The Lonely Svalbard Islands Reveal Their Desolate Terrain

Much of our cruise up the coast of Norway has included visits to islands. Our final experience would also be on an island, a large island some distance off the coast of Norway and much farther north. We would be crossing the Barents Sea to reach the Svalbard Islands and the town of Longyearbyen

The crossing of the Barents Sea was the challenging part. First we experienced more rocking of the boat during the crossing. Fortunately we had pretty good weather so the rocking wasn’t too bad. Nevertheless, there were a few times when walking was difficult. We felt like drunken sailors.

The other challenging part was that we were at sea for a long time period with no landings and no view of land. This made for a somewhat long day. While the cruise offered some experiences, they were not enough to fill the day adequately. They had a number of lectures. The one we did attend was how to take photos with your camera phone. While much of it was basic photo composition rules, I did learn a few things. They also offered a demonstration and tasting on cooking shrimp. We passed on that one.

Jacob and Andrea had discovered a board game in the library and had played it off and on so that’s how we passed a good portion of the day. Jacob was reading, but Andrea, Silvette and I played a number of games. It was a way to pass the day. Towards the end of the day we did begin to see some land again, and I finally took a few photos.

Tuesday morning at 8:00 am we were notified that we were passing a glacier which is well known in Norway and well researched. Everyone was encouraged to come out on deck and see the glacier and hear about its story. I went up to check it out, but I didn’t find the glacier that exciting. When we went to Alaska in 2021, we took a day cruise out to see a glacier. I felt that glacier was much more interesting than this one in Norway. We could see the ice falling from that glacier. This one seemed pretty tame, perhaps because we were in a larger ship.

Since we were cruising near the Svalbard Islands now, we saw a number of scenic sites other than the glacier. We passed some mountains that had areas of red soil. It reminded me of the Painted Hills in Oregon we visited two years ago.

We didn’t arrive in Longyearbyen until 1:00 pm. However, because this was our last day on the cruise, we had to vacate our rooms by 10:00 am. We packed everything up and put our suitcases under the stairwells in the departure level. After talking to the staff, I was under the impression we could leave our luggage there until we left to go to the airport. Unfortunately that wasn’t true. We realized the truth when we found our luggage sitting on the dock.

The plan was to take a shuttle bus from a hotel in Longyearbyen out to the airport. We decided to take our luggage over to the hotel to see if they would store it for the day. They could. In fact they had a whole room dedicated to storing baggage without charging us. We inquired as to when the shuttle bus would come and then took off to see what we could see in Longyearbyen.

It was a beautiful sunny day in this Arctic city. It wasn’t as cold as we thought it might be. The area is quite barren. There are no trees to speak of, and everything is brown, not green. One of the interesting aspects of the town is the houses. They built the same house all in a row in a number of places. In some they painted the different units in different colors, but some were all the same color.

We saw the local church which claims to be the northern most church in the word. We saw it from a distance, but didn’t go over to visit it as many churches are not open to the public in Norway.

The cruise had warned us about polar bears. They are considered quite dangerous. People are not supposed to leave the city limits out of concern for polar bears. There are some polar bear warning signs around which are quite famous in their own right. Unfortunately we didn’t see any polar bears or warning signs around town.

Another unique aspect of the town was the snowmobiles. The streets didn’t have snow at this point, but there were rows of snowmobiles in various places along with warning signs about them.

We mostly spent our time in Longyearbyen visiting the local shops. We felt it was important to support the local economy by buying a few things. A number of store had local crafts for sale from the Sami people who are the indigenous people of the area. We bought a few things along the way.

After visiting the shops we walked down to the waterfront to see the sights from there. We passed by a powerful stream of melting snow which was quite muddy as it flowed quickly down to the fjord. The nearby hills had some snow on them, but most of it had already melted.

Returning to the business area, we enjoyed some coffee and tea with a cinnamon bun at a local coffee shop. Finally it was time to get to the airport. The shuttle bus picked us up and dropped us off at the airport which was not too far away. When we were dropped off, we were more interested in the sign in front of the airport. Finally we saw the famous polar bear warning sign. Inside we did a self check-in and then waited for our flight. It was a full flight to Oslo which lasted nearly three hours.

When we got to Oslo, we were surprised to learn we had to go through a passport check. That I couldn’t understand. The Svalbard Islands are part of Norway so I couldn’t understand why we needed to go through a passport check. Apparently it has to do with how the Svalbard Islands relate to Norway. Waiting for our turn took perhaps a half hour. It was getting later and later.

We finally got through the passport control, got our baggage, and then tried to figure out the train schedule into town. Everyone was tired and grumpy by this time. We finally got on the train which took about 35 minutes to get to our stop. We then had to figure out how to get to our hotel. Andrea led the way. Unfortunately I ended up tripping and falling down on the cement. Fortunately I had no major injuries, just some scrapes.

However, things got worse when we got to the hotel. I didn’t have a reservation for the hotel. It seems there are a number of hotels in this chain with the same name, and Andrea and I had booked at different hotels. We were at her hotel. The clerk called us a cab which took us to our hotel. We were so tired by this time we basically just got to our room and fell into our bed. Tomorrow we would begin to discover what Oslo has for us. Tonight, we just wanted to sleep.