Alaska: It's only $700

This isn't a phrase I'm comfortable uttering. In Homer, $700 gets you a flight across to Katmai National Park. You land on a beach in Hallo Bay and there are bears. The bears are not afraid of you. They're not really curious about you. In fact, they nothing you.

Back in Homer - before any of this happens - we get a lengthy briefing about how to behave. Most of it is reasonably straightforward and appears to be common sense to me. Then we get to, "if they come toward you, don't run away". This one seems a little counter-intuitive to begin with but then is explained away by saying that running away invites a chase instinct and that's how you die.

It seems fair enough.

We have a large group - it fills four planes - and our subgroup of six is a mum and daughter from the US, a couple from Israel, myself and our pilot, Martin. Martin is the older of the four pilots and a comes off as a little brisk and lonesome - especially compared to the two kids flying other groups - but he basically discards the flight plan and takes us out over a chain of island volcanoes.

Chalk that up as a win.

We land on the beach, pulling up with the sort of J-turn that I absolutely never did in Wembley Downs as a seventeen year old. It leaves me grinning, most others seem altogether a bit more concerned. We're in a bay full of bears that we'll be walking amongst and they're all of a sudden concerned about their mortality?

The first bear we see bisects our group and another. It is maybe forty metres from either. Ambles down from the dunes and wanders across the beach. Casts cursory glances at both groups and carries on. It gives precisely no fucks.

I don't care. You're not near the salmon.

The pattern would be repeated for four or so hours. One sow and her cub come to within twenty metres of us. They stare for a bit, catching the eye of people in the group. After the first encounter everyone seems a little more relaxed about the prospect of being torn limb from limb and eaten alive but that doesn't stop me from positioning myself with a person that I could outrun in two steps between myself and the bears.

No need for a long lens when the bears come to you!

Over the day we see a dozen or so bears in slightly different settings. Cubs play fighting. Grizzlies fishing. Sows taking strolls on the beach. A sow protecting its cub from potential attack from another bear. Bears just chilling. It's like some sort of beach side resort for bears. It's tempting to wax lyrical about this being all kinds of fantastic but I'm just going to defer to photos instead. There's more. Lots and lots more. Go to my flickr page for ten or so, facebook for thirty (just for George) or bail me up somewhere in the world and you can look at all five hundred. They're great.