Country Images Magazine North Edition November 2016 | Page 10

Approaching Monacobreen glacier - our first ice.

We were cruising to the north of Svalbard in
the Spitzbergen archipelago, a mere twenty
degrees from the North Pole. Our ship, the M.V.
G-Expedition was taking us in search of wildlife
in the Arctic, especially polar bears. These we
were fortunate to see, together with walrus,
seals, arctic fox, blue whales and thousands of sea
birds, together with the tiny flowers of plants and
miniature trees that manage to grow, bloom and
set seed within a summer lasting only a month
or so.
The flight from Oslo to Longyearbyen, the
‘capital’ of Svalbard was not without its
excitement. Rather than fly direct we had to
land and temporarily disembark at Tromsø, in
northern Norway. The reason behind this is
because the Russians who have a presence on
Svalbard despite it being sovereign Norwegian
territory, insist on being shown the passenger
manifest of every inward flight.

Into the ice!

Riding on Zodiacs can be quite exciting.

Landing at Longyearbyen in broad daylight
despite the late hour told us we were now in
the land of the midnight sun, and we were not
going to see a sunset for another fortnight.
Originally a whaling station, then a coal mining
town it was founded at the beginning of the
20th century by the American industrialist John
Munro Longyear. With the demise of coal
mining in the past 18 months, the local economy
now relies heavily on tourism. Governed by a
sysselman, actually a woman at the moment,
appointed by the Norwegian government, she
(or he) has total jurisdiction over the lives of
the 2,642 people living on the 23,561 square
miles of Svalbard. Surrounded by un-named
peaks covered by permanent snow, beneath one
of which is the world seed vault, Longyearbyen
looks and is a bleak, dreary ex-colliery town;
that is until mining was stopped after a series
of tragic accidents. Scattered across the narrow
valley are houses, some of them painted in bright
primary colours, a few shops and two hotels
together with a community hall and a school far
larger than would appear to be needed by the
handful of children living on the island. At one
time Russians were the main employees of the
mining companies, but the few that are left are
concentrated at Barentsberg further down the
Isfjorden.

Wildlife is plentiful, and as wholesale hunting
is banned it was not surprising to come across a
trio of wild reindeer wandering around the town,
completely oblivious to us humans.
10 | CountryImagesMagazine.co.uk