After a very tiring and energetic day doing dog sledding, we decided that another pizza at the place next door was a good idea. Trekking even 500 metres at minus 15 can be quite a feat in itself. In fact the evening seemed to fly by and I definitely needed sleep when I made it to bed.
In the morning, I convinced myself that a run around the town would be a nice closure to my trip and I ran by myself down to the harbour and saw the 3 masted schooner which is taken up into the Fjord in a few weeks to be frozen in the ice and act as a hotel in the middle of nowhere for dog sled trips etc. Also ran past what must be the most northerly Toyota dealership in the world and took plenty of pictures to remind myself of how compact the town of Longyearbyen really is. After returning and having the pleasure of a shower, a long breakfast and plenty of hot coffee we had a quick stroll through the shops. I was keen to get an accurate map of the local area so that I can map the dog sled run (from my GPS watch) onto it and finally ended up with map C9 which has some really good detail and shows much more of the contours around Bolterdalen (where we did the dog sledding) and Longyearbyen.
After checking out, we also made a trip as far up the mountain to the west of Longyearbyen. It got pretty steep pretty quickly and the snow was pretty deep but we managed to get well away from the street lamps and managed, again, to see some streaks of the northern lights as they went across the sky and back again. It was the most amazing IMAX experience you could get by lying down in the snow and gazing up at the clear sky with the full moon and greenish streaks of the lights. Looking South you could just see the faintest tinge of white and red on the horizon which was the maximum of the Svalbard day and to the North, across Advent Fjord you could just see the mountains. I hope that some of the long exposure pictures we captured can show in some way the experience we had but I strongly doubt it :-(
At 1pm the bus took us from the hotel to the airport and to the one single flight per day in and out of Longyearbyen (in fact there are only five per week). After we left, the airport was surely closed up again until the following day. I was sad to leave Svalbard as it has been such a special place and I have so many amazing memories of my visit (and just from 2 days).
Back in Tromso, we made our way back to "Bed and Books" and went out for some food to cook. What a surprise when we ended up with a pizza to cook ourselves - plus garlic bread. We also had some champagne - curtesy of British Airways (which I was given by the Purser on my flight out) which was nice to celebrate (finally) our race on Saturday. We sat eating with a couple who were also staying at B&B. Daniel (a Swede) and Hina (British) have spent the last year travelling around the world and had ended up here to see the northern lights before starting back to work in Singapore at the end of January. Unfortunately at that moment it was heavily snowing so not much chance tonight.
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| Daniel and Hina |
After dinner, we went for a walk in the warmer (zero degrees) conditions, but it was now very windy (the snow had stopped) and I am so glad we did not have to run the race on this day rather than Saturday. After taking some pictures in the new snow we ended up in a bar and enjoyed some local Mack beer (Worlds most northerly brewery). Had long conversations with
Daniel and Hina as well as a drunk oil worker (recently off a rig in the Norwegian sea) and a fisherman off his boat. Two jobs that I'm not sure I could cope with in the artic winter!
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