One night, we left calm coastal waters to lurch across the rough Barents Sea. We docked the next day at Longyearbyen, a town on Spitzbergen Island in the Svalbard archipelago.
A former coal-mining colony, Svalbard’s largest settlement is a village teeming with an eclectic international community of Arctic adventurers, students, scientists and tourists. Visitors are asked to remove their shoes — even inside shops and businesses.
After more than a week of healthy Norwegian cuisine, we binged on a basket of fries and beers in a pub at a Radisson Blu hotel.
The next day, we stopped at Ny-Alesund (”New Alesund”), another former mining site and now a research station hosting scientists from 20 glaciology and climate institutes from 10 countries. There, among the permafrost and treeless landscape, 100 researchers study the effects of climate change on the Arctic.
From this spot at King’s Bay, polar explorer Roald Amundsen in May 1926 launched an airship that would cross the North Pole 700 miles away.
While the whipping wind and 30-degree temperatures coaxed me to return to the warmth of our ship, Heidi was mesmerized. Maybe, she said, it was the contrast between a dozen scattered century-old wooden buildings set against the burst of vibrant green moss on permafrost. Or perhaps it was the starkness of a blue-tinged glacier in the distance winding its way to the sea.