596, and now Hudson was in the same waters in 1607.
That signpost is Bear Island, at 74 degrees North. It is a strange place, a big rock in the middle of nowhere with an instantly recognizable feature, a large pointed rock at its bottom like a finger pointed upward.
The Dutch gave it a name: Stappen, (Step) a 625-foot-tall needle that can’t be missed. The instructions: find Bear Island, and then continue north and you’ll arrive at Svalbard.
That’s what I told the guests on Viking Mars before I went to the Bridge.
And this is more-or-less what we saw:
The signpost in the middle of the Arctic Sea was there. We could see it on the ship’s radar, and we could feel its presence. But the fog in June–a combination of cool air over a finger of the warmer Gulf Stream, or warmer air over the still-cold ocean–gave us a complete and total whiteout.
For the record, here is what the island looks like in a photo I took on a previous, luckier voyage:
Two days later we made landfall in Svalbard at the only significant settlement in the islands, Longyearbyen.
The town was given its name by the un-modest American John Munro Longyear, who first visited Svalbard in 1901 aboard one of the first cruise ships. Longyear, already very wealthy from iron ore and other mineral deposits he exploited in the American Midwest, saw industrial-scale whaling stations in Svalbard boiling whale blubber in trypots that were fired by coal.
Longyear returned in 1906 and bought up the majority of the coal mine claims in the islands at the top of the world.
For centuries, Svalbard was Terra Nullius, a no-man’s land. Since the 1920 Treaty of Svalbard, the archipelago has been under the sovereignty of Norway. But any of the signatories of the treaty have the right to send their citizens their and to engage in trade and mining. Russia still maintains several small communities on the main island of Spitsbergen including a few small mines.
The isolation and cold of Svalbard also brought about the establishment of another strange operation: The Global Seed Vault, also known colloquially as The Doomsday Vault.
Contained within an excavated shaft in a mountainside just outside of Longyearbyen, the vault holds millions of seeds sent there by nations around the world. The idea is to preserve plants of all sorts for the future in the event of climatic or other disasters.
Next month: icebergs off Greenland and sunrise over the isle of Manhattan.
All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
If you’d like to order a copy of my book, “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” you can obtain a Kindle or PDF version by clicking here: HENRY HUDSON DREAMS AND OBSESSION
Or if you would prefer to purchase a printed book in hardcover or paperback (personally autographed if you’d like) please send me an email for details. Click here to contact me.
By Corey Sandler
I’m still unpacking bulging suitcases from a trip that began on a cool Spring morning in Boston, proceeded to a still-frosty and snowy Norway and Iceland, crossed the Atlantic to carefully navigate in and amongst icebergs in Greenland, arrived in Nova Scotia on an unseasonably sweltering hot day, and ended with a glorious sail-in on the Hudson River with a full moon over our shoulders and a red rising sun transecting New York’s East River ahead of us.
Icebergs? Tons of them.
We included winter coats and gloves for Svalbard, just short of 80 degrees North latitude, the last piece of occupied land before the geographic North Pole. We had hiking boots for Iceland, summer clothes and suntan lotion for Halifax and the Big Apple.
This itinerary has a lot of meaning to me because it retraces much of the history of the explorer Henry Hudson, who sailed from London and Amsterdam into the ice in search of a passage to Asia. Indeed, Hudson eventually ended up on the other side of the Atlantic in the great waterway that later would bear his name, New York’s Hudson River.
I spent three years of my life researching my book that retraced Hudson’s four known voyages.
Unseasonable winds and threatening clouds caused our flight from Boston to Amsterdam and onward to Bergen to take an unusual pattern on takeoff. The jet headed east, away from the ocean before eventually finding a clearing that led to the Great Circle Route across the Atlantic.
The takeoff gave me an opportunity for a non-standard view of our home port of Boston.
We’ve visited the ancient city of Bergen many, many times but were greeted this time by a Ferris wheel and carnival temporarily installed in front of the 500-year-old Bergenhus Fortress. Our ship, Viking Mars, lay just beyond at the cruise terminal.
Heading north up the coast of Norway, our ship called at the port of Narvik, the site of the first significant battle of World War II after German invaders were temporarily pushed out by by British, Free French, Polish, Norwegian resistance, and other Allied fighters.
Narvik’s reason for being is the extraordinary railroad that crosses the border into Sweden to the massive iron ore mines at Kiruna. The Germans wanted the ore, and the railroad, to support its war aims; the Allies fought on land and at sea to deny access.
Honningsvåg is the northernmost city in mainland Norway, our last call in Europe before heading further north to Svalbard. It has the feeling of one of the ends of the earth.
Just around the corner to the east is Kirkenes, which sits on the border with Russia. Relations with that country have gone from cool to cold in recent years, even more so as Norway’s other neighbors Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. At the time of our visit NATO was conducting winter exercises in the snow and ice of Norway’s north.
I’ll continue the story in next month’s blog post, right here on August 1.
All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
If you’d like to order a copy of my book, “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” you can obtain a Kindle or PDF version by clicking here: HENRY HUDSON DREAMS AND OBSESSION
Or if you would prefer to purchase a printed book in hardcover or paperback (personally autographed if you’d like) please send me an email for details. Click here to contact me.
By Corey Sandler
As I write these words, we’re on our way from Bergen to the top of Norway and then beyond to Longyearbyen in Svalbard archipelago, the last inhabited piece of land before the geographic North Pole.
It is one of the strangest environments on earth, and one of my favorites. I wrote about Svalbard at length in one of my books, “Henry Hudson: Dreams and Obsession.”
I’m looking forward to returning, and sharing a new series of photos soon.
After Svalbard we’ll sail back down to Iceland, Greenland, Nova Scotia, and finally into the great harbor of New York on the Hudson River.
My camera is never far from my hands, at home or anywhere else in the world.
A day without a new photo is a day lost.
I’ll upload new photos and observations in my next blog post.
Meanwhile, I’m looking for signs.
Photos and text copyright 2024 by Corey Sandler. To obtain copies or otherwise use images, please contact me through my website at www.coreysandler.com
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
To see portfolios of some of my travel photos visit www.coreysandler.myportfolio.com or www.coreysandler2.myportfolio.com
By Corey Sandler
Our second cruise of the winter to the top of Norway, some 200 miles into the Arctic Circle, proceeded more or less on schedule.
Don’t blame the cruise line. Don’t blame the captain. Don’t blame me.
The high latitudes near the North Pole (and those near Antarctica at the other end of our planet) are places that are predictably unpredictable. Usually very cold, often very windy, sometimes heavily occluded with heavy clouds.
We were there in hopes of seeing the Northern Lights, something I have enjoyed quite a few times.
So here’s the deal: the Northern Lights–or to use its more formal title, the Aurora Borealis–are present in the earth’s atmosphere nearly all the time. Our planet’s protective magnetic field directs most the sun’s solar particles toward the Arctic Circle or the Antarctic Circle where the magnetism is weaker. (At the equator, the earth’s diameter is much greater than it is at the top or bottom, and so magnetic fields have less effect in the high latitudes.)
The second thing that is needed in order to see the Northern Lights is darkness. Sunlight washes out the diaphanous curtains and swirls. In the Arctic in winter, there is very little sunlight for at least three months of the year, from about December to March. (The Antarctic’s seasons are the opposite of the Arctic, with the dark midwinter on June 21 of each year.)
The third necessary element is a clear sky. The Northern Lights are the result of collisions between solar particles and various atoms in our atmosphere. Most of these collisions occur in the earth’s Thermosphere, the second-highest layer of the atmosphere, about 50 to 440 miles above the planet’s surface. If there is heavy cloud cover overhead, there’s little chance of seeing them. I always tell guests that if you cannot see stars or planets in the sky, there’s little chance of seeing the aurora.
And the fourth element: luck. You can be in the right place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the right time.
On our long sail from Bergen to the top of mainland Norway we had a few faint sightings of the lights; crew on the navigational bridge alerted passengers. But it wasn’t until we were tied up at the pier in Alta that all four elements: solar particles, darkness, clear skies, and luck aligned.
I headed for the highest deck of the ship with my tripod, full-frame digital camera, thermal underwear, and down-filled mittens. The first glimmer was a claw-like green image on the horizon:
I headed from the stern to the bow of the ship, near the radar and communications equipment and set up again.
Our ship was due to depart Alta about 11pm, and as a group of us waited on the upper deck the navigator set the radar antenna to rotate. We heard the whir and saw the antenna move…and then as if summoned, the Northern Lights came directly over the ship.
On our way down the coast, headed for the port of Tilbury on the Thames River, we made a call at Narvik in Norway. This is a place of great beauty and possessed of a history that still seems to echo through the fjord.
In the 1890s, a combined British and Swedish group engineered a spectacular railway that ran from iron ore mines in landlocked northern Sweden to the port of Narvik where it could be loaded onto ships and taken to steel mills in Europe.
The biggest customer for the Swedish steel coming through the Norwegian port was Germany. And soon after World War II began, Germany invaded and occupied Norway; one of the main reasons was to gain access to Narvik and its railway to neutral Sweden.
One of the largest naval battles of Europe took place within the confines of Narvik, and for a few weeks the British, along with Free French and the Norwegian resistance held off and then ousted the Germans. But the Allied foothold could not be sustained, and they withdrew; German bombers and naval vessels all but leveled Narvik and the export of iron ore from the port was halted.
Up in the hills above the rebuilt town is a private nature preserve called Arctic Park. I went there with some guests, and we clamped ice spikes to our boots to visit large enclosures that were home to Arctic wolves and fox, wolverines, reindeer, and other creatures including several very large lynx, which are known as bobcats in North America.
After Narvik, we set sail for IJmuiden, the port of Amsterdam, which was our last scheduled call before disembarkation at Tilbury on the Thames River in England.
A month before, our ship had been unable to make it to Tilbury because of a massive winter storm along the west coast of Norway; we had to fly from London to begin a re-jiggered cruise.
This time we ran into high winds and rough seas as we sailed toward IJmuiden and eventually it became apparent there was no way to make our call in The Netherlands and then cross over the North Sea to end the cruise in Tilbury at the scheduled hour.
And so we ended with an extra day at sea and a nighttime arrival in the United Kingdom.
And then we flew home, unpacked our bags, and began planning our next voyage, scheduled for the end of May. I’ll see you here with details.
All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
By Corey Sandler
So our trip by ship from London to the top of mainland Norway in search of the Northern Lights had started out with a few glitches.
An historically strong winter storm had all but shut down coastal Norway the week before our planned starting date, and that meant our ship Viking Venus had been unable to escape relative shelter in Alta and Tromsø. Guests had boarded in Bergen and headed north, but missed out on most of their cruise ports of call. And those of us arriving in London to board the ship were all dressed up with no vessel to board.
There’s a saying in the cruise industry: Ship happens.
By the time we reached Viking Venus in Tromsø, she was ready to set sail for Alta, the farthest north port on the much-amended itinerary. It was plenty cold and windy in Alta and though the winter sights were lovely, sightings of the Northern Lights were few and far between.
Sailing south toward Bergen, we added a port call in Ålesund, a handsome fishing and trade town. I’ve been there many times in summer, but not so much in the much quieter seriously cold season. Our ship was among the big events of the winter.
Due to Norway’s homegrown version of cabotage regulations, Viking Venus was obliged to make two port calls outside of Norway. A pair of short courtesy calls were made at IJmuiden (the port of Amsterdam in The Netherlands) and an unusual touch-and-go across the North Sea at Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England.
The jumbled cruise ended in Bergen, Norway. Guests departed in the morning, and a new group boarded a few hours later. The turn-around day was an unusually bright and sunny day in Bergen; our departure day that followed was a more typical rainy and blustery February day.
Next month, I’ll take you back up north on our resumed search for the Northern Lights.
All photos and text copyright by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you’d like to obtain an image for personal or commercial use please contact me.
By Corey Sandler
I’ve just returned…last night, to be precise…from nearly a month at sea. Safe and sound, well fed, and restocked with new stories and photos.
We spent the largest portion of two cruises inside the Arctic Circle. In February, generally the coldest and snowiest and windiest time of the year.
And for the first two weeks that was exactly what we got: cold, wind, and snow. The second two weeks were strangely, terrifyingly warmer than usual greatly confusing visitors, reindeer, Arctic fox, and other denizens.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the high latitudes up north, including research trips to Svalbard, upper Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and far northern Canada; those trips initially were for the book I wrote retracing the four known voyages of the English explorer Henry Hudson from 1607 to 1610.
Hudson got trapped in the ice near Svalbard and then Russia’s Novaya Zemlya island near Arkhangelsk before he turned westward and headed for North America…where he got caught in the ice of Canada’s James Bay.
You can read that story in my book, “Henry Hudson: Dreams and Obsession.” You can order a print or digital copy here.
On our trip in February of 2024, we sailed in great comfort, with indoor heating and conveniences, and fine food. I was a featured speaker aboard Viking Venus, a vessel Henry Hudson could not possibly have imagined.
But that’s not to say we were oblivious to the weather. As I said, inside the Arctic Circle in February.
As we prepared to fly from Boston to London to meet our ship at the Port of Tilbury on the Thames, we heard the first intimations of meterological mayhem.
The winter’s strongest storm, big enough to be given a name, was lashing the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea.
Storm Ingunn hit the coast of Norway with hurricane-force winds. Scientists said it had the characteristics of a relatively rare “sting jet”, a narrow band of very strong winds caused by the unusually rapid strengthening of an extreme low-pressure system. Very fast upper-level winds were redirected downward to sea level.
In fact, atmospheric pressure dropped to a level very close to the lowest on record in Norway, a mark not seen since 1907. The storm itself was judged to be the fiercest to hit Norway since 1992.
Storm Ingunn brought hurricane force winds of 115 miles per hour to the island of Heimøya, north of Trondheim. Up and down the coast, sustained winds of 100mph were recorded, and in Bergen to the south a bus was blown off the road.
The day before our flight to London we received an email with a few scant details. Get to London, it said, and we’ll figure out out from there.
When we arrived in London, our ship was still securely tied up at the pier in Tromsø, 2,178 miles away, at the top of Norway inside the Arctic Circle.
It took three days to ferry the guests on board the ship—by chartered jet—from Tromsø to London and to transport new guests (and us) from London up into the Arctic.
The itinerary was completely scrambled, and I was madly at work reordering and adjusting my lectures for the guests.
But we were safe and the ship was grand and Norway, as always, was gorgeous. And our suitcases were properly crammed with winter clothing. Nothing like a good set of thermal underwear, a ski parka, down-filled mittens, and a balaklava to make you feel at home. I hardly noticed the -2 degree Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius) morning in Alta, Norway.
Oh, all right, I did notice the temperature. But this was the Arctic in February, right?
Here are some photos from that first cruise, which ended as per schedule in Bergen, Norway. Next month I’ll share photos from the second cruise which sailed back up north to Tromsø and Alta and then returned us to Tilbury on the Thames and our flight home.
We made it back, unlike Henry Hudson.
Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a photo for personal or commercial use please contact me.
By Corey Sandler
The last two ports of call on our Asian trip were Taiwan and Hong Kong, both of them places with complex histories of independence and occupation and modern stories that keep them on the front lines of cultural and economic and political conflict.
As we sailed from Nagasaki in southern Japan through the East China Sea toward Taiwan, we could see dozens of Chinese fishing vessels as well as other ships whose purpose was less apparent. In the late afternoon, with mainland China to our starboard side and Taiwan a few hundred miles ahead, a Chinese coast guard vessel cut across our bow and stopped in our path.
We were a civilian cruise ship, registered in Norway, carrying Americans, Canadians, Australians, Brits, and others.
I am not privy to whatever communication took place between the coast guard vessel and our cruise ship; it eventually moved west, toward China and we continued.
We docked in the port of Keelung, Taiwan’s second-largest port, about half an hour from the capital city of Taipei. Taiwan’s largest port is to the south, at Kaohsiung, where I had visited many years ago when researching a magazine piece about Taiwan’s then-booming electronic industry.
Taiwan is an unusual island nation with a strong economy and a functioning democracy, in a very tough neighborhood. There are some 168 islands, about a dozen of them significant; the main island of Taiwan is nearly 14,000 square miles in size and home to about 24 million people. Even with the vast jungle and mountain ranges in the center and east, that makes the Republic of China one of the world’s most densely populated countries.
Its official name is the Republic of China, which is easy enough to remember until you need to distinguish it from the People’s Republic of China which lies 80 to 100 miles to its west across the Taiwan Strait.
Both countries call the stretch of water by the same name, but that is one of the few points of agreement.
Mainland China–the People’s Republic of China–claims sovereignty and jurisdiction over the strait, declaring to the world that these are “internal territorial waters”.
In theory, that means any foreign vessel does not have freedom of navigation without official consent from the People’s Republic. In practice, vessels registered in the Republic of China and those of most other seafaring nations regularly traverse the strait.
The People’s Republic sends coast guard and naval vessels into the waterway and from time to time conducts “exercises” with weaponry, a literal form of saber rattling. The United States and a few other nations send naval vessels through the strait and aircraft above in response. There have been numerous incidents of close encounters, probably more than publicly known.
It’s not just Taiwan and the People’s Republic who squabble–sometimes loudly–in the region. Mainland China and the Philippines are at odds over small islands. And the Spratly Islands are disputed by the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
It seems a place where a misstep could quickly escalate into an incident or worse. Watch this space.
There is evidence of humans on the island dating back at least 25,000 years, and a history of indigenous peoples from about 6,000 years.
In 1542, Portuguese sailors passed by an uncharted island, marking it on their charts Ilha Formosa (“beautiful island”). That name still rattles around in some parts of the world.
But the large island began to become more significant in the 17th century under a short-lived Dutch colony which lured large numbers of Han Chinese from northern China. It passed through several rulers until 1683 when it was annexed by the Qing dynasty of mainland China.
Things might have been simpler (not necessarily better) in the region if that had remained the status quo, but in 1895 the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to the expansionist Empire of Japan after being defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War.
Japan would occupy and defend the island through the end of World War II in 1945.
The Qing dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China. I’m leaving out entire shelves of history books here, including intrusions and battles with Western nations, but for our purposes two events are most important:
In 1911, the Qing dynasty was overthrown and replaced by the first version of the Republic of China. During World War II, competing forces of the Chinese Nationalists (the Kuomintang, led by Generalissimo Chiang-Kai Shek) and the Chinese Communist Party (led by Chairman Mao Zedong) mostly cooperated in fighting Japanese forces in China.
Again, a long story made short:
After the end of World War II, the Chinese Civil War resumed between the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party. By the end of 1949, the Nationalists had been defeated on the mainland, but Chiang Kai-shek evacuated his government across the Strait to Taiwan.
About two million people, soldiers and the members of the Nationalists’ ruling elite, came to Taiwan and took control of about six million residents already in place. According to some historians, the Nationalists also brought with them much of mainland China’s gold and currency reserves and other treasures.
Things were rough on both sides of the Strait. The CCP in the People’s Republic of China ruled with an iron hand. The KMT in Taiwan declared itself a democracy but also imposed martial law which remained in place until 1987.
The vast People’s Republic of China claimed sovereignty over Taiwan, while the Republic of China proclaimed its goal to regain the mainland.
Although Taiwan was–and to a great extent still is–an economic powerhouse, by the late 1960s the tides had turned toward an uneasy accommodation by most of the world away from Taiwan and toward mainland China.
Today, most nations recognize the People’s Republic and many nations–the United States and major Western powers among them–maintain informal or third-party representation with the ROC.
Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975. It was not until 1986 that the first opposition party was allowed to participate in elections, and only in 2000 was there a change in leadership at the top.
Today, Taiwan is generally considered a democracy, And Chiang Kai-shek, though his monument dominates a large section of Taipei, is not universally revered by the citizens of the country he helped establish.
Our final call on this trip was to another place with a very complex backstory: Hong Kong.
Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after it was ceded by the Qing Empire in 1842. That foothold was expanded in 1860 to the Kowloon Peninsula and again in 1898 to the New Territories.
Like much of this part of Asia, Hong Kong was occupied by Japan from 1941 to 1945 during World War II.
In 1997, the United Kingdom and the People’s Republic completed a negotiated “handover.” Since then it has been a “special administrative region” of the People’s Republic under a purposely vague doctrine called “One country, two systems.”
To my way of thinking, Hong Kong is a place that enjoys a bit more freedom than exists in the People’s Republic, the country of which it is a part and a pretty robust capitalist economy. In theory, that will continue, although the people of Hong Kong have to know that they can only push the boundaries so far.
Hong Kong has its own flag, its own currency, and uses both Cantonese Chinese and English as official languages. You need a visa to cross the border into the People’s Republic of China.
Today, Hong Kong has a bustling economy that is immediately evident when you look at the shops filled with ultra-expensive automobiles and designer cloths and luxury goods. It also, by one measure, has the world’s largest collection of skyscrapers, with nearly 500 structures taller than 150 meters or 490 feet.
At the same time, sections of Hong Kong remain very much Old China.
We visited the rabbit warrens of Stanley Market on Hong Kong Island. You could buy just about anything from vendors, up to and including “genuine fake jade.”
The district received its name in recognition of Lord Stanley, the British Colonial Secretary at the time the United Kingdom added Hong Kong as a colony; Stanley would later serve five short terms as British Prime Minister. His second son, Frederick Arthur Stanley, served as Governor General of Canada from 1888 to 1893 and he presented Canada with a trophy for the champion of its ice hockey tournament; the Stanley Cup is still in use in the National Hockey League.
And we also took a motorized sampan tour of Aberdeen Harbour, where many people still live aboard old fishing boats or shacks on shore.
And strangely–or perhaps not so in this odd corner of the world–Hong Kong maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan. The cynic in me would observe this allows the People’s Republic a backdoor connection to a place it would otherwise claim to be an illegitimate claimant.
On our last day in Hong Kong, from our luxury hotel surrounded by upscale malls, we went for a walk into Hong Kong Park.
It is a rare piece of manicured greenery in the crowded city center, renovated in 1996 on the former site of Cantonment Hill under British colonial rule and the former location of the Victoria Barracks. One of the restored buildings, Rawlinson House, was the former home of the British Deputy General but today serves a government offices including the Cotton Tree Drive Marriage Registry.
All text and photos copyright 2024 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to use a photo for personal or commercial use, please contact me.
We arrived at the dawn of 2024 with the world in a parlous state. War, lies, autocrats; they’re all connected.
I wish the solution was as simple as turning the page to a new year.
As I watched the New Year’s Eve fireworks over Boston Common and then over Boston Harbor I thought of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”:
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Let us try.
All photos and text copyright 2024 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to obtain a copy of any of my photos for personal or commercial use please contact me.
Japan sits perched on the edge of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire, which gives it earthquakes, fumaroles, hot springs, and more than a few active volcanos.
And it also holds the unhappy distinction of being the site of the only two atomic bomb wartime attacks: two days in August 1945 which all but destroyed a pair of cities.
A few months ago we returned to Japan for several weeks, and among the places we visited were Beppu, Kagoshima, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
Each of these cities, in different ways, made us feel very small when measured against natural and manmade extremes.
We went to hell in Beppu.
The town on the southern island of Kyushu doesn’t have a heck of a lot going for it, with the exception of its numerous steaming gas vents and eight geothermal hotspots.
In Japanese they are called joguku, which can be roughly translated from Buddhist beliefs as hells. I’m pretty sure that Western visitors and modern residents have seized on a hot topic to lure tourists.
Japanese Buddhism includes the concept of hot and cold regions below the surface of the earth, ruled over by Emma-ō, the lord of death. He judges the dead by consulting a register that lists all of their sins.
Residency is not necessarily permanent; the dead can move out after they serve their sentence or reduce their time by responding to the prayers of the living.
There are turquoise and chalky white and green hells, but the one that grabbed my attention was Chinoike Jigoku, which means “blood hell” or “bloody hell.” Either way, it is more like a hot bowl of rust, which makes sense since its color comes from iron oxide bubbling up to the surface.
The ponds were somewhat threatening. Much worse were the souvenir stands which you had to pass through to get to them. Commercial hell, they were, filled with trinkets and candies and bath salts. And lots of kittens.
A few days later we visited Kagoshima, another relatively obscure port that features an impossible-to-overlook geologic formation.
The local tourism folk would have you call the place the “Naples of the Eastern World.” Not for its architecture or for the invention of that essential food, pizza. What Kagoshima shares with Naples is the fact that it is a city with a hyper-active volcano in very close proximity to just about everything.
Sakurajima is Japan’s most active volcano.
Sakura is the Japanese word for cherry blossom. Jima means island. So, cherry blossom island.
Only it is no longer an island. In 1914, the last major eruption connected it to the mainland with a narrow spit of land.
Sakurajima is almost constantly erupting, sending plumes of fine ash and smoke into the sky. It was active all day when we were there, but luckily the wind was blowing away from downtown and the port where our ship was tied up.
Residents of the city, population about 680,000, regularly participate in shelter drills; schoolchildren wear hard hats. Scientists says the stratovolcano could produce a major event at almost any time.
We took a 15-minute ferry from town to Sakurajima to look around; we scuttled back to the ship for lunch with a view.
On June 17, 1945 about half the city was destroyed by incendiary and cluster bombs dropped by American aircraft, part of the preparation for the expected land invasion of Japan.
The last two Japanese cities in this month’s blog are forever etched into world history: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On August 6, 1945 the first use of an atomic bomb killed about 90,000 people in Hiroshima; the final death toll, including those who died later of injuries and radiation sickness was about 160,000.
Modern Hiroshima is a prosperous city, and it is almost possible to forget what happened there. That is until you come to the park near its center. There are a few monuments, a large bronze bell, and along a river bank the Genbaku Dome, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
The people of Hiroshima chose to leave standing the shell of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The city has been rebuilt all around, but the dome is intended to be forever a ruin.
After the visit to the dome, I spent the afternoon re-reading one of the great works of American non-fiction, John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima,” first published in 1946 just after the one-year anniversary of the blast.
The piece occupied all of the editorial pages of a single issue of the New Yorker magazine, telling of the aftermath of the blast through the stories of a handful of survivors. Not that I needed the lesson, but it was especially sobering to read the book while at the dock a few miles from the hypocenter of the first atomic bomb.
While Hiroshima chose the stark reality of a ruined building at the hypocenter of the first atomic bomb blast, the people of Nagasaki took a different approach. There is also a gaping hole in that city, but they chose to build a park of monuments contributed by countries around the world, speaking to the hope for peace.
Nagasaki was bombed on August 9, 1945. It was not the original target for the second atomic bomb; the intent had been to strike Kokura but that city was obscured by clouds.
At the center of the bomb’s destruction today is the Nagasaki Peace Park. At one end is the Peace Statue, about 10 meters or 33 feet tall.
The statue mixes eastern and western art, religion, and symbology.
The right hand points to the sky, to where the bomb was dropped. The left arm extends outward to symbolize peace. One leg is folded in a meditative stance, the other extended as if to stand up and offer solace and help.
At the end of the trip, in late October, we began the long trip home to Boston. The first leg was a flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo.
As we reached the bottom of the home islands of Japan I noticed a city with a mountain and a plume of smoke rising up toward us. I checked our location on the airplane’s seatback video map: it was Sakurajima in Kagoshima.
Next month I will conclude my observations on our Asian trip with notes and photos from two places that are betwixt and between modern powers: Taiwan and Hong Kong.
All text and photos copyright 2024 by Corey Sandler. If you would like to use an image for personal or commercial use, please contact me.
We came to Tokyo five days ahead of our cruise to allow us some extra time to explore some of the less-visited sections of the city. It also didn’t hurt to have a few extra days to acclimate to the 13-hour time zone change.
We stayed in a modern hotel in Tokyo’s Odaiba district, a very modern very strange place that includes several vertical malls, a replica of the Statue of Liberty, a massive model of Unicorn Gundam (look it up and feel free to explain it to me), and half a dozen or so stations on the driverless Yurikamome system that connects to Tokyo’s 11 other more conventional subway lines.
On our first day we went to the Asakusa Sensoji Temple, the oldest Buddhist temple in Tokyo, dating in its original form to the year 645. The shrine at the site is much younger, built in 1649. Both were severely damaged in World War II when much of Tokyo was fire-bombed, but have been rebuilt as they were.
The approach to the temple presents a religious site of a different sort, an outdoor market of several blocks called Nakamise. It’s the place to go for essentials like ornate fans or simple summer kimonos called yakuta. On the day of our visit, a Saturday leading up to a holiday, the stretch of stores was probably the most crowded place I’ve visited since the onset of the pandemic.
Another expedition took us through the spaghetti bowl of subway lines to a much quieter part of Tokyo, the Koisikawa Kōrakuen park in the Bunkyō district, a formal Japanese garden that dates from the early Edo period of Japan. The garden was established in 1629 and has been mostly left untouched as modern Tokyo grew around it.
A few days later we were in Osaka, Japan’s third most populous city (after Tokyo and its close neighbor Yokohama.)
This is the nation’s financial center, and also the home of a few of its largest electronics makers Panasonic, Sharp, and Sanyo.
There are some spectacular pieces of modern architecture in the city, but that’s not what we were looking for on this visit. Instead, we went to a very impressive piece of very old construction.
Sumiyoshi-taisha is a Shinto grand shrine, first established in 211 and modestly updated over the years. It was at first closely connected to imperial trade with China.
Next month I’ll post some photos from places where Japan’s ring of fire comes to the surface, the southern towns of Beppu and Kagoshima and also scenes from our visit to the atomic bomb cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
All photos and text copyright Corey Sandler, 2023. If you would like to use a photo for personal or commercial use please contact me.
When you imagine Japan, do you conjure Samurai warriors?
Stealthy, lethal Ninjas?
Fierce soldiers who held out against overwhelming forces throughout World War II, including against overwhelming force in the final months?
Or…do you think of modern Japan as something very different?
Pokémon and Sailor Moon? Furry mascots for sports teams, corporations, and municipal governments?
And above all, kittens.
We’ve just returned from another trip to Japan. That marks twice in six months we have ventured to the far extremes of jet lag, a 13-hour flight and 13 time zones. Being there was great; getting there and back was grueling.
This time we met up with Viking Orion, sailing from Tokyo to central and southern Japan and then on to Taiwan and Hong Kong.
To me, one of the great joys of travel is to go where life and culture are different.
When I am away, I do not want to feel at home. I want to go down the rabbit hole with Alice to a place where the more you explore the curiouser and curiouser things become.
I was born just after the end of World War II and that makes me of the age that knew of fierce Japan, ruined Japan, and resurgent Japan. The country, most of its cities and ports reduced to rubble, literally rose from those ashes to become an economic powerhouse.
And though Japan was greatly changed by the war and by the mostly positive efforts of American occupation led by the intriguing General Douglas MacArthur, it rebuilt itself with a culture that took many things Western and turned them toward the East.
The first time I visited Japan, in the 1980s, I was bewildered by the unfamiliar colors of familiar objects like refrigerators and cars: lime green, tangerine, pink. Today, the color scheme has moved more toward neutral Western white, silver, and black.
But there are still some very perplexing examples of things that seem somehow lost in translation.
Consider the humble KitKat chocolate bar, a British invention now owned by the Swiss confectionary maker Nestlé, except for an American offshoot produced by Hershey. KitKat arrived in Japan in the 1970s when rights were acquired by Fujiya, which makes and sells brands including Look, Heart, and Milky chocolates and jellies.
In Japan, you can still buy the traditional chocolate bars, but why go for the familiar when you can also find KitKats in Dark Matcha (chocolate and green tea), Chestnut, Sweet Potato, Caramel Pudding, or Melon?
Alas, some of the 70 or so varieties are produced in small batches and only sold for short periods of time.
We stopped at several dozen convenience stores and other shops in search of our holy grail: KitKat Wasabi. Never found it, but there’s always next time.
But for me the greatest source of wonderment in Japan is kawaii: the national fixation on cuteness.
I will not pretend to be a sociologist here.
I will observe that in many places around the world young girls seem to be engaged in a race to dress like, act like, and otherwise seek a very early entry into womanhood. In Japan many instead seem to be holding fast to childhood.
I say young girls, because that seems to be the heart of kawaii, but there are also a sizeable contingent of young boys who do not easily put away childish things. Think Nintendo and anime comics and Japanese Boy Bands.
Kawaii (可愛い) means adorable or cute. There are cute girls and cute boys, and also kittens, lots of kittens.
The hyperactive Japanese game and music and merchandising industries have extended that concept to cute categories within manga (comics or graphic novels) and anime (animated cartoons.)
Say hello to Super Mario Bros., Hello Kitty, and Pokémon.
And then there are the mascots. Nearly every sports team, major corporation, store, city, and prefecture has a kawaii character.
KitKat’s maker, Fujiya, is represented by Peko-chan, a girl in pigtails licking her lips. Peko-chan, to me, looks like a somewhat updated version of Anne of Green Gables, the fictional heroine of books by the Canadian author Lucy Maude Montgomery.
Anne, sometimes called Anne of Red Hair, took hold in the postwar years when American occupation forces imported the book as part of an effort to liberate Japanese girls from traditional gender roles. And very kawaii, too.
Certainly not every Japanese female has gone kawaii. But a stroll through Tokyo, especially on the weekend, leaves you almost surrounded by Lolita fashion, ribbons, bows, and parasols. Makeup styles aim to accentuate large, round doll-like eyes.
In the United States, many young girls play-act adult roles with Barbie dolls. Barbie is not a big factor in Japan, but instead there is Licca, a doll modeled after an 11-year-old girl.
So why kawaii? It could be seen as a way to seek a return to innocence in a country that was ravaged by war, including the horrors of two atomic bombs. In the 1950s, kawaii came into being…at the same time as Godzilla and his competitors. Curiouser and curiouser.
One of General MacArthur’s legacies is a constitution that renounced the right to wage war, at least in theory.
Or perhaps, sociology-wise, a broader move away from the strictures of the samurai, ninjas, and geishas.
Tokyo itself, the capital of the island nation and home to many things old and revered in Japan, has several conflicting personalities. Modern architecture ranges from emulation of things western like the expensive shops on the Ginza and the Eiffel Tower-like Tokyo Tower to inscrutable oddities like cartoon characters surrounding office buildings and very unusual decor at major corporations.
I’ll be back next month with photos and observations from other stops on this cruise, including the heavily freighted worlds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a visit to the neighborhood erupting volcano in Kagoshima, a drop-in in Taipei, Taiwan and a steamy time in schizophrenic Hong Kong.
All photos and text copyright 2023 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like a copy of a photo for personal or commercial use please contact me for permission.
By Corey Sandler
I am told that this past summer was a particularly hot and uncomfortable season in much of the United States and Europe and elsewhere. I cannot testify to that, because as chance would have it we spent much of that time in places that ranged between cool and cold.
For the month of July, temperatures soared in the American West, the big cities of the central states, and much of Western Europe. In Athens, Greece authorities shut down the Acropolis for much of the month for the safety of tourists, guards, and various caryatids.
During the heart of the summer, we were in Sweden, Norway, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland, and wearing sweaters and jackets.
We returned to Boston for a three-week rainy and relatively temperate break in August and then departed for a cruise from New York to Nova Scotia, Greenland, and another circuit around Iceland. By the end of the cruise aboard Viking Saturn, we were in winter coats watching the first snow of the season land on the peaks of eastern Iceland.
Here is some of what we saw in September.
We boarded Viking Saturn at New York’s historic cruise terminal along the West Side of Manhattan, near what used to be known as Hell’s Kitchen and later was the site of the tenements that formed the backdrop for “West Side Story.”
Today mid-Manhattan is mostly populated by soaring office and apartment towers. Our ship backed out of the pier and then headed south, down the Hudson River toward the open ocean.
The handsome city of Halifax, Nova Scotia always sparkles.
It is home to one of the world’s largest natural harbors, vying for second place (behind Sydney, Australia) with Cork, Ireland or perhaps Poole in Dorset, England or Falmouth in Cornwall, England.
It is big by any measure, and it also holds the astounding story of the Halifax Explosion on December 7, 1917 when a munitions ship collided with another vessel creating the largest manmade explosion until the dawn of the Atomic Age.
Among its gems is the Public Gardens, a formal Victorian garden established in 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation. No matter what the season, they always have something wondrous to show.
Thinking of its long an illustrious history, on this visit I applied a photo filter that mimics the look of an oil painting.
We moved east to make two calls in Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark that they used to refer to as Grønland. To be politically correct today, its official moniker in the Kalaallisut language is Kalaallit Nunaat. Kalaallisut is a dialect related to Inuktitut spoken by many Inuit tribes in northern Canada.
The vast island is home to only about 57.000 people and nearly all of them live in small communities that ring its west, south, and east coasts. The interior is still nearly unpopulated, with about 81 percent of the land covered by the vast Greenlandic Ice Sheet. Huge pieces of glaciers calve off every summer and mostly head west and south down the coast of Atlantic Canada and New England; it is believed that the iceberg that met the S.S. Titanic followed that route.
The economy is based on fishing and a bit of tourism, as well as the operations of an air base established by the United States during World War II and now under local control.
Scientists are concerned about the loss of the ice cover of Greenland as the climate changes; along with the effects on the global sea level there is also the mixed blessing of possible exposure of mineral and petroleum deposits in this otherwise nearly pristine place.
We arrived at the West Fjords for a visit to the port of Ísafjörður and experienced Iceland’s version of summer all in one day: chilly and cloudy, heavy rain, and then a brief but uplifting glimpse of blue sky and sun.
We twice crossed into the Arctic Circle as we circumnavigated Iceland. When we pulled into Djupivogur on the country’s east coast, it seemed as if winter arrived with us, coating the hills with the first snow.
Our final port of call before the cruise came to its end in the capital city of Reykjavik was at Heimaey in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago. This was near the original home of the West Men, Irish monks who were likely the first settlers.
Fifty years ago, in 1973, a long-dormant volcano on the island came to life and destroyed much of the town. Even worse, a long tongue of lava headed for the mouth of the harbor threatening to close it off completely.
A small cadre of locals, aided by international reinforcements, fought against the volcano pouring huge amounts of sea water on the lava and eventually stopping it before it completely closed off the harbor.
Viking Saturn found a spot outside the harbor–the sea bottom too deep and rocky to allow putting down an anchor–and hovered in place all day while tenders threaded the narrow opening into town.
All photos copyright 2023 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like a copy of an image for personal or commercial purposes, please contact me.
In October, we will head west for a trip from Tokyo through the Japanese islands to Taiwan and on to Hong Kong. I hope you’ll visit me here in these pages.
By Corey Sandler
So where were we?
We returned at the end of July from four weeks cruising from Stockholm to Bergen, and then on to Reykjavik…with a lot of wondrous stops in between. And as September begins, we are back at sea, sailing from New York to Atlantic Canada, Greenland, and coming to Iceland but this time from the other direction.
In full disclosure, this blog serves two audiences. I’m happy to share some photos and thoughts with readers. And it also helps us remember where we were and when.
When we left Bergen in mid-July, we headed up the coast of Norway for three port calls, and then went across the North Sea to the mist-shrouded Faroe Islands, and from there approached Iceland from the east for a counter-clockwise, aqueous version of the Ring Road.
The weather was somewhere about midpoint between delightful and dreadful, but we were lucky enough to miss the oppressive heat wave that was ongoing in Europe and much of North America.
Every place we went to was full of wonders. Somehow, though, whoever was in charge of the weather in Ålesund, Norway managed to pull off a Chamber of Commerce salute to our ship as we sailed away.
So, if all goes to plan–not a certainty these days–as this month’s blog is posted, by this time we will have sailed down the Hudson River in New York, saluted the Statue of Liberty, and hung a pair of left turns to pass along the the length of Long Island and then head up the coast of New England.
In addition to my microphone aboard ship, I’ll have my cameras and lenses at the ready. Hope to see you here again in October.
All photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you’d like a copy of one of my images for personal or commercial purposes, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler
As Groucho Marx sang in “Animal Crackers”,
Hello, I must be going
I cannot stay, I came to say, “I must be going”
I’m glad I came but just the same I must be going
To me, that’s a natural turn of events. With the exception of the unwanted and unappreciated interruption of the Pandemic Years, I’ve been on the move most of my life.
It’s good to be going.
So, I’m interrupting the contemplative mood of the most recent set of blog entries to report on my most recent travels, from Stockholm across the Baltic and then up and around the corner to Norway.
And then from there northwestward ho, to the stubbornly iconoclastic Faroe Islands and a near-complete circumnavigation of the island nation of Iceland, which straddles the line that defines the European and American land masses.
We did this in great style, aboard Viking Jupiter, where I was guest lecturer for a month.
The old salt’s benediction used to go like this: “Fair winds and clear skies.” Fingers crossed, we can expand best wishes for travelers like this: “Fair winds, clear skies, and healthy air.”
As always, I travel with my camera and notebook.
Our first port of call from Stockholm was south across the Baltic to Gdansk, Poland, a place that has seen more than of its share of history. It was once a very prosperous trading port for all manner of local businesspeople, including the Vikings and the Hanseatic League.
And then it came under control of Germany, until the messy aftermath of World War I when it was partitioned off to a reconstructed Poland as Danzig. That act was one of the excuses for war for Hitler, and it was in Danzig that the first actual battle of World War II was fought.
Much of Gdansk–now once again part of Poland–was destroyed in the war, but it was rebuilt as it was before and is now a handsome port of call.
A few days later we were in Warnemunde, Germany. This has been a popular seaside resort for more than a century, enduring a strange, stagnant period when it was part of the German Democratic Republic, better known as mostly humorless East Germany.
I’ll be back next month with more photos from this series. In the meantime, I must be going…preparing for another voyage, this one from New York to a clockwise circle of Iceland.
If you’d like to purchase a copy of any of my photos for personal or commercial use, please contact me through this website.
By Corey Sandler
We are, with fingers crossed, seeming to tiptoeing back to something approaching normalcy. Whatever that means.
Soon after I post this blog entry, we will be heading to the airport for what I am sure will be a predictably unpleasant red-eye flight to Europe to meet up with a ship in Stockholm.
Once we have landed, the travel commences and that is the enjoyable part.
But why do we travel?
You can travel to experience spectacular scenery. Or to time travel through history. Speaking for myself, the joy of travel is in how it helps you better appreciate and understand the place from where you started.
I go to learn how other people live and allow it to inform me about my own life.
A favorite fragment from T.S. Eliot:
“And the end of all our exploring
“Will be to arrive where we started
“And know the place for the first time.”
Photos and text copyright Corey Sandler. To obtain copies or otherwise use images, please contact me through my website at www.coreysandler.com
To see portfolios of some of my travel photos visit www.coreysandler.myportfolio.com or www.coreysandler2.myportfolio.com
By Corey Sandler
If you were to ask a (talented) child to draw a picture of a volcano, what you’d get would likely look very much like Mount Fuji in Japan.
To put it another way, Mount Fuji is a near-perfect volcanic cone, the tallest mountain in Japan with its summit at 12,389 feet or 3,774 meters. It stands on its own, covered or sprinkled with snow for about half the year.
In April, I was sailing on a ship into Shimizu, south of Tokyo, ready to head out on an expedition to fulfill my mind’s-eye plan for a photo of Mount Fuji. As the sun rose on a gray and cloudy, while the ship was still maneuvering through the harbor, Mount Fuji came to me.
I chose to make this image a study in rich black and white.
We had traveled from Tokyo to the southern islands of Japan and back to Yokohama aboard Regent Seven Seas Explorer, and on the last full day of the cruise we called at Shimizu, a bustling city south of Tokyo also known as Shizuoka. The weather forecast for the day called for heavy clouds and that’s what greeted us as we sailed into the harbor.
Mount Fuji was right there, off the starboard side…or so the GPS map on my phone told us. But all we saw was a wall of cloud from sea level to the skies.
But I don’t give up that easily. I kept a weather eye on the sky, and saw it begin to brighten slightly and then a half-volcano-sized hole opened. I took the first of many photos from the veranda of our suite before our ship came to the dock.
For centuries, Japanese artists, poets, and spiritual leaders have made Fuji the object of rhapsodic study.
Fuji is an active stratovolcano, still bubbling within; its most recent significant eruption came in 1707 and across its known recent history it has erupted every few hundred years. You do the math…
It is hard to miss Fuji if you venture south of Tokyo; in fact, on a clear day the summit is visible from the capital city 62 miles away.
Many Japanese consider it a life’s goal to climb to the summit, typically a five-to-twelve-hour trek of about 12 miles on various trails that approach from nearly every direction. Climbing season runs from early July to mid-September, and the best experience is supposed to be a nighttime hike that culminates with sunrise from the summit.
A Japanese aphorism says that a wise person will ascend Mount Fuji once in a lifetime, but only a fool would climb it twice.
I’d consider the hike, although my visits to Japan have all been during the mountain-climbing off-season. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.
A few hours later, I went with a group of guests on a pilgrimage to the Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha Shrine, constructed in the 17th century at least partly to admire the volcano.
Our guide kept speaking of the beauties of the mountain and pointing vaguely in the direction of the huge volcano, but the clouds were once again completely blocking the view.
We toured the shrine, watched a very young couple dressed in traditional clothing make a pre-wedding visit (accompanied by a camera crew) and toured the gardens. We were just past the peak of cherry blossom trees, but wisteria was having its moment.
As I often do, I wandered a bit from the group and looked for non-traditional photos and angles. I turned a corner and suddenly was face-to-face with a volcano. The volcano. Fuji.
After I snapped a few safety photos, I ran back to alert the guide and guests. Here’s some of what we saw:
And then, under the thesis that any worth doing is worth overdoing, we drove an hour back and then past Shimizu to visit Miho no Matsubara, a quiet seaside pine grove with a soft lava sand beach.
Once again, Fuji was elusive at first. But rounding a curve on the beach, we found the mountain once again.
A few days earlier, we had called at Naha, the capital city of the prefecture of Okinawa. It includes more than 160 islands inhabited and uninhabited.
For most of its history, Okinawa had been an independent country, the capital of the Ryukyu Kingdom. It became part of Japan in 1879.
Most of the people of Okinawa speak a distinctive dialog not easily interchangeable with Japanese. Even today, many residents identify themselves not as Japanese, but as Okinawans.
When World War II, Naha and Okinawa Island were essentially invaded by the Japanese military who fortified the island and conscripted teenage boys into combat and teenage girls into nursing and other support roles.
As Allied forces advanced toward the mainlands of Japan, the outer islands became critical defensive positions. In April of 1945, four months before the end of the war, a force of mostly American Army and Marine Corps troops launched an invasion with 185,000 troops, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific war.
The American intent was to use bases on Okinawa as staging areas for the planned invasion of Japan’s home islands about 340 miles away.
They faced fierce resistance including a retreat by many Japanese troops–and Okinawan civilians–into caves. The battle lasted 81 days.
Precise numbers are hard to come by, but one estimate says 12,500 Americans were killed or missing in action. On the Axis side, 77,166 Japanese soldiers and about 30,000 Okinawan conscripts died. And perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 Okinawan civilians were killed in the assault.
Okinawa remained under American occupation until 1972, and there are still a half dozen American military bases on the islands.
In the weeks leading up to the assault, Japanese naval authorities ordered the construction of a massive network of underground tunnels and rooms in a limestone mountain near what would be the climactic battlesite.
After decades, the rooms and tunnels were opened to visitors, frozen in time and toured mostly in silence.
Photos and text copyright Corey Sandler. To obtain copies or otherwise use images, please contact me through my website at www.coreysandler.com
To see portfolios of some of my travel photos visit www.coreysandler.myportfolio.com or www.coreysandler2.myportfolio.com