Cruise day 1

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Early morning checkout from hotel with transport to Oslo airport. There is something about guided tours that is a bit lazy….everything just happens. The trade off is that you spend a bit of time waiting for others but I think this is more than outweighed by the fact that it is all laid on for you.

A two hour flight to Tromsø on the Norwegian coast, followed by a bizarre deplaning, checkout, passport control and check-in through a separate gate, getting back on the same plane in the same seat! We worked out later that this is because Longyearbyen is outside of the Schengen customs zone which explains the extra layer of beauracracy. Airport signs in Norwegian, English and Russian suggest we are heading to a unique part of the world. Norway is FULL of lakes. There must be thousands of them. Mountains, snowdrifts, and lake after lake after lake!

Tromsø to Longyearbyen is another 2 hours, mostly over water. Longyearbyen is the largest settlement in Svalbard, on the island of Spitzbergen. It is a town of about 2000 people, and in spite of it’s remote location it seems to have all the trappings of modern Norway. We were dropped at the Radisson Blu hotel for a couple of hours of secure luggage storage, allowing a stroll up the main street. Every store you would expect to find in a tourist town’s main street was there. Free internet access in a café allowed us to send a final email to the kids prior to boarding the boat. (It turns out the boat has on board text-based emails so we were able to keep regular contact).

The town is relatively flat but surrounded by bald but snowcapped mountains, with the detritus of a century of coal mining on open display.

We board our boat, the MS Expedition, at 4pm and bags miraculously turn up at our room – cabin 311. A mandatory safety drill, life jackets, life boats and thermal suits and we are on the way. We are also introduced to the concept of expedition cruising and it becomes obvious that the key to a successful cruise is to maximize the time spent outdoors, or at least at a window with a good view. We are warned that all plans, agendas and timetables are subject to change to best suit the conditions (weather, ice and bears).

Part of our deal was the complimentary goose down jackets, which weigh about 4kg each but are the most sensationally warm garments we have ever worn. Retail price $595 but supposedly included in our ticket price.

We headed out of Adventfjorden in a northerly direction. The mountains get more and more craggier, with more and more snow, interspersed with glaciers. The only wildlife we can see are birds in abundance.

Dinner is a four course extravaganza. Food is plentiful, good quality, served to all 125 guests at once.

In this part of the world, there is no night at this time of year. The sun moves around the sky, higher or lower at times, but never dips below the horizon. At 2 am it can be clear and brighter than at 2 pm (if the afternoon was overcast). And it’s a little disconcerting because the ship will wake everyone at 1 am for a whale spotting. For the record, blue whales might be the biggest creatures ever in existence, but they don’t breach, and generally are the same colour as the water (i.e. blue) so there isn't a lot to see here...move along please.

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Comments

[Liddy]

Hi
Nice Bird. Does it have a beard?