When you’re in the Arctic, you expect to see some things.
You want to see polar bears. You want to see the Northern Lights. You want to see snow and ice everywhere, and maybe a glacier or two.
But did you know that Longyearbyen, Norway?a town of 2,000 people located inside the Arctic Circle?has all of those things? And then some!
It’s true: Longyearbyen is home to not only the world’s northernmost university campus but also the world’s northernmost museum and art gallery. It’s even got a church that is literally carved out of rock! And if that weren’t enough, it boasts an annual population of over 30,000 reindeers (yes, really).
But what happens when it gets dark? What do people do when there are no sunsets or sunrises? When we visited this wintery wonderland during Polar Night (the longest continuous period of darkness on Earth), I have found out!
Let’s start from the beginning
My journey started in Bergen in the south of Norway.
Early in the morning at 7:00 I had the first flight of the day to Tromso in the north of Norway.
I encourage you to see and subscribe to the Szymon-travels channel on YouTube, where you will also find video reports from Svalbard.
The plane flies almost meridian which causes an interesting effect on the right side of the plane outside the window you can see the sun which is below the horizon line and on the left side there is darkness.
In Tromso I was only a few hours change at terminal C and then the flight to Longyearbyen.
In Tromso at this time of year the sun never rises above the horizon, so whether it’s 9am when I arrived or after 12 noon when I left everything looks the same. With every minute of the flight north, there was less and less daylight outside the window.
The Spitsbergen airport is very small, the baggage claim strip, baggage check-in hall, security desk, etc. are all in one place, a few meters apart.
Transport from Airport
Transport logistics is very well correlated, after leaving the Terminal (i.e. a hall with a baggage belt, it is a micro scale by European standards) coaches are waiting for us, a kind of local transport. Just put your luggage in the hold and get on the bus. Once everyone is on board, the driver with the card terminal walks around and collects 100 Norwegian Crowns for the ticket, and asks where to stop.
After about 8 minutes of driving (I encourage you to see the film https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNBCI8eWLGvM8U8MnJ1vpmpp1yeRF07u_ on the Szymon Travels channel) I reached my Hotel.
Hotel?
Yes, Longyearbyen is about 1,300 km from the North Pole at the 78th parallel, however it is still a place where people have adapted to the extreme climate, so we have 1 supermarket, probably 3 hotels, a university. Of course, all in scale, the entire archipelago Svalbard has 2,600 inhabitants, of which 2,000 live in Longyearbyen.
I arrived after 2 pm, the photo above is taken at 3:05 pm as you can see it is dark. This is the polar night. 24 hours a day outside the window is the same view, nothing changes, the only thing that will tell me that it is already morning is the watch.
Habits
The first thing you encounter is a changing room in front of the reception on the left. Okay, but why? The custom that everyone respects is to leave the shoes on the shelf and then we go in socks. The shoes are on a shelf, there are no key lockers or other forms of security, they just stand and no one will take them away.
The hotel is very nice, so if you want to go to Svalbard, but you don’t want to use Hostel or bunk beds anymore, I recommend Radison.
The main street stretches from the bay up the valley. You need special shoes to walk around the area. Ordinary mountain or trekking footwear does not work, the surface is very slippery, especially on the edges of the road, I found out myself getting off the bus that brought me from the airport.
I encourage you to see and subscribe to the Szymon-travels channel on YouTube, where you will also find video reports from Svalbard.
These shoes are designed to withstand the temperature of -40C, of course you should also wear woolen socks and two pairs.
Some information comes from these sources:
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyearbyen, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
