From midnight onwards it rains rather hard and continuously – the first for 6 some weeks – a relief to us for our poor dry plants abandoned in the garden.
There is an hour’s delay due to loading difficulties, but we finally board the Sterling Airways DC 6B, 4-propellored plane at 8:40 and take off in 5 minutes. It has stopped raining and we get good views of SW Norway, though there is much cloud. Lakes, farmed areas, forests, rivers, bare rock, remnant snow-patches, very beautiful. Fly at 18.000 feet.
We get a breakfast and lunch and buy a minute, very expensive beer between them. Plane full of noisy Austrians, and we also have Kenn Brooks onboard!
Begin to come down on Mestersvig at 2. Fly low over continuous unbroken ice in Kong Oscars Fjord. Cloud very low and mountains hidden. We land at the bay, Noret, North of Mesters Vig, where the settlement is. It’s 4 degrees Celcius and raining.
We stand and wait by the plane, but cannot help, so walk over to the huts for a meal – bread-and-meat, almost inedible for me!
A chorus of sledge dogs is heard at times. Males sit on wooden squares in the middle of their territories, chained. Females are loose, some with small, short-legged, clumsy puppies. A box-like house is available for them, but most sit outside in the rain.
We help unload ours and the others’ things from lorries from the plane afterwards. Then we are shown, to our surprise, our rooms – comfortable dry, even slightly heated. So at least we shall be comfortable while we wait the next few days for the helicopter to arrive.
Supper at 8 and then Tove Birkelund produces a bottle of port. We sit talking for an hour. Listen to Brooks’ booming voice, Claus and I falling to sleep. We also got none last night.
We look out the Windows. Winter snow drifts cover some 50% of the ground and each time the mountain tops become visible around us, the snow-line has crept a little lower!
Bed at 9:15! A small wader with dark grey back and head and throat and white underparts, and a snow bunting, just outside my window in the snow.
Mestersvig Airport
