June 23 - Longyearbyen in the Spitsbergen Islands

As forewarned, there was no Internet connection from the Spitsbergen Island, so here we are "the morning after".

Our day in the most northerly point of our trip was sunny and about 5C. The air was crystal clear, with a crisp quality to the light.

We were told that the Islands have a vegetation coverage of only about 7%, with glaciers covering around 60%, and the rest is bare. They have a stark beauty, as we first saw from the ship as we approached.

How is this for an isolated house:

The main settlement of the islands occurred in the early 1900's when coal mining companies established villages for their workers. I had assumed that our port, Longyearbyen, was a purely Nowegian name, but in fact it was named for an American mine owner surnamed Longyear. Coal mining remains a major industry and we saw signs of it as soon as we disembarked.

These entrepreneurial boys are not running a lemonade stand - that's lumps of coal that they are selling to us tourists!

And the girls in the background are selling fossils.

The ship's passengers outnumbered the town's population, but the residents were well prepared for our invasion. I am sure there are stores for the residents somewhere, but all we saw during our time in town were the tourist shops (Norwegian knits by the hundreds), and several Arctic outfitters' stores as well since this is the launching place for scientific expeditions northward to the North Pole. We saw a cavalcade of Zodiacs ferrying luggage and supplies out to one ship anchored in the harbour.

There is a fine museum in town where we saw the Islands' most famous wildlife...

and some favourites of mine from a Newfoundland trip - puffins:

The museum also had a film with the best time-lapse photography of glaciers "surging" that I have ever seen. These showed Spitsbergen glaciers flowing several meters a day until they got back into equilibrium and slowed down again. Fascinating! There is likely a good clip of this on Youtube.

Polar bear signs were everywhere in Longyearbyen.

We were told not to walk outside the town. The townspeople carry guns for protection against the bears when they travel, and many of the shops had signs at their doors saying not to bring weapons inside. But as these were tourist shops, I imagine these signs were for our benefit.

There was a parking lot for the townpeople's snowmobiles - their most common form of transportation:

The houses reflect the town's origins as a mining town, but they are painted different colours to achieve variety.

A boat in the harbour reminded me of the colours the boats in Malta are painted:

The harbour was at the edge of town. If you walked the wrong way, away from Longyearbyen, you faced this "Yield to polar bears" sign:

 

The Norwegian words mean "applies to all of Svalbard".

We were back on the ship by mid-afternoon, and we decided that this was the perfect day to order Tea for Two in our room. (yes, it's really called that on the room service menu). Here's what two waiters brought us:

This was way over the top... Scones on the top plate, then clotted cream and strawberry jam, then savouries, then cookies, then cakes. Good grief! was about all we could say (besides Katherine wishing they had included a teapot for the tea, and not just a vacuum container of hot water).

Needless to say, there is plenty left over for us to have today. You certainly don't go hungry aboard a ship.

Then it was sailaway time, and we headed back down south, past these unusual and beautiful islands.

We went up on deck at midnight to have our pictures taken in the midnight sun. We'll see how they turned out tonight.