In an effort to use my soon to be expiring Norwegian Air miles I arranged a trip to Svalbard at the end of my UK holiday. While I did use up my $750 flight credit , in the end I spent significantly more on hotels and tours and the flight to Norway. But I didn't waste $750 and I had a great trip to a place I had always wanted to visit.
I flew from Manchester to Oslo on SAS. It was a nightmare drive to the Manchester Airport, what should have taken 50 mins took nearly 2 hours. The Rental Car and airport security checks didn’t make the day any better either but I did arrive safely in Oslo.
I stayed in a hotel at the airport as I had an early morning flight the next morning to Svalbard. When I eventually found the right colored airport Radisson all was well (it was the Red one and not the Blu one).
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| Floating Saunas |
In the evening I caught the train from the airport into Oslo. A wonderfully modern well designed system - clean, prompt, fast, not too expensive. In Oslo I wandered around for a while checking out the floating saunas on the quayside - what a great idea.
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| The Oslo Opera House |
I wandered over to the Opera House where there was a lot of activity going on and I found out there was a ballet that evening. With nothing else to do, I bought one of the remaining tickets. I had a good seat and while I am not a huge ballet fan I really enjoyed it. When the females go “on point” I found it almost uncomfortable to watch - it looks so painful. The dancers are certainly amazingly fit athletes and they do move so gracefully. The ballet, Giselle, is a bit twee and corny - cad of a prince woos a peasant girl but he is already betrothed so she dies of a broken heart, etc, etc. For me a really unexpected fine evening of culture.
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| At the Ballet - Giselle |
I got a bite to eat at the station before heading back on the train to the airport hotel (trains every 10 mins for most of the day).
The next morning I was up early for my Norwegian Air flight to Svalbard. The airport was very busy and to my surprise it is all self-serve automation. You check in at a terminal to get your boarding pass and baggage tags, you put your own tags on and drop them off on a conveyor - no airline personnel involved and while there. must have been some somewhere to resolve problems I didn’t notice any.
The flight to Svalbard stops in Tromso where everyone had to get off the plane and go through customs before re-boarding the plane. Apparently Svalbard while being administered by Norway it is a visa free zone that allows entry from other countries (like Russia) so you have to go through customs going in and coming out.
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| Longyearbyen |
We landed in a grey, overcast and drizzly Longyearbyen where there were buses waiting to take us into the town. After the last bag came off the plane the buses left and we had a 5 min drive into town where we were dropped off at the various hotels.
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| The hotel bar |
My hotel, the Radisson Blu, was just fine - nice room, a good location (it's a small town so all locations are pretty good), the most northerly bar in the world and a fine restaurant. After checking in I got a brief intro to the town from the front desk and then set off to explore. I visited the Svalbard Museum which had a nice presentation of the history of the area - whalers, seal hunters, trappers, coal miners, arctic researchers and lately tourists.
Svalbard is the name of the archipelago while Spitsbergen is the name of the island, Longyearbyen is the name of the city, named after John Munro Longyear, an American from Michigan who developed a mining operation on the island.
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| The North Pole Expedition Museum |
The other museum in town, the North Pole Expedition Museum is just down the street so I visited there too. This museum was devoted to the race to be the first to reach the North Pole. While there were many that tried the first accredited persons to reach the pole were Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, and Umberto Nobile, an Italian. They set off from Svalbard in an airship, flew over the pole and landed in Alaska.
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| Colorful houses in Longyearbyen |
I walked around the rest of the town center before retiring to the hotel. The town is not that large and the central area is an easy walk - there is a supermarket, a couple of coffee shops, a pharmacy, several cold weather clothing stores, several gift shops and a few restaurants. In the evening I had a fine meal in the hotel’s restaurant - venison.
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| The Polar Girl |
The next day I had arranged for a boat trip to the Soviet mining town of Pyramiden. I, along with a few other folks, were picked up at the hotel and taken to the dock where we boarded our boat, the good ship Polar Girl.
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| Isfjorden |
There was a perfunctory safety briefing and we were off sailing out of the bay across the Isfjorden towards Pyramiden. I had purchased sea sick pills the previous day and had taken them so I was feeling fine even though there was a bit of a swell. Unfortunately a young lady next to me was not looking so good and likely not feeling so good either. She sat grim faced and didn’t move for most of the crossing.
We saw whales off in the distance - puffs of spray or distant black shapes as they breached. Apparently they were either Minki or Fin Whales.
Every now and then there were small cabins on the coast. Signs of a hard existence of a trapper or miner or someone who liked to be alone.
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| The dock in Pyramiden |
The town of Pyramiden was in a small sheltered inlet called Billetfjorden. We sailed up to the dock where once coal would have been loaded onto ships. The mining operation was abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union and the town was abandoned. Now there are 6 or 7 residents that are caretakers and guides for the tourists.
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| Armed Guide |
We were met on the dock by a couple of guides. They were armed with rifles and carried flares to protect us from the polar bears. Apparently there have been bears in the area and one actually broke into their building a couple of weeks ago. Or perhaps they tell that to everyone just to make things more dramatic.
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| Pyramiden |
The mine was quite active in the 70’s and 80’s and the town was quite large - there were several residential buildings, a canteen/kitchen, administration buildings, a swimming pool (the most northerly one in the world), a gym and a community center. It was sort of a model Soviet community where everything was provided for the miners and their families. It was abandoned fairly quickly when the mine closed and the whole area has a "Chernobyl feel" to it.
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| The most northerly swimming pool in the world |
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| Mr Lenin |
The main avenue was probably quite attractive in its day. It even has a bust of Lenin top of the avenue. We finished the tour in the coffee shop/gift shop area and were given plenty of time to look around before being bused back to the boat dock.
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| The ruins of the coal mine, Pyramiden |
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| Welcome to Pyramiden |
Back at the ship they had prepared quite a tasty lunch on the back deck - salmon, rice and salad - really good.
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| The Nordenskioldbreen Glacier |
We then sailed up the valley towards the Nordenskioldbreen glacier. The ice was quite beautiful - white and ice blue with lots of crevasses. We came as close as we could to the front of the glacier and floated around for a while before turning away.
We headed back but out of Billetfjorden and then stopped to pick up some students who had been camping near the glacier for some time (who knows how long). There were about 25 of them and it took quite a while to ferry them and their gear back to the boat but eventually we got them all on board and we continued toure way back to Longyearbyen.
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| Svalbard at Sunset |
We arrived back in Longbearbyen around 7:00 pm so there was little time to do any more. A dinner of reindeer tenderloin in the hotel restaurant and I was off to bed.
The next day, Sunday, I had arranged for a tour of the Longbearbyen area. The taxi guy showed up and there was only me and one other guy (a Jamaican working for the UN in Geneva) on the tour. The taxi guy was quite informative and humorous. He was the second oldest guy on the island.
There are only 2,500 people on Svalbard and yet there are 52 nationalities. Anyone who is a native of one of the countries that signed the post WWI Spitsbergen Treaty is allowed to live there provided they have a job or resources and a place to live. We also learned that you cannot be born or die on Svalbard unless it is by accident. There is no prenatal care on the island, and no social care for the elderly. So if you are pregnant they make you go to your home country. If you need end of life care or assisted living then you are also sent off.
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| Svalbard Church |
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| The Old Cemetery |
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| Satellite Dishes outside the town |
Our taxi tour took us around the entire town - the old Governor’s House, the original town location that was burnt down by the Germans in WWII, the graveyard on the hillside, the second location for the town (post WWII), the original airport, the sled dog kennels, the last remaining coal mine, the satellite antennas on top of the hill.
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| Beware of the Polar Bears |
Back at the hotel and with the rest of the afternoon free, I set off to walk around many of the places I had been in the morning tour. With one addition, I walked all the way out towards the airport and up the hill to the Global Seed Bank. You cannot enter the Seed Bank but you can see the entry into the mountain repository.
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| The Global Seed Bank |
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| The old coal tub lines to the port |
I walked back to town by a different way on the trail above the coal tub lines that ran from the coal mines out to the port.
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| Sled Dog Kennels |
Back in town, I walked out of the other side of the town to where there were a lot of sled dog kennels. Apparently you cannot keep your sled dogs in town so you have to kennel them outside town. The kennels looked kind of sad with those wonderful dogs cooped up in them for most of the time. It was feeding time at one of the kennels and it erupted into a cacophony of yelps and barks.
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| Statue of a Coal Miner |
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| The Arctic Cathedral |
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| Roald Amundsen |
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| Tromso Cathedral |
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