With just 2400 residents and a lot of ice, Svalbard’s main town of Longyearbyen will become easier to visit next year thanks to a new ship route. Read the story in our spring issue of Fin Magazine, which is out on Friday, August 19.
The scientist beside me – a French Canadian wearing Blundstones – is visiting Svalbard to study permafrost. We’re at 78 degrees north, surrounded by a monumental landscape of iced peaks and dark valleys hewn by Arctic glaciers, so she’s come to the right place.
A fully refurbished MS Trollfjord with nostalgic touches – new features include floor-to-ceiling windows on the upper decks and a show kitchen for cooking classes and tastings – will ply the adapted 16-day return coastal route from Bergen to Svalbard. Shorter, 10-day sailings will also be available.The ship will hug the coast to Honningsvag, at 71 degrees north, before striking across the Norwegian Sea to Svalbard via Bear Island.
A Norwegian nurse named Sylvie with a feeling for snow tells fireside stories of polar pioneers and, of course, polar bears. A powerful swimmer,spends most of its life on sea ice hunting seals, which it can smell up to 32 kilometres away. The bear feeds by filleting off the seal’s fatty blubber and leaves the protein-rich meat for its cubs.
For starters, there’s not a single tree anywhere close to Longyearbyen. Short-legged Svalbard reindeer roam free around town, nibbling on arctic tundra, and that’s as green as it gets. The mountains are bare, immense, confronting. Our silent, electric-powered boat stops close to the melting edge of the sheet ice, not far from a sleeping seal. A toothpaste-white glacier glints in the sun, towering over the old Soviet utopia: frozen in time, and just frozen.It’s wild and bright and cold. A man asks his friend to leave him in his wheelchair alone on the bow, and he sits there surrounded by ice and sky, his head raised ecstatically to the summer sun that never sets.’s regular Coastal Express sailing.
The mountains here are forested to their snowy caps, the meadows fringed by rocky shores and inky fjords. Unlike many countries with long coastlines, the Norwegians have resisted overdevelopment and uglification. Even the farmyards appear Scandi-perfect.The Svalbard archipelago has a 400-year human history, a saga of exploration, settlement and exploitation: fishing, whaling, trapping, mining.
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