Thank Al Gore. A small San Francisco outfit, High Country Passage, had put together what it thought would be a surefire trip: take guests up the coast of Siberia on a Russian icebreaker into the Arctic Ocean to see wildlife, recruit some experts and package the voyage as "A Symposium on Global Warming." But the expedition was a long eleven days, slightly arduous for the targeted clients and, as one person commented, a lot of money ($15,995 per person) to watch ice melt. Few were signing up. Then Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar, and all eighty-six slots were filled in two weeks. Fortunately, my wife and I had already booked one of the suites.
The Kapitan Klebnikov was compact and clean; its Russian crew accommodating; its Viennese chef excellent. Most of the staterooms were small, but the four corner suites were lovely, each consisting of a living room with a separate bedroom and picture windows. From Anadyr, Russia (a two-hour flight from Anchorage), the ship sailed north past Siberian villages, breaking through ice as it moved. Polar bears coasted by, adrift on ice floes, as we'd expected. Passengers glimpsed walrus and musk oxen and watched a mother polar bear teach her two cubs to swim. White beluga whales surfaced from time to time. On the tundra, which we accessed via helicopter, we spotted 2,000 reindeer tended by Siberian shepherds who looked straight out of central casting. In the remote village of Novoye Chaplino (pop. 300), schoolchildren put on a performance that made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in polish.
Aboard the ship, we were treated to lectures by four distinguished scientists well versed in various aspects of global warming. Former anchorman Forrest Sawyer served as an engaging moderator. All agreed that there is a warming trend, though they disagreed as to the causes. The conventional wisdom is that humans are responsible for heating up the planet and that humans must remedy the situation. However, one scientist, Ross MacPhee, curator of vertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, argued that although humans may be part of the problem, the bigger issue could be that the earth is in the midst of another historic warming cycle. And though in the past, when the population was made up of a few nomads, it didn't matter if the coasts were flooded, it sure does now.
By the end of the cruise, we all concluded that, whatever the causes of global warming (and I agree with MacPhee that the answer is not a simple one), this was a memorable adventure. Russia's Siberian Arctic is a strange and dazzling place, especially in the twenty-four-hour sunlight of summer. 800-395-3288; highcountrypassage.com.
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