Here begins a day-by-day account of my bucket-list Arctic-Ocean-circling travels, mostly by cruise ship.
The Polar Bear report, published a few days ago, was a special case, and the obvious star attraction, which is why I produced it and published it first. Next I produced a shorter video with the highlights of the week spent cruising in and around the island of Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Norway. I’ll present that first.
And now we’ll get into more detail.
Day One started with a charter flight into Longyearbyen, Svalbard from Oslo, Norway. Before getting on the cruise ship, we had a chance to tour the town of a few thousand people, dubbed the northernmost city in the world (defined as a settlement with more than 1000 people). Here is the downtown, which features a pedestrian-only walkway running 7 or 8 blocks from near the shore up the valley toward the glacier you see in the background. In the foreground left is a statue honoring an early coal miner. It was the coal in the area that first attracted settlers.
The town is named after John Munro Longyear, an American industrialist, who visited the area in 1901, bought many mining claims, and began commercially mining in the area in 1906, founding the town to support the operation.
I had the opportunity to ramble around the town for several hours, spotting the abundant barnacle geese in a wetland featuring the iconic Arctic cottongrass.
I had a chance to walk to the best viewpoint of the valley, a bit out of town but still within the protected polar bear perimeter.
Because of the presence of polar bears, it is not safe to walk in the open country beyond the perimeter without carrying a shotgun. Just the day before we were there, a polar bear dragged a person who was camping outside of town out of their tent and seriously injured them.
Some of the tundra plants were still blooming, although summer was coming to the close and although the season of midnight sun at this latitude doesn’t end until August 27th. Here’s a white Arctic poppy struggling in the wind and fighting off the misty rain with the temperature in the low 40’s F.
We boarded the ship, a small one carrying just 192 passengers (plus crew) about 4PM and settled in, went through some mandatory drills and briefings, and then set sail. On the way out I grabbed a photo of the heart-shaped mini-glacier on the hillside near the mouth of the fjord, which I had first spotted from my window seat on the plane, flying in. Also see the feature photo at the top of this post.
We had just emerged beneath the clouds as we made our approach to the airport, and this was that lasting first impression that will always stay with me.
Early the next morning we headed up a Fjord called Lillehöökfjorden where I got my first good glacier views.
Before we even reached our first scheduled stop, the Expedition Leader came on the PA system and announced a polar bear sighting. Everybody scrambled out onto the top deck. Here’s my first photo, which gives you an idea of how far away it was.
My $300 point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot camera, with its 40x zoom, brings this female bear into pretty good focus.
That ‘pocket camera’ can compete with top-of-the-line cellphone cameras and with bulky professional cameras that cost three times as much and up. With it, I got some good video of this bear, included in the Polar Bear post published earlier.
After spending an hour or so watching this bear foraging along the gravel shoreline, we headed on to our destination, the Lillehöökbreen glacier at the head of the fjord.
We piled into the ‘Zodiacs’ – basically motorized rubber rafts – and headed out for a view of birds and icebergs and the calving front of the glacier. The Zodiac I was on was piloted by a real character:
Don’t let the garb fool you. Marcel is no Viking. He is a Costa Rican PhD biologist and forest ranger from a family of research Astrophysicists. Here are the highlights of our cruise among the icebergs on a beautiful afternoon, when the sun broke through for a few hours–the only blue-sky time we had in Svalbard:
I picked up a clear-ice mini-berg and brought it back to my room. The clear ice is formed when melt-water fills crevices in the glacier and then re-freezes. Lillehöökbreen glacier is in the background.
I used that thousand-year-old ice in my drinks that evening (just a coke, thankyouverymuch). Refreshing!
As we headed out of Lillehöökfjorden later in the evening, the wind was nearly calm and the sea almost like glass. I got this parting photo of at the mouth of the fjord before we headed out to sea and on northward toward the north end of Spitsbergen Island. Stay tuned for the next report.