6 ★ FT Weekend 22 February/23 February 2020i/DE TA I L S
Mary Novakovich was a guest of Ski Sarajevo
(ski-sarajevo.com), which offers two nights at
Hotel Termag in Jahorina and one night at Hotel
Europe in Sarajevo from £299 per person,
including lift passes and transfers. Seven-night
packages start at £489pp. Fly Bosnia
(flybosnia.ba) has direct flights from London
Luton to Sarajevo from £195ppP
eople who think skiing in
Sarajevo sounds a bit far-
fetched have short
memories. I like to remind
them of the 1984 Winter
Olympics, when American Bill Johnson
beat off the Europeans — Franz
Klammer and Pirmin Zurbriggen
among them — to claim downhill gold,
and Torvill and Dean skated to those
glorious perfect scores. Of course, the
city’s brief post-Olympic glow was
quickly eclipsed by the years of war
that followed.
In November 2020 it will be 25 years
since the Dayton Accords brought an
uneasy peace to Bosnia. As I’m walking
through Sarajevo’s 16th-century
Ottoman quarter, Bascarsija, with
Armina Pijalovic, my guide from
Funky Tours, she refers occasionally to
the 1992-95 siege as the “hard times”.
Her choice of words is curiously
understated, I think, as we step over
another Sarajevo Rose, a splatter of
red resin on the pavement that
symbolises those who were killed by
Serbian snipers and grenades.
Like many people I’ve met in Bosnia
over recent years, Armina wants the
city to shake off its image as a tragicplace of war, promoting instead its
cultural mishmash, food and sheer
sense of fun. It is also one of the few
places that can offer a combination of
city-break and ski holiday. Jahorina,
scene of the 1984 women’s Alpine
skiing races, is a 45-minute drive away
— you can stay in the city (as I did) and
drive out to ski, or vice versa, or split a
long weekend by staying in both city
and ski area. My visit coincides with
the season’s opening weekend, andwooded blue runs feel more like red
runs, which is one of the reasons why a
new beginners’ area was created for this
ski season.
The next day, strong winds mean
only one draglift is open, along with
one functioning slope. Despite the
limitations, with just 10 other people
around, it’s an enjoyable experience,
even if I am ambushed by a pack of
dogs near the bottom of the slope.
Luckily, I can ski much faster than they
can run.
If all this sounds a bit too chaotic,
it paints an unfair picture. The
restaurants and hire shops are on a par
with what you would find in a small
French resort, with hefty meat dishes
taking the place of molten cheese. At
the foot of the slopes, Hotel Termag
stands out — a sophisticated place with
a spa, a stylish bar and a restaurant
that serves portions large enough to
feed a small army.
In the six years that British tour
operator Graeme Higgs has been
running ski holidays to Bosnia
with Ski Sarajevo, he has seen big
improvements in the infrastructure in
Jahorina as well as nearby Bjelasnica
(where the men’s Alpine skiing eventstook place in 1984) and Ravna Planina.
“And we’re trying to connect all three
resorts on one lift pass,” he says.
The direct flights launched last year
from London and Rome to Sarajevo
with Fly Bosnia should also help boost
the ski market here. But it is the
combination of a decent — if small —
ski area and Sarajevo itself that’s the
key draw. Looking more polished every
time I visit, the city is compelling, its
Ottoman and Habsburg legacies
mingling with its Slavic character —
boisterous, warm and inviting.
After being on the slopes, I get my fill
of Slavic soul food —burekandpita
(coils of filo pastry filled with meat,
cheese or spinach) andcevapi(grilled
rissoles) — as well as Sarajevsko beer
brewed with spring water.
As a fitting end, I spend the final
evening at Kino Bosna, a huge bar in an
old cinema. I feel as if I’m in an Emir
Kusturica film, as an accordionist leads
a good-naturedly raucous singalong to
Yugoslav pop hits from the 1960s and
70s. There may still be problems with
corruption and the economy, but I’d
like to think the hard times are gone.Mary Novakovichthe bow, our little boat violently rocking
and shuddering. Such is the tempestu-
ous nature of weather in the Arctic.
Suddenly, not seeing orca seemed pref-
erable to not seeing my breakfast
again. We headed back to port.
That night on the Kallinika, with a
storm rattling the rigging outside in the
polar night, we hadfenalar— leg of
lamb salted, dried and cured for a year
(such preserved meat was one of the
keys to the Vikings’ success in travel-
ling the world) and served thinly
sliced, likejamón ibérico. This was fol-
lowed bypinnekjott, northern Norway’s
traditional Christmas meal, in which
cured mutton ribs were soaked for 30
hours to remove the sea salt before
being steamed and served with swede
purée, boiled potatoes and a spoonful
of blood-red lingonberry jam. All
accompanied by an inexhaustible sup-
ply of aquavit, that fiery caraway-seed-
infused grain alcohol (undoubtedly
another key to Viking success).
After dinner, Audun gave a presenta-
tion of his orca photographs, including
his most celebrated one, of a submerged
male beside a trawler, with the water-
line splitting the frame so that the mas-
sive cetacean and the boat fill half the
picture each.
He talked about his upbringing close
to the nearby Lofoten Islands, in a whal-
ing family, when hunting whales,
including orca, was still legal. (It was
banned under the International Whal-
ing Commission’s 1986 moratorium.
Today, Norway still hunts the minke
whale under an “objection” to the IWC
ban.) Audun spoke of the herring, the
main keystone species of the Arctic,
how overfishing in the 1950s and 1960s
led to a collapse in their numbers and
those of the animals that predated on
them, and how a temporary ban in the
late 1970s restored herring numbers.
He talked about the restored, billions-
strong herring shoals, called the “silver
of the sea” for the many communities
they sustained, how nobody really knew
for sure why they suddenly changed
their migration patterns back in 2017,
but that waters warming because of cli-
mate change — Arctic air temperatures
are rising at twice the global rate —
seemed to be pushing many animal spe-
cies further and further north.
For the orca, the recovery of herring
stocks had been a mixed blessing. With
oceans full of the now illegal but slow-
decomposing industrial toxins poly-Travel
W
ait! Wait! Wait!”
This was the com-
mand of the skipper of
the tiny boat in which I
was bobbing around the
frigid waters of the Norwegian Sea in
January, 300 miles inside the Arctic Cir-
cle. I had one leg over the side. A few
metres away, a scimitar-shaped black
fin, the height of a man, broke the sur-
face and disappeared again. Then
another.
“Wait! Wait!”
I checked my equipment, running my
glove-clad fingers around the rubber
neck seal of my dry suit, and then over
my tight neoprene hood, which was
compressing the exposed bits of my face
into a permanent scowl. My snorkel and
mask seemed secure.
“Wait!”
I had been waiting for this moment for
three frustrating days. But now that the
wait was almost over, all I wanted to do
was carry on waiting. The skipper wasClockwise from top:
Audun Rikardsen’s famous
photograph of trawler and
orca; a whale seen on Mike
Carter’s trip; waiting to go
in the water; the Kallinika
Audun Rikardsen; Henrik Jorgensenecosystem, and hopefully become
advocates for their protection; the
scientists, by encouraging tourists to
send them their photographs and film
of whale encounters, gain useful
research material.
“We think the humpbacks left last
week for their spawning grounds in the
Caribbean,” Tiu, 59, told me over a glass
of whisky. “But there are still plenty of
orca around.”
Finding them, however, would not be
so easy. This became apparent the next
morning when we set off in a small boat
in the crepuscular light that, at this lati-
tude in January, where the sun never
appeared above the horizon, gave you
just a five-hour window of twilight
before the polar night turned every-
thing black again. As we headed out into
the waters of Kvænangsfjord, framed by
jagged, ice-encrusted black mountains,
it seemed inconceivable we might find
our quarry in its vastness.
The orca is the largest member of the
dolphin family — adult males can be
nine metres long and weigh as much aseight tonnes. The pods, formed of some
10-25 family members, stay together for
life, headed up by a strong matriarch,
who can live for as long as 90 years.
Males live to about 45. After meno-
pause, a female orca becomes a “grand-
mother” to younger pod members.
As we scanned the fjord, Tiu told me
about the orca. They have a complex
social structure, with each family
group having its own dialect to avoid
inbreeding, and co-operate during
hunting, rounding up herring by terri-
fying them into a ball (called carousel
feeding, this is like “an underwater bal-
let”, according to Tiu) before slapping
the fish with their tail flukes and eating
their stunned prey, delicately, one by
one. “There is one orca we call
Stumpy,” Tiu told me. “He has a
deformed dorsal fin, so he can’t dive to
feed. The others drop herring in front
of him so he can eat.”
Maybe, she said, that is why the orca,
known as the “wolves of the sea” because
of their family groups, seem to fascinate
humans so much. “They remind us of
ourselves,” she said. “They can be brutal
but also sensitive and gentle.”
In the distance were some boats, their
fishing lights pinpricks in the gloom,
attended by a dense squabble of wheel-
ing herring gulls, and two white-tailed
sea eagles, Europe’s largest raptor, with
a wingspan of two metres, orbiting like
languid satellites around them.
Orca have learnt that fishing boats
mean a free meal — they pick off herring
squeezed out of the nets — to the extent
that, when they hear the winches being
pulled in, they head smartly for the
boats. Thus so did we.
Sadly, in a heartbeat the wind shifted
to the east. Within minutes, the sea was
twisted and confused, a ceaseless cla-
mour, with freezing water crashing overi/ D E TA I L
Mike Carter was a guest
of Cookson Adventures
(cooksonadventures.com), which
offers a five-day trip like the one
described from £11,000 per person,
based on a group of five, including
guiding by a whale researcher and a
photographer, as well as carbon
offsetting; it is available from
November to JanuarySkjervoyTromsoKvænangenNordkjosbotnNorwegian
Seamaps news.com/©HERE kmNORWAY
FINLANDIn their element
Norway|Mike Carteron the delight and dread of a close encounter with an orca
— the marine world’s apex predator — in the icy waters of the Arctic Circle
POSTCARD
FROM...SARAJEVO
positioning the boat so that we could
jump directly into the path of the
planet’s apex marine predator. I had
seen film of this animal smashing pen-
guins 80ft in the air with its tail for fun,
or beaching itself to grab seals with its
enormous, razor-sharp teeth. Great
white sharks fled from it in terror. Its
Latin name suggests that it belongs in
the realm of the dead; its English name,
usefully, as a guide to humans contem-
plating swimming with it, even contains
the word killer.
“Go!”
Bugger.
“Go! Go! Go!”Three days earlier, I had arrived in
Skjervoy, just north of the 70th parallel,
after a four-hour ferry ride from
Tromso, site of the nearest major air-
port, 55 nautical miles (or 150 driving
miles) to the south-west.
Skjervoy, on the tiny island of Skjer-
voya, had been just another small sleepy
fishing village in the Norwegian Arctic,
until October 2017, when locals woke up
to discover that their nearby fjord,
Kvænangen, was suddenly roiling with
hundreds and hundreds of humpback
whales andOrcinus orca, or killer whales,
never before seen in those parts in such
huge numbers.
The vast herring shoals had aban-
doned their previous overwintering
grounds just off Tromso and migrated
north. The whales that fed on them had
followed. Overnight, Skjervoy had
become a Klondike for marine biolo-
gists and whale-watching tourists alike,
one of the best places in the world to get
up close to these remarkable animals.
I’d walked from the ferry, crunching
through the snow, an immense wolf
moon looming over Skjervoy, and clam-
bered aboard the S/Y Kallinika, a 25m
steel sloop moored in the harbour that
would be my base for the next three
days as we tried to track down the orca
and, hopefully, snorkel with them.
Among the crew was Tiu Simila, a
marine biologist who has helped pio-
neer the study of orca in northern Nor-
way. Also on board was Audun Rikard-
sen, a professor in marine biology at
the Arctic University of Norway in
Tromso and one of the world’s leading
photographers of cetaceans.
This was part of a new initiative pair-
ing scientists and tourists: visitors gain
detailed knowledge of these animals
and their importance to the marinechlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), initially
absorbed by plankton, then eaten by
herring and in turn eaten by the killer
whales, the orca are among the most
exposed animals in the world to the pol-
lutants. The toxins were stored in the fat
of the whales and passed to the calves
through the mother’s milk. “Many
groups of orca are predicted to die out in
the next 50-100 years,” Audun said.
On top of all that was the relentless
search for oil. In the very week I was
there, the government granted more
than 30 new oil-production licences in
the Norwegian and Barents seas.
“This is why scientists and tourists
coming together is so important,” said
Tiu. “Orca are great ambassadors for the
oceans and getting people to care. You
can connect with these intelligent,
social animals, learn about their current
struggles and meet them in their own
environment. It is a very emotional
experience for most people who get to
see them.”
Photographs. Testimonies. It was so
frustrating, being so close to these
incredible animals yet unable to see
them. That frustration spanned the
next day too, my penultimate day in
Skjervoy, as we spent the twilight hours
out on the water; Audun, at 6ft 5in, like a
watchtower, looking in vain for signs of
orca in the deranged sea, the mono-
chrome world doing nothing to lighten
my mood. “The orca may have left, fol-
lowing the herring,” Audun said, as we
turned again for the harbour. “Around
here, it’s the herring that run the show.”
By breakfast on my last day, I was
resigned to the fact that I would be head-
ing home disappointed. Then the Kal-
linika’s radio crackled into life. One of
the spotter boats out in the fjord had
found a family of orca. We scrambled
into our dry suits...“Go!” the skipper shouted again.
I slipped into the water and looked
down into the abyss. It was as clear as
cut glass, albeit, in this twilight world,
tinted glass, its four degrees (the univer-
sally recommended temperature for a
fridge) instantly numbing the exposed
parts of my face. For a few seconds,
nothing happened, I just floated inspace. And then an immense black-and-
white shape came into view, moving
towards me — a male orca, one of the
outriders ahead of the group, like Prae-
torian guards, alert for trouble. I could
see his large bovine-like eye behind his
front white patch, as he seemed to
assess me before swimming on. And
then the family appeared: about 12 ani-
mals, brilliant-white patches dancing
around like spotlights illuminating the
night sky at a film premiere.
There was a mother and her calf,
swimming tightly alongside her. I
remembered Audun telling me that
such an intimate encounter with these
animals, these gentle giants, these apex
killers, could evoke a sense of delight
and dread. That felt about right, as I
watched the tail fluke of the last orca
fade into the black. Compared with the
experience of other visitors earlier in
the season, when they had witnessed
breaching and the “underwater ballet”
of carousel feeding, and had long, lin-
gering interactions in the water with the
orca, my encounter had been brief. But
it was still one of the most magical
things I had ever seen.
Back on the boat, we followed the
dorsal fins and arched backs as they
headed north, towards the open sea,
and I wondered whether these animals
would return next winter to Skjervoy.
And I thought about the day when they
might not return at all, neither here
nor anywhere else, as I watched the last
fin vanish into a curtain of snow
draped across the fjord.‘Go!’ the skipper shouted.
I slipped into the water. An
immense shape came into
view, moving towards meBryan Ferry has come to perform the
gala-night gig in a large marquee, deftly
running though his greatest hits in a
smoky haze.
It is early in the season, so many of
the runs are yet to open, but I can
get a sense of the place. There are 45km
of pistes, rising to the highest point,
Ogorjelica, which is above the treeline
at 1,916m. This winter brings a new
gondola, and there are seven other lifts,
a mix of chairlifts and drags. TheMatthew CookFEBRUARY 22 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 20/2/2020 - 17: 19 User: matthew.brayman Page Name: WKD6, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 6 , 1