Thursday, July 14, 2011

Day 29 Honningsvag


This morning, Bill and I walked through the town of Honningsvag and up the hill behind the town.  The Norwegians say that the architecture is boring because the town was rebuilt after World War II, and there were only four styles of houses that the people could choose from.  After the high rise grey apartments of Murmansk, we thought the brightly coloured houses with their grassy back yards were a breath of fresh air.  Today, was the most perfect warm day (evidently, they get two such days a year).  This afternoon, we went by bus through the island of Mageroya where we saw reindeer.  They are a bit like kangaroos in that they have very little road sense and our bus had to stop on more than one occasion while a reindeer crossed the road in slow motion.  They seemed to like standing on the small patches of snow that still remain.  We were taken to the town of Gjesvaer where we boarded a boat for an afternoon of bird watching.  Stappen Island is a bird sanctuary so we saw many birds such as the puffin birds which use their wings to swim and then have to flap their wings vigorously when they want to fly.  There are 800000 puffin birds in this colony.  We also saw white tailed sea eagles with their wing span of almost 3 metres.  We saw cormorants, razorbills, white garnets and black – legged kittiwakes which we call sea gulls in Australia.  The scenery was spectacular.  The fjords are just magical.

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