Local Sights and Fare.....

Greg spent most of yesterday at an orientation session for new staff of the school.  I stayed home with the kids and slept through most of the day, partly due to sheer exhaustion, the other part illness.  When he came home, though, he was full of stories of his day, and I thought I would share some of it with you.  I asked him to be a guest blogger, but he's shy.  LOL

There were a few very interesting parts of the orientation yesterday.

The beginning of the permanent road from Tuk to Inuvik.

 During their tour of town, the group was taken down the road to where the permanent road is being built between Inuvik and Tuk.  Right now Inuvik is about 200 km away from Tuk and is only accessible by land during the winter on the ice road.  The ice road is usually thick enough to be opened to commercial traffic just before Christmastime and will remain up and running until early mid-April, when the ice becomes unstable. It takes about 3 hours to drive the ice road one way and a strict speed limit of 70 km/hr is enforced.  If you are caught going over the speed the limit, you are slammed with a ticket of $800!  Maybe the powers that be should be consider that for the 400 series highways in Southern Ontario, huh?   The ice road will begin about 30 seconds from our driveway and all winter we will be able to watch the vehicles coming and going.  Apparently it is quite a diversion.

Anyway, despite the winter road, there is still a permanent road being built from Inuvik to Tuk, which will make Tuk all the more accessible.  This will help their economy by lowering prices of goods being shipped up here since they won't have to fly them in.  There will still be all the surcharges of shipping above the 60th parallel and then beyond the Arctic Circle, but at least there won't be the flight and cost of airline fuel, taxes, etc.  That will help a bit.  The road has definitely been a long time coming, and is scheduled to open in 2016.

The other thing that Greg found extremely fascinating is the Ice House.  This was built by community members as a way to keep meat fresh.  Greg actually got to go down into the ground below and see how it all works down there, 30 feet below the ground in the permafrost!  It is pitch dark down there with no electricity, so you have to wear a miner's hat or carry a flashlight in order to see where you are going or what you are doing.  Greg said that as he walked further down the path, he kept thinking of the short story "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe.  His imagination definitely got the better of him because he began to get nervous and said that if he had seen anything that resembled a brick he would have turned and ran!!  For those of you who have not ever read this story by Poe, it is highly recommended by both of us as a perfect Hallowe'en read!  He said the ice was lining the ceiling above him and was formed like diamonds, sparkling and glistening when the light hit it, and it was, of course, incredibly cold.  Not only was he given a miner's hat for light, he was also loaned a pair of work gloves to use for warmth, and for grip as he descended the ladder 30 feet below the ground.  He forgot to get a shot of what the building looks like from the ground, but I have seen it, and it looks like a wooden outhouse, or at least those would be the approximate dimension, and when you open the door what you see is the picture top left. Once you are down below there are a series of hallways with doors leading off along the sides.  Families rent these spaces so that their meat will keep.  Talk about your year-round deep freezer for caribou and whale!

During lunch, a traditional meal was served.  Greg had the opportunity to enjoy some fishy appetizers, of which he is not a fan.  There was beluga jerky and beluga sushi, and Greg can honestly say after trying both that he will never eat the stuff again.  The beluga sushi was the fresh meat after the blubber had been scraped off - which he tried out of respect and sheer interest, but now that his

taste buds have had their say, he will decline any and all offers in the future!  There was also some smoked fish of some sort, which he decided not to eat, given that he was trying not to throw up at the time.  The main course was caribou stew, muskox steaks and Eskimo doughnuts, which is the Arctic equivalent of bannock - a non-rising type of bread made by the First Nations people.  It is usually fried and although fatty, sooooo good!  Eskimo doughnuts are much the same and equally as good.  Greg loved the caribou stew. It was rich and meaty and very savoury.  His review of the muskox steaks was that it tasted much like a moose steak which is slightly more 'gamey' than a beef steak.  Since Greg likes moose meat, muskox was not that much of a stretch.  Dessert was a trifle made with traditional berries and whipped cream and cake.

Now that I have heard about the menu, I am super glad that I was at home with the kids sipping chicken noodle soup for lunch.  Our whole family had been invited along on this orientation session, but  I was not in a condition to attend, and I wondered if lunch would be like this, which meant our children would not eat. Bad news.  It was just as well that the remainder of us didn't go.

The big mountain like thing you see in this photo is the Ibyuk
Pingo, which is the second tallest one in Tuk.

The pingo from our kitchen window, also known as the
local sliding hill.

The orientation group also got pretty close to the Ibyuk Pingo, which is about 6 or 7 stories tall.  A pingo is basically a permanent, huge ice heave.  They appear as slopes of land and are usually covered with the low-lying bushes that cover the ground.  Currently they are all fall colours, red, orange, gold and yellow.  They're beautiful.  Tuk is known as the Pingo capital of the world, because everywhere you look around here, there are pingos.  We can see one from our kitchen window about a minute's walk from our house, and Greg and the kids climb it as a shortcut when they walk to school.  It is also known as the local sliding/sledding hill here.  Kids go up and down particular parts of the pingo based on age and ability level, rather like slopes at ski resorts! The Ibyuk Pingo is the second tallest one in the world. Apparently there is a pingo a bit north of here that you can climb and when you reach the top, as you look out across the Arctic Ocean, you can see the curvature of the earth!  Greg has now added climbing this pingo to his bucket list!

As for me, I'm just happy looking out at the Arctic Ocean and marvel at the fact that this is part of my daily view.  My bucket list contains seeing whales in the harbour and doing some natural 'whale watching' when the belugas come into the harbour.  I have been told now that fall has arrived, the whales' instinct is to move further out into the ocean because the shallower parts will begin to freeze over and they will get caught under the ice.  This means we probably won't see any whales until the spring.  Nobody had our phone number and they were sorry they didn't because the whales were playing in the harbour a few nights ago.  The wind and wicked waves on the ocean dragged a lot of herring into the harbour, and the belugas were attracted to the fish.  Man were we sorry to have missed that!  I have given numerous people our phone number now and said that no matter what time of day or night they see the whales,  call us!!  Sometimes they are seen in the middle of the night, but people call around anyway and everybody congregates to watch them.  I am not surprised considering how majestic they are!

So, Greg has tried some of the local fare, and has joked that I have to learn how to hunt so I can go out and get a caribou to make him stew.  Can you see me doing that?  Well, at least he didn't like the whale, because the last thing I need to do right now is hang out on the Pequod with my harpoon! Imagine that!