GETTING ready for my date with killer whales, I felt excited, impatient and just a bit cumbersome, like some medieval knight preparing for the ritual slaughter of the jousting field.
First, they ushered us into a hotel alongside a craggy Norwegian fjord. Then they made us squeeze into bulky survival suits to keep us safe in waters cold enough to kill. I duly pushed and shoved at various limbs, forcing my way into snapping, blubbery rubbers.
I also caused a sharp cry of pain as I tried to help an elderly woman put on her gloves. Go on, she insisted, go on ... ouch! Then we tramped outside into the overcast morning like a chorus line of Mr Blobbies, climbing into rubber boats to look for orcas - killer whales - so that we could slip into the water and swim alongside these magnificent beasts.
Why do we do these things? It seemed obvious, a point not even worth considering, as we whizzed along, boat bouncing madly, until in a calmer patch the captain killed the engine and said: “In you go.”
Such a strange sensation. The water was sharp on my cheeks, yet I was almost warm; a weirdly contradictory feeling, floating on a cushion of suit-trapped air, weightless as if in space. Staring down, I could see shoals of fish, sea anemones, pink starfish - an entire world no longer out of reach.
But no killer whales. Not a one. And the awful truth is that it had been exactly the same the day before when we had prepared for this pivotal moment with a more sedate whale-spotting boat ride up the coast and back. So now, as I wallowed in my rubber suit, I was left reflecting on what exactly ought to happen when holidays such as this go wrong.
It is, in fact, a question many nature-lovers will have to face at some stage. Any trip that centres on real wildlife (the kind that doesn't get tethered) carries an inbuilt risk of failure. That's the point. Nature is unpredictable, it's her elusive charm, because without the no-show risk there would be no sense of privileged awe when the curtain finally does go up. Which means that at some stage we must pay the price of risk. And here we were, floundering back to the boat after our chilly-warm swim, trying to assess the pleasures of failure.
A dozen of us had flown here to Tysfjord for this three-night experience, changing aircraft at Oslo, feeling the weight of expectation intensify with each air mile. About 700 orcas feed around this coast during November to January, trailing a unique concentration of herring - 10 million tonnes - which they lash into “carousel” style, forcing their prey into a ball which they whack with tail flukes before feasting. Many tourists come simply to watch - others, like me, to swim.
John, a biologist, said that he had come because he wanted to experience life with five sea creatures, including the hammerhead shark and the giant octopus, while Julie, from Suffolk, said that she liked the look on friends' faces when telling them that she planned to snorkel with killer whales - the lure of the anecdote. That was pretty much my view: the sense of being special.
On the first day we took a six-hour boat ride along the fjord with about 30 other tourists - an extraordinary journey in its own right. The ride was slow and calming. The sky was a dappled palate of steel and pewter rimmed by a range of frosted, toothy mountains falling into the water, tapering into islands and then to nothing, beyond sight. The landscape of northern Norway requires a vocabulary all its own. It is as mystic as a Nordic fable; as powerful as a living creature.
We chatted as we bumped along. Ate fish soup (made jokes about this being the closest we would come to an orca). Took endless photos. We were ... merely resigned, at the end, when the orcas failed to materialise. “That's wildlife for you,” shrugged John, strolling down the gangplank, heading for the coach.
That evening, after a vast buffet and costly beers, we watched DVDs of earlier trips positively crammed with orca sightings - which was rather rubbing our noses in it, we laughed. And there were lectures on the orca(the room was packed) and, later, on the herring.
Next morning, one of the most poignantly perfect moments of the break struck me in an almost careless fashion just before breakfast, holding me rooted in the snow for the sight of the most extraordinary sunrise I have ever seen. There was more like this, and these were precisely the moments I was to look back on; the lectures, sights, sunrises, landscapes were pleasures I didn't consider too much at the time because I was locked into anticipation. But, later, floundering in my Blobby suit, I realised that they made a pattern of their own.
Of all those in the group, 79-year-old Donalda was the most remarkable on the trip. A retired doctor, she was the one whose arm I almost broke while trying to force on her gloves. But she forgave me, later telling me that she had been really quite timid until bumping into her younger friend June, a lithe sixtysomething, who took her on all sorts of wild trips. So here I was, chatting to a pensioner who wanted to swim in near-freezing waters with killer whales, and it was as much a surprise, a pleasure, as that dawn. So it went on.
To be fair to the tour operator Explore, it says that normally all their clients see orcas on these trips. But migratory patterns vary, and my own view was that clients should have been made more firmly aware beforehand that failures were possible, not because it would - or should - stop them coming, but because attitudes at the end can depend on expectations.
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