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If you can make it to Svalbard, it's worth it. It's like nothing I have ever seen before or since. Pictures don't do it justice.
by canjobear 6y ago
If you can make it to Svalbard, it's worth it. It's like nothing I have ever seen before or since. Pictures don't do it justice.
- cozzyd 6y agoI'm definitely interested in making it there! I need to find an excuse to do some research at Ny Alesund though. I've been to the South Pole and I figure Ny Alesund is the northernmost I can reasonably go (My current record for positive latitude is ~72.6 N at Summit Station, Greenland. Ny-Alesund would get me an extra 6 degrees.)
- dheera 6y agoI went to Svalbard in the dead of winter. Very fun experience, not seeing the sun for a week straight. The downside of Svalbard though is that it's very difficult to randomly explore on your own. There aren't any roads outside the settlements, and you need a rifle and a snowmobile and government registration to go anywhere outside it. Snowmobiles can be bought but are almost impossible to rent; rifles can be rented but if you don't have skills you can't expect to suddenly have them when faced with a polar bear in a life-threatening situation. There is zero infrastructure outside the settlements so it's not a joke. So ultimately I was mostly confined to the town of Longyearbyen and vinicity but it was fun anyway. I managed to get to Bjorndalen and a couple of other nearby places via some locals who I found on Facebook, but that's about as far as I was able to get. Don't expect the same level of exploration freedom you could get by, say, renting a car in Canada or whatever. The thing I found most fascinating about Longyearbyen, ironically, is how normal life was there at a town so close to the north pole. People had gigabit internet access, a couple of bars, and a supermarket. Nothing was out of the ordinary, really, except for the lack of the sun.