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Author: Hanneke

I started my first blog when I left the Netherlands (my home country) for an internship in Alaska in 2004, to keep my friends and family updated on my adventures over there. Little did I know it would be more than 13 years before I'd move back to the Netherlands! I spent a year in Toulouse (France) before starting a PhD in meteorology at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK) in 2005. That's when I started this current blog, first in Dutch but I soon switched to English. I really enjoyed life in the UK, and was actually planning to stay there after my PhD, but "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" and I ended up moving to Tromsø in Northern Norway in 2009. Tromsø is a photographer's dream, surrounded by spectacular mountains, with the light ever changing from the midnight sun in summer to the dark days compensated by aurora-filled nights in winter. I learnt Norwegian and got a job as a weather forecaster - I got thrown in at the deep end, doing radio interviews and speaking with fishermen with way-too-strong dialects straight from the beginning, before I was anywhere near fluent in Norwegian :D I survived though, and slowly started to do some research on the side. I got more and more involved in research projects and in August 2015 I moved 2000 km south, to Oslo where I started working 100% as a researcher. A year after moving to Oslo, I met Michiel at a music festival in Brussels :) and we started to travel very frequently between Oslo and Rotterdam, where he lives. You can't do that forever though, and I soon realized I found the perfect "excuse" to finally move back home, something I had been considering many times before. So since July 2017, I'm living in Rotterdam! I'm actually taking some time off before finding a new job, and I'm looking forward to lots of adventures in the near future - so stay tuned!
Flying Dutchman

Flying Dutchman

My youngest brother has become a flying Dutchman 🙂 He got his Private Pilot License early this summer, and has been taking friends and families on flights across the Netherlands. I kept getting emails with fantastic photos, and was impatiently waiting for my turn to come 🙂

So the day after I arrived in the Netherlands to celebrate Sinterklaas, my brother and I drove to Lelystad Airport – even though the weather forecast wasn’t looking very favourable. As he’s flying small planes without advanced instruments, he has to fly “visual” which means he can’t fly in the clouds and needs a certain distance from the clouds as well as a minimum horizontal visibility in order to fly. When we arrived at the airport, it was POURING with rain, and the wind was strong and gusty. We could forget about flying in conditions like that, so instead he showed me around his club, and we had a fantastic lunch at the airport restaurant.

Then suddenly it stopped raining, the wind decreased and bits of blue sky turned up. The restaurant emptied, and small planes popped out of all the hangars on the airport 😀 So we hurried back to the club as well, and got ready for a short flight…

My brother pulling the plane out of the hangar Ready to go!

Originally we were going to fly to Texel and Ameland, and make a daytrip out of it, but it was almost 14:00 now and we only had time for a short (30 minute) flight over Flevoland before people at the club were going home.

Here we’re flying over Harderwijk, where we could see the dolphins swim underwater in the Dolfinarium (Sea World), and the theme park Walibi.

Harderwijk, with the Dolfinarium (Sea World) in the foreground - we could see the dolphins swim underwater! Attraction Park Walibi with lots of roller coasters - pity it's closed for the winter

Flevoland is a “new” province in the Netherlands, the land was reclaimed from the sea and made into a province in 1986. That means it’s flat like a pancake, and the farm fields are relatively large and straight. And all the towns are new of course, but in the first photo you can see an older town that used to be on the shore of the Zuiderzee.

Elburg, with a moat around the city centre Modern (and identical...) houses in Dronten

We saw LOTS and LOTS of windmills, and they’re planning to build even more. After 30 minutes, it was time to land again. We landed with a 22 knots crosswind, which is quite tricky. You have to land with one wheel first, to avoid the wind getting underneath your plane and tipping it over when you land. I thought it would be a scary bumpy landing, but my brother did amazingly well and landed it very softly 🙂

Lots of windmills Nice clouds :) Ready to land... you can see the landing strip in the distance

It was a fun flight, now I am looking forward to come in summer and do a longer flight over the Netherlands or perhaps even into Germany 🙂

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise or sunset?

It might be mørketid (dark time) but the light is at its most beautiful at the moment. A sunrise that melts into a sunset, lasting for hours… It’s just beautiful, especially when you have the chance to go out and enjoy it 🙂

A boathouse on a cold day in Tromsø The view in the other direction (looking west) is pretty too!

Waves crashing over a rock - I almost got stuck on this rock because of the incoming tide! This photo is taken when the sun was at its highest point... but still below the horizon ;) soon the 'sunrise' will turn into a 'sunset'

I would almost say: my favourite time of year – but only when skies are clear. Mørketid is a lot less fun on cloudy days 😉

Whale Safari from Sommarøy

Whale Safari from Sommarøy

After our successful – but rather dark – whale safari last week, we were hungry for more! And we weren’t the only ones, so soon a plan was born: we rented a boat on Sunday. They were closed for the season, but still had 2 boats in the water and they kindly let us rent on of them. We went with my colleagues Gunnar, Trond and Nick. Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day, with very colourful skies…

View from Sommarøy towards Senja Leaving Sommarøy

The views towards Håja and Sommarøy were breathtaking and I wouldn’t have cared if we didn’t find any whales: the views alone were worth it 🙂

Håja in the pre-sunrise glow Looking back at Sommarøy with Senja in the background

We found the whales soon after leaving Sommarøy though! Three of them started playing around the boat – at times they even touched the boat! It was awesome… a beautiful experience 🙂

Two whales were playing very close to our boat Whale & Håja

Especially with the backdrops in that location…

Diving under Whale in front of Sommarøy

At some point they got bored of us, and left to check out the boat of some fellow whale watchers. There were lots of people on the water that day 🙂

Paul could get more detailed photos with his telezoom :) Two small lighthouses and a whale's tail :)

We drove around the fjord trying to find more whales, but they all seemed to be on their way out the fjord and we didn’t want to chase them too much.

One of the bridges to Sommarøy The sun was painting the mountain tops pink, it was such a spectacular scenery!

At some point Trond noted herring flying up from the surface, and soon after two whale heads came up right next to the boat – WOW! So far we never saw their heads, just fins and tails. It was really impressive, but it happened so quickly that nobody got a good photo of it. We were in very shallow and clear water here, and to our amazement one of the whales swam right underneath the boat. We could see him very well in the clear water – for a moment I was afraid he would get stuck underneath the boat! Or, I guess he wouldn’t get stuck as I suppose they can easily move the boat – luckily this didn’t happen 😉

Trond is smiling here, but what you can't see is that he's humming the JAWS theme song :D this was just after we saw a whale diving under the boat! Gunnar and Nick at sunset

As the skies turned pink, the whales kept playing around other boats near us.

Whale and pink skies The whales seemed to be very curious and were checking all the boats out

The light was getting dim though, so we decided to head back to Sommarøy. A huge flock of sea gulls flew overhead, hungry for herring I guess… a beautiful sight!

I love this photo, taken by Nick Hughes A huge flock of seagulls flew past - hungry for herring I guess ;)

One last photo of the sunset, and the moonrise back in Sommarøy…

Our view at sunset - it was getting quite dark, time to go home Moon rising from behind the mountains

What a day! With our memories (both digital and natural) filled with the fantastic experience, we headed to the local cafe for some warm food. A perfect day 🙂 I also took some video footage with my SLR…

 

On the same day, some people I know were out in Grøtfjorden where the whales were having a feeding frenzy. Check out these fantastic photos – even more amazing when you know they were taken from a kayak! Not always without danger, as you can see in this crazy video, taken in the same area some days ago – luckily all went well.