I’ve always liked the winter. There’s something about the hush it brings, the way everything is softer and quieter and more gentle. I’ve never minded the cold particularly, at least not when I’m properly bundled up and within easy access of a hot shower or sauna. Despite that, I’ve often found myself avoiding frigid temperatures when I’ve been traveling; I want friends and open fires and warm drinks after a day of tromping around an arctic landscape, and that’s proven hard to arrange. I’ve mostly taken off for warmer climes.

But I made plans to visit friends in Sweden, and that left me with about a week after leaving Vienna. And having been as far south as I was ever likely to get just a few months ago, I figured why not go as far north as I was ever likely to go. So I booked a weekend in Svalbard. It was far easier to get there than Antarctica. There’s daily flights from Oslo, and the cost is less than I was expecting.¹

I found myself flying in to Oslo for the night, then catching a flight out the next morning to Longyearnyen. The first sign that things were a little odd was when we landed in Tromsø² where we were all obliged to disembark the aircraft, cycle through passport control, then get back on board.³ The second sign that things weren’t normal was when the sky started getting dark in early afternoon, about 15 minutes before we landed in Longyearbyen.

After landing at the airport⁴ I caught the bus into town.⁵ The driver upsold me on the return ticket, assuring me if I was worried about losing it I could just take a picture of it and that would work fine. The day I arrived it was unseasonably warm — above freezing — and had been raining as well. As the driver put it, “Rain on permafrost is bad news. But don’t worry about wearing your seatbelt. We are all optimists here.”

The bus dropped me off at my hotel which had the ominous name of The Vault. There was a small footbridge over the pipes which run alongside the road⁶ and on the other side was the hotel, which turned out to be relatively new construction with 50 small but cozy rooms. One of the quirks of the town is you’re required to take off your boots and leave them at the entrance to most places — shops and restaurants excepted — which is a good idea because of the snow and ice but apparently stems more from Svalbard’s coal mining past. It’s a pain in the ass to scrub coal dust out of carpeting.

Longyearbyen was founded in the 19^th century as a coal mining town, and for most of its history that’s been the overwhelming majority of its population. The mines have been closing down over time.⁷ There’s only one still running at this point, but the industry’s been replaced with research and tourism. Svalbard has the distinction of being the closest outpost to the North Pole with routine airline service.⁸ Both my flights were full, taking about 180 people back and forth to Norway every day, and in the summer cruise ship traffic dwarfs even that.⁹

There’s a lot of peculiarities that come from being so distant from the rest of the world. There’s one hospital with just eight beds, so if you need any serious medical care you’re evacuated to Tromsø. For similar reasons if you’re pregnant you’re required to leave the island to give birth; they just don’t have the medical resources to deal with complications.¹⁰ There’s over 300 children living in Longyearbyen so there’s a couple schools for them. I was vaguely worried about food as a vegetarian but there was a bright shiny supermarket right in the middle of town filled with about the same range of stuff you’d expect to find in a midmarket supermarket in Oslo. There’s even a specialty Thai grocery. And there’s a surprisingly good restaurant scene aimed at tourists, even if it’s only a couple dozen restaurants in total.¹¹

I was only there for the weekend, arriving Friday and leaving Monday, and so I booked tours for both Saturday and Sunday. The first morning I went on a tour to an ice cave. During the summer the water that melts off the glacier carves channels which freeze every winter. Over centuries these can get deep enough that snow forms bridges across the top; water still gets in and keeps reshaping the cave that forms but they’re stable enough over the winter you can safely explore them. They’re utterly unique. Not the translucent blue you might imagine from Frozen but an odd mix of rock and stone and ice. Some of the walls you can even see layers a couple inches thick of cloudy white snow (from the winters) alternating with clear layers of ice (from the melt that refroze at the end of the summer). There’s even occasionally a thin dusting of sand suspended in the ice, from storms blowing it up from the beach.

In the evening I had booked a Northern Lights excursion. Svalbard is actually a little too far north to get the best Northern Lights; it’s right on the edge of where you can expect to see them. But because it’s above the Arctic Circle, it does get the lights during the day as well as the night.¹² That’s good, since it was snowing the evening I had booked for the viewing tour. And my morning hike to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was canceled,¹³ but I ended up getting a decent view of them that afternoon instead, when I took a bus tour around the city.

I’d recommend the bus tour as a good introduction to the town; besides a reasonable chance of seeing the Northern Lights during the day you get to see the church¹⁴ and you can get a picture next to the sign warning about the risk of bear attacks.¹⁵ And it does drive up to the Seed Vault, which is worth seeing even if you can’t go inside.¹⁶

But really, I just enjoyed being there. The temperature was cold but not horrifically so, being about seven degrees below freezing for most of the time.¹⁷ It really confirmed my vibe is much more Murder at the End of the World than Glass Onion. I should have stayed a week. I thought about staying longer. I even looked up house prices. I could have stayed forever.

Except, of course, I couldn’t have stayed forever. Visas weren’t an issue. Housing would have been difficult to sort — the government seems disinclined to approve much in new construction, with valid concerns about overdevelopment — but I’m sure eventually I could have managed it. And the cold was honestly a selling point.¹⁸ But there are three stumbling blocks which I think rule it out as a place I could live.

First, I’d struggle to find healthy food I could eat. Norwegian food culture is pretty terrible for vegetarians in general — I tried to find a vegetarian salad at the Oslo train station and basically they all have chicken on them¹⁹ — and while I can make up for it if there’s a wide variety of restaurants to pick from Longyearbyen just doesn’t have that. If I found a place with a kitchen I could cook and the grocery store looked reasonably well-stocked, so this wasn’t exactly a dealbreaker, but it’d be a struggle to get all the ingredients I wanted.

Second, health insurance would be an issue. The hospital is only free if you’re Norwegian, or if you work for a company that has a deal with them. I’ve no idea what getting private insurance would cost, but since if anything serious happens you have to get airlifted to Tromsø I’m sure I don’t want to pay for the coverage. Maybe a year ago I’d have been comfortable with that risk. I’m not sure I am anymore.

But the real issue is the sunlight. I loved the polar night for the three days I was there. I’m sure I would have been fine for a week or two. But I could tell there was something in the back of my mind that was bothering me about it. After a month or two it’d really be weighing on me. Better to stick to small doses.

The rest of my time in Norway was spent at a friend’s place, just taking some time before I caught the train to Sweden where I’m visiting some other friends for a bit. February’s going to be a bit of a holding pattern before I reach Portugal, and that’s going to be a whole thing. I’m trying not to stress about it.

On the flight back from Svalbard it was 15 minutes after take off before we saw the first glimmer of light. It was beautiful, a perpetual sunset with the sun just over the edge of the horizon. It’s three hours direct to Oslo from Longyearbyen and it stayed like that the whole flight, a ring of pink and red and yellow, until the winter night caught up with us and the sun finally set for good.

Next: Stockholm (ARN) to Edinburgh (EDI)
Prev: Vienna (VIE) to Oslo (OSL)

Footnotes

¹ About $300 r/t, if you’re careful.

² It felt a little like a roller coaster landing, since we had to bank around some mountains on the approach and there was a little bit of a crosswind. I had been expecting the same coming in to Longyearbyen but it wasn’t an issue.

³ Svalbard isn’t in the Schengen area, and unlike similar places like the Faroe Islands (where there aren’t any passport controls between there and Denmark) you do get an exit stamp when you leave mainland Norway. Weirdly, though, you don’t pass through any sort of passport control when you enter Svalbard. You don’t even get an entry stamp. If you want one, apparently you have to bug the post office in town for one.

The reason for that is because Svalbard doesn’t have any visa, work, or residency permits. The Norwegian Immigration Act doesn’t apply. If you can turn up, you’re welcome to stay. As a practical matter you’ll probably need permission to transit through Schengen to get here, since the only commercial flights out are to Norway — I suppose working on a cargo ship or research vessel would avoid that problem — and in theory the governor could have you deported if you were indigent or committed a crime, since there aren’t any prisons. But I suspect as long as you weren’t causing trouble you could stay as long as you liked.

There’s some Russian settlements on the islands, although the population’s been declining as the coal’s dried up. Most of the Ukrainians who were living there left in the wake of the war.

⁴ There’s one gate, which handles about two flights a day.

⁵ They only run the bus when a flight arrives so you don’t have to wait too long, although you will need to wait for everyone to get their luggage first.

⁶ All the infrastructure in the town, including the hot water and sewer pipes, has to be built above ground to avoid problems with the permafrost. Even all the buildings are built on stilts so they aren’t in contact with the ground.

One of the tours I was on passed by an abandoned guest house which used to be apartments. It had been built in the 1950s, on cold plates directly on the ground. Apparently in the 90s one of the residents decided to turn off the cooling system and the foundation sunk into the ground, rendering the whole building uninhabitable. Everyone was forced to move.

⁷ Owing more to economics than worries about climate change.

⁸ It’s at 78° 13′ 0″ N. My trip to Antarctica only got to 64° 49′ 31″ S.

⁹ The population of Longyearbyen is about 2,500 people, and the largest cruise ship brings 4,000 passengers to the city.

¹⁰ Ironically, Argentina famously flew pregnant women down to Antarctica in the 1950s to give birth in the hopes it would strengthen any claim they might have of the territory.

¹¹ Lots of tasting menus featuring whale and reindeer and seal meat but a many of them had something vegetarian or vegan on the menu, even if it wasn’t especially healthy. My hotel had a small restaurant selling sushi and ramen which I was quite disappointed to find wasn’t open for lunch.

¹² Although the magnetic field of the Earth tends to channel the radiation from the sun around the pole before it hits the atmosphere, so even then the lights are generally stronger at night, when the Earth is leaning away from the sun.

¹³ The tour guide just … didn’t show up. The worst part is the tour company didn’t even tell me, so by the time I figured it out it was too late to take a different one.

¹⁴ Another place where you’re required to remove your shoes before entering.

¹⁵ Svalbard is particularly known for polar bears. Before I left I was asked multiple times if I was going to need to carry a gun in town. (The answer was no, although one of the guides for the Northern Lights excursion was carrying both a rifle and a flare gun. The flare gun isn’t to get help; it’s to shoot at the feet of polar bear to try and scare it away.)

The risk of polar bears is markedly low within the boundaries of Longyearbyen; they go up markedly when you get out into the wilderness. I didn’t see any, and I get the sense if that’s your sort of thing you’ll want to go in summer, both because that’s when the boat tours are running up the coast and because that’s when you have a fighting chance of spotting them before they’re right on top of you.

¹⁶ Svalbard is kind of ideal for a seed repository. The vault is located up the side of a mountain, above the flood level if the polar ice caps were to melt. It’s tectonically stable so there’s minimal risk of earthquakes. The coal mines provide a locally available power source if they get cut off from the mainland. The seeds are refrigerated to -18°C but if the power gets cut the permafrost should keep the vault below freezing for centuries.

Of course, that timing depends on current climate projections. It feels like every time I mention the Seed Vault someone brings up the fact that it flooded five years ago, usually with a tone that implies the designers were schmucks for not anticipating it. What’s clear now in a way it wasn’t 20 years ago is that the Arctic and the Antarctic regions are heating up much faster than the rest of the world. Svalbard has the distinction of having the greatest gain in average temperature of anywhere on Earth over the last 50 years. The seeds are fine, they’ve taken steps to fix the issues, and snide comments targeting people taking concrete steps to deal with the climate emergency seem mean-spirited and nihilistic.

¹⁷ For the first time I bought winter boots and long underwear to travel with, and remembered to take the hat I had picked up in the Antarctic with me when I left NYC. After I visited the ice cave I ended up buying a very nice pair of mittens as well, partially because of the temperature, partially because I ended up touching the walls enough while navigating the place that I got a little bit of frostburn.

You’d probably want snow pants and a decent sweater if you were going to be outside for any serious length of time. But I mostly didn’t even bother with the long underwear.

¹⁸ Maybe I’d feel differently after six months of winter. I kind of doubt it.

¹⁹ This is a lie. Sometimes they have shrimp or tuna.

I did eventually find one green salad after checking five places but it was beetroot and goat cheese, and I’m not the biggest fan of beets. I ended up with a pasta salad with vegan chicken on it. I’ve been avoiding meat substitutes because they’re heavily processed, but at least it’s half leafy greens.