Early 4.30 am start this morning for a 5.30 am departure to Oslo airport. The group is split into two uneven parties – 150 or so on a chartered 737 from Oslo to Longyearbyen (a flight of 3 hours duration), and about 40-45 people on the scheduled service Oslo – Tromso – Longyearbyen. Much grumbling from the scheduled flight passengers, but the facts of the matter are that the plane can’t hold 199 people and I suspect the Longyearbyen runway can only accommodate a 737 or Airbus 319/320.
The day of boarding the ship is always long and tedious – the turnaround time required the ship means that the previous passengers are departing Longyearbyen on the plane that we arrived on, and the ship’s crew need time to ready the ship for our arrival. Mild panic starts at the airport when the previous group (on a 7-day expedition from Tromso to Longyearbyen) complain that they didn’t see any polar bears. They did not head as far north as we are planning to, so we may have better luck.
Longyearbyen turns out to be an interesting little town of 2000 residents, 500 of whom are under the age of 18 as a result of efforts by the Norwegian government to diversify away from mining to tourism. Longyearbyen has a surprising number of small hotels, a well-stocked supermarket (complete with a taxidermied polar bear), and a few shops selling souvenirs and arctic-grade clothing. This turns out to be helpful for the passenger whose luggage didn’t arrive in Oslo after his departure from Hong Kong. The town also has an excellent museum, devoted to the local wildlife and replicas of the living conditions that used to prevail in the area.
Our ‘local’ guide is Tyler, an undergraduate geology student from Melbourne, who usually conducts his tours in French ;-). Quite a change of scenery for him!We end up boarding the ship around 4pm and set sail around 17:30, destination Ny-Alesund. On the way out of the harbour, we pass the Ortelius (a Russian icebreaker used for Arctic and Antarctic expeditions), and the Hanse Explorer (a charter yacht built for polar expeditions). I last saw the Hanse Explorer in Port Stanley, in 2008-9, where during a hurricane that had all ships hunkered down in the harbour, it managed to drag and tangle its two anchors.
We are too far north to connect to the ship’s internet satellite service (the satellite is below the horizon). So no internet, phone or fax until we approach Greenland.
