Svalbard - Intro

29 Jun 2019 . category: Travel . Comments
#Svalbard

I’m back with a couple of posts about a short four-day trip I took to Svalbard in June 2019!

Background

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago that’s very very far North. It’s located at 78 degrees latitude, about 650 miles from the North Pole. The main town of Longyearbyen (population ~2k) is the northernmost human settlement with over a thousand people. My guess is that at some point during this trip, we were amongst the top 200 most-northernly people in the world (not counting any planes flying over the Arctic). It has several other random claims to fame, all related to its geographic position:

• It’s the location of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
• Due to the threat of polar bears, they’re the islands where guns are required.
• It’s “illegal” to die there.
• There are four months of continuous sunlight every summer, with a corresponding four months of darkness each winter. Thankfully, we were visiting during the former, though I am now tempted to return during the winter. This also means that during the “normal” four months a year, the times of sunset/sunrise shift roughly thirty minutes everyday.
• It’s the location of the polar bears in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I suspect is where I first encountered the world “Svalbard,” though I probably didn’t know it was a real place back then…

Going very far north like this has always been on my (long) travel-list, and being in London for a work trip in June was the perfect opportunity to do so. It was my first time being north of the Arctic Circle (we sadly got within one latitude degree in Iceland) as well as my first time seeing the midnight sun. This was also somewhat-planned to be a birthday trip, as I turned 25 while there. Getting 24 hours of sun for my 25th birthday was pretty sweet!

When I started shopping this trip around to friends, I expected to get ~1.5 people to come with me, but was pleasantly surprised to end up with four. Two others flew from London with me (Michal and Daniel) and two made the more arduous journey from New York (Dore and Duff).

Getting There

Those of us flying from London did so with a stop in Oslo, whereas Dore and Duff took a red-eye from NYC the night before, had lunch at Maaemo and met us in Oslo. Part of the reason I didn’t expect to get so much interest in the trip was figuring that no one would want to do so much flying for just 3 or 4 days in Svalbard…but I was wrong! The flights were pretty uneventful, though I think the LHR-OSL leg is the latest I’ve ever boarded a plane? We were admonished by the gate agent for showing up so late…though one guy did manage to make it on after us, so we weren’t the last. Note that Longyearbyen isn’t in the Schengen Area, and it’s possible to do a non-Schengen transfer at the Oslo Airport, which saves one from having to clear passport control twice.

I realized ahead of time that it would be basically impossible for me to make a McDonald’s trip in Norway, as there isn’t one in the Oslo Airport, and we were otherwise spending the entire trip in Svalbard where there also isn’t one. This was pretty sad, as I’ve almost been to McDonald’s in every country that I’ve visited where it’s available. But my incredible friends really pulled through. As a total surprise to me, Duff and Dore greeted me at the airport with some McDonald’s they’d purchased while in Oslo—perhaps the best gift I’ve ever received!

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