Svalbard
Trip Start
Jul 12, 2007
1
2
44
Trip End
Apr 13, 2008
Longyearbyen, Norway
Friday, July 13, 2007
I have put some of the photos I took on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/markjenner/sets/72157601064361661/
The flight up there was via Oslo, we landed there at about 8:30pm and left just as the sun was setting around 10:30pm. Because of the 24hr daylight, the sun never got a chance to set as we flew north to Longyearbyen, and I did not see darkness again until I returned to London almost 2 weeks later. The flight upto Longyearbyen from Oslo took just under 3 hours, and was on a standard jet (Boeing 737 to be exact), which surprised me, I was expecting a much smaller plane, but it seems there are quite regular flights up there.
I stayed the night in a hotel in Longyearbyen and had most of the day to explore before we boarded the ship in the afternoon. It is a small place but for such a remote location has a surprisingly big permanent population of around 1500 people. It did not take long to explore and I entertained myself by sending a couple of postcards and having a bacon sarnie in a cafe.
It was exciting to board the boat and explore my new home for the next 10 days. I was sharing a cabin and it turned out that my new roomie was also called Mark. In fact he also worked at RBS in the same building as me and lived just down the road! How weird, but fortunately he was a really nice guy and we had quite a lot of fun. The boat was called the Akademik Segey Vavilov, and was excellent. Well setup and in very good condition, overall the trip was superbly run by the Perigrine staff who were all helpful and were a great set of personalities.
We first sailed up the West coast of Spitsbergen, heading North. We had great weather for the first 5 days, calm and sunny with loads of blue sky, which turned out to be a real boon. Our first stop was a Ny Alesund, a research station and where Amundsen lauched his airship for the first crossing of the North Pole. The next day we walked on the Tundra, seeing various birds and other wildlife as well as geographic formations unique to the tundra. The sadest thing was the huge amount of rubbish that was on the beach. It all washes up from the gulf stream and ends up on the shores of Svalbard. We collected ove 50 kgs on the way back to the Zodiacs on our return to the ship.In the afternoon we were in the Zodiacs to cruise along the ice cliffs of the Monaco glacier. The weather was great and it turned out to be a spectacular day amonst the icebergs and ice floes and then several large chunks of the glacier calved in front of us sending large waves in our direction and scattering all the feeding sea birds in an awesome display of nature. Unfortunately this spectacle is occurring too often and the glacier is retreating at a quick rate.
(I am returning to this about 1 month after starting so it is going to be a bit more abbreviated now)
In the following days we headed past 80 degrees north (less than a 1000kms from the north pole!) searching for the sea ice and the polar bears that hunt for seals on it. We found the ice and spent a spectacular day sailing along it, but we had no luck finding any bears. We visited an amazing bird colony along the cliffs, and saw an Arctic fox stealing off with an egg. The sea ice had closed the straights between spitzbergen and its neightbouring island so we headed back the way we came to come around the southern tip of the island instead.
The weather started to pack up, and it was mostly low cloud for the rest of the voyage, as we visited more amazing coast lines, glacier bays and bird colonies. We saw a couple of bears in the end, one in the water and another sleeping on the tundra, but sadly neither was close or particularly active. Despite our good luck with the amount of sea ice that was around, we never saw a bear on it. Nevertheless, I think seeing and being amongst the sea ice was one of the most amazing aspects of the trip. It was a very foreign, wild and constantly changing landscape.
