As you know, I recently took an 11-day trip to the Arctic, visiting Svalbard (formerly Spitzbergen), the usually forbidden island of Jan Mayan, and Iceland. Because we didn’t have Internet near the Arctic Circle, I couldn’t send photo or accounts of the trip, so I’ll try to catch up here bit by bit. First, the maps of our trip, courtesy of the folks at Quark Expeditions, who ran the trip on the small (200-passenger, but only 140 aboard) ship the Ultramarine, designed for polar destinations (it’s heading as we speak for Antarctica). As you see, most of the stops were in Svalbard, but there’s plenty to see there.
There are three maps here, each circle indicates a landing or a Zodiac trip. Note #5: our furtheest north; the edge of the Arctic sea ice (see below).
Here’s the daily log at noon from the bridge. As I noted, we got as far north at 82° North Latitude, farther north than the ship, or anybody on it, had ever been (see here for photos).
The first leg of the trip was a flight to Helsinki, Finland where we spent the night in an airport hotel (no time for sightseeing), and then a 3.5-hour flight the next morning to Svalbard, formally a part of Norway. This archipelago (nearly all islands are uninhabited) is shown in dark green from this Wikipedia map. It’s above the Arctic Circle (60° N).
We landed at the island’s capital, Longyearbyen, which is touted as the world’s most northerly city with a population of more than 1,000 (it was 2,595 two years ago). The location is shown in red below. As Wikipedia notes, the city “stretches along the foot of the left bank of the Longyear Valley and on the shore of Adventfjorden, the short estuary leading into Isfjorden on the west coast of Spitsbergen, the island’s broadest inlet.” It’s easily accessible by sea, and hence a good place to start a ship tour.
Now I have to brag that on my trips to Antarctica I also visited all three places touted as “the world’s most southern town“: Punta Arenas, Puerto Williams, and Ushuaia. In latititude the farthest south is Puerto Williams in Chile (54°56′S, 67°37′W, population 1,868), so I can say I’ve been to the most northerly and southerly towns on Earth.
But back to Longyearbyen. It’s a rather dreary place, enlivened only by a few colorful houses and otherwise rather slipshod. There’s one shopping center where everyone gathers (it has the only grocery store), and I spent several hours there because a wander through the town took about 1.5 hours (they gave us 3.5 hours). I found a cozy chair outside a store and nodded off for a while until our ship, the Ultramarine, left in the afternoon.
It was a cozy ship, unlike the Hurtigruten “Roald Amundsen” on which I lectured and traveled to Antarctica (ca 450 passengers). The Ultramarine was a delightful vessel, the food was great, the staff was friendly, and, if I can scrape up the dosh, I hope to travel on it again. Here she be, but more photos of the ship and my cabin will comelater. (Click photos to enlarge them.)
Getting ready to land:
Longyearbyen: our plane from Helsinki. Below that, the first thing you see when you enter the tiny airport terminal, and a sign:
Yes, there are a fair amount of polar bears about, and if you leave the town you’d best carry a gun in case of attack (our guides packed rifles on the trip nearly every time we landed).
Note the “watch out for polar bears” sign. This is not a joke: a woman tourist was killed by a polar bear a few years ago while camping outside near the airport. You do not want to mess with polar bears: they are the largest four-footed predator on Earth, they are totally carnivorous, and they are brazen:
This picture of the town is from Wikipedia; the rest of the photos are mine. In the background is the former coal-mining operation of the Arctic Coal Company, but that’s been closed for eight years. Instead, as Wikipedia notes, “Meanwhile, the town has seen a large increase in tourism and research. This includes the arrival of institutions such as the University Centre in Svalbard, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and Svalbard Satellite Station. Svalbard Airport, Svalbard Church and the Svalbardbutikken department store serve the community.”
And this is pretty much it:
The colorful houses are the main draw; here are some:
They are set at the bottom of a hill, which spanwed a big avalanche in 2015 that killed one person and injured 9. I presume the barriers on the mountain were erected later to prevent such events.
While the houses are attractive, behind them people just strew their snowmobiles and skis in big piles, so the city is rather a mess if you snoop around. But I can see why the residents don’t care much. Big fun in the snow in winter (the aurora is also visible from the city). At this latitude it’s light 24 hours per day, though it gets a bit darker in the middle of the night.
A back porch. Everyone has skis.
Stuff on sale in the grocery store. Besides regular groceries, there’s a big section of tourist-related items featuring the local wildlife:
These are real, and are in the dog food section. (I looked for cat food, but there was none, so I guess there are no cats in Longyearbyen. I bet that’s because of the bears.)
And I think this is the dreaded RHUBARB, a vegetable I cannot abide. Am I right in my guess?
Wandering disconsolately around the town for the second time, waiting to get on the ship, I heard a honk nearby. And here I found the best part of the city: geese and their goslings! These are barnacle geese, (Branta leucopsis). a species with a range in northern Europe and the Arctic. I’m not a big fan of geese (ducks are much better), but these are attractive and their fuzzy gray goslings are adorable.
Part of a large group nesting in a field next to the shopping center. There were many more than shown here.
I have to admit that they are good looking:
And with babies!
They were my first wildlife of the trip, and, if I kept a life list, I could have added these babies. Here’s their range taken from Wikipedia. They are migratory, wintering in the British Isles and northern Europe:
That made my day, and, in late afternoon, we boarded the ship. The next installment, whenever I get to put it up, will show the ship, my cabin, and the bridge, where we were allowed to wander freely.
This is wonderful, thank PCC(E)!
I walked over to look on my globe, and yeah – wow, sure enough, Svalbard and Longyearbyen are clearly marked. Looks like the Arctic Circle starts.. well, is… inscribed at 75 degrees Latitude… it extends to the North Pole, so Arctic … paraboloid.. is the whole Arctic area… even though all we ever say is “circle”..😁
[ takes a dip in the Internet ..]
BTW if one wants some Arctic trivia, there’s an Arctic Circle theorem – but it has more to do with Aztec diamonds than icy water…
I’ll leave it at that!
🧊🌊
Small point – Arctic Circle is an imaginary line extending around the Earth at 66.33 degrees North. No part of mainland Iceland extends above the Circle. However one inhabited island, Grimsey does and beyond that the rock, Kolbinsey. I worked in Shetland Islands for a few years. The Islands extend to just short of 61 degrees, cold but not quite Arctic.
( sorry, not on usual device and misspelled user name. Veroxitatis. )
A huge reading error!
I found the Arctic circle dotted line! No degrees given.
Thank you!
The northern edge of Iceland’s mainland still gets midnight sun (just barely) on the summer solstice because refraction through the earth’s atmosphere allows at least the upper limbus of the sun’s disk (which is not a point but subtends half a degree of arc) to be visible at midnight, especially from land which is substantially above sea level. (The centre of the disk sets below the true horizon at all sea level points on the mainland.) The sun sets in the north at midnight which makes the sea horizon visible to observers on land. Of course it’s so often overcast in Iceland that a tourist making the trip would probably miss it.
This isn’t a contradiction of anything you wrote about the Arctic Circle in Iceland. I just like to keep comments together and I am curious if your experience bears this out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun
The return of the sun, typically mid-February depending on latitude, is celebrated in Canada’s far northern communities. Locals often situate themselves on high points like radio antenna towers in hopes of catching a glimpse of the sun rising in the far southeast over the flat Arctic barrens a few days before the official prediction from the government astronomers in Ottawa.
Mmmmm…rhubarb! Like IPA in an acidic stick!
Yummy rhubarb! I feel a crumble coming on….
It looks like an incredible trip, and the cherry on top is that you get rhubarb 😉
I’m looking forward to future instalments.
Rhubarb seems to be stalking you!
Nice start to your travelogue.
Groan…:) Good one!
Did the package involve a Finnair flight, or were you on your own on how to get to Longyearbyen?
Also, does Quark take passengers on the transit from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Twice-yearly special! Bi-polar excursion! Book now! (OK, maybe I shouldn’t write ad copy.)
They arranged the flight to Longyearbyen, but I arranged my own flight to Helsinki and then back home from Reykjavic, as I wanted to stay in Iceland for a few extra days.
No, the north to south trip, as far as I know, is made by all polar excursion companies without passengers.
Thinking more on that, probably some stops along the way for maintenance, cleaning, upgrading things etc, and also doing some of those things while in transit as well.
I guess when they get to the Antarctic they’re plying the waters from Chile like on the expedition you were on, so the transit is basically N –> S in the Atlantic
In any event, an expensive exercise in dead-heading.
A quick note regarding names: Svalbard is the modern (since around 1925) name of the archipelago. Spitsbergen is the name of the biggest island in the archipelago. Some confusion arises from the fact that the archipelago (not just the biggest island) was called Spitsbergen (or Spitzbergen) in the past.
As I think you noted earlier on, the name Spitsbergen was coined by the Dutch explorer Willem Barentz. It literally means “pointy mountains”. The name Svalbard could mean something like “cold coast” from old Norse svalr (cold) and barð (many meanings, possibly including coast).
Oh, and it’s not only good advice to bring a rifle when you go away from the town. I am pretty sure it’s mandatory. When camping, you put tripwires around the campsite, rigged to set off a loud explosion when tripped. And you’d better bring your gun into the tent with you. I am told it can get quite exciting, when other, more benign, wildlife trips the wire.
Yup rhubarb. Delicious stewed, with maple syrup as a sweetener.
Barnacle Geese are cool!!
Quick note: The Arctic Circle is at “about 66° 34′ N” (and varies) per Wiki.
Thanks for sharing more photos and stories from your trip! I always love your travel photos and postings. I would thoroughly enjoy seeing more from your earlier travels too!
I once attended a slide show by a polar explorer/athlete who skied, solo, to the Magnetic North Pole. She said, “for a Polar Bear, anything that moves on the ice is food.” Hence their brazenness and dangerousness.
Quick note 2: That latitude is where the sun starts to never set (or rise, depending on the season). And that specific number results from the constant c 23° angle between Earth’s rotational plane and its orbital plane.
“And next time, we’ll do fractions” (TL, R.I.P.)
And I agree with your assessment of rhubarb. Always disliked it. It must be a real Scandinavian thing. All of my Dad’s relatives were of Norwegian heritage and everyone planted and ate rhubarb. And we’re talking rhubarb pie without the strawberries. And jam. Blech.
In 3.6yrs in Sweden I don’t think I was ever offered rhubarb. I never asked for it, either.
The reason cats are banned on Svalbard is to protect the birds. Life is rough enough for the featherballs already.
Up until a few years ago there was a cat living in Barentsburg, the Russian settlement, though. It was quite the celebrity.
Barnacle geese are so-called because of the medieval belief in Europe that the goslings emerged from barnacles growing on waterlogged tree stumps. It was only when Barents’s crew saw them hatching from eggs in 1596 that they realized they reproduced like every other bird (they were only ever seen in Europe as adult geese, so speculation abounded).
Rhubarb crumble with custard is the finest pudding known to mankind. The recipe should be the simplest possible, so e.g. in this one skip the ginger https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/rhubarbcrumble_11396
Rhubarb fool is also v good.
No, Indian puddlng or sticky toffee puddings are the finest pudding known to mankind and womankind!
Rhubarb is such a vexed topic! Over the years I have assumed that our love of it in the UK is a result of wartime shortages, just like the dreaded carrot cake… for me this is more of a general dislike of cooked carrots, I have no idea where it comes from, possibly school dinners back in the late 50s early 60s (and swede on most menus these days always seems to have carrots included – stop doing that!) 🙂
Watched a YouTube video a couple of days ago about the 1897 Swedish balloon expedition that was to go from what was then Spitzbergen across the north pole to Canada. It did not end well, predictably.
https://youtu.be/umX6Euh3B-g?si=HiQcmWLKKhYueONO