Well, I am back from the Arctic! I will have lots more to post, but a couple of quick thoughts:
- Quark has done a seamless job of taking over from Peregrine - excellent, excellent service
- We were able to do a circumnaviation of Svalbard - first of the season
- The Vaviliov is a slightly better a ship than the Ioffe due to the observation bar
- I totally broke my camera on the trip and should have brought my old one as a backup. What a bummer that was!
- The wildlife is way more "where's waldo" in the Arctic than the Antarctic.
- Polar bears can keep you from landing for days!
- To answer the question I posed in my last post, Quark recommended tipping $9-10 a day, so I tipped $100 for the 10 day trip
- They used US dollars on the ship, so things were less expensive than I had feared on the boat. Off the boat was a different story.