Postcard from Svalbard
The best way to appreciate the geopolitical significance of Svalbard — an archipelago on the Arctic circle — is to look at an atlas of the North Pole. Around the edge of the polar icecap are five countries, each roughly equidistant from the pole. Clockwise, they are Greenland, Canada, Alaska (USA), Russia and Svalbad. Dwarfed by the others, but nonetheless much larger than say Denmark, the Svalbard islands have been historically the starting point for explorers to access the North Pole. It was originally called Spitsbergen, after the prominent mountain on the main island, but today Spitsbergen is the name of the largest island, Svalbard is the name of the whole caboodle.
The first polar explorers, for both the north and south poles, set out from Svalbard by boat in early C20 with their dogs and sleds in a big push to be first to the poles. Norwegians were famously first to the South Pole, beating Scott by a few precious days, and came second in reaching the North Pole, a few months behind the American explorer, Robert Peary. The Norwegian explorer ship Fram was deliberately iced in for a few years to see whether the ice flows would naturally bring it to the pole (they didn’t make it). Explorers also looked for the elusive Northwest Passage, a quick shipping route from Europe to Asia along the north most edges of Canada and the USA.
There’s a family connection to Svalbard, which I only recently discovered: my grandfather Arthur Wynne-Edwards’ ship HMS Leda was sunk 150 miles off the coast of Svalbard in September 1942, while bringing some stranded merchant seamen from Archangel in Russia back home to Loch Ewe in north-west Scotland. He survived in the bitterly cold water, he claimed afterwards, thanks to the tradition of the captain being the last to leave a sinking ship, so he spent much less time in the water than his fellow seamen, many of whom perished. He was rescued by another British warship.
Administered by Norway under the terms of a 1920 treaty, Svalbard is semi-autonomous and international, with a Russian mining town and an international polar research institute. It’s part of Norway but not part of the Schengen Agreement, so even Norwegians need passports to come in. Under the terms of the treaty, people of all the signatory countries (there are quite a few) have the right to be treated equally, so with so many different peoples, we hear English widely spoken, perhaps more so even than Norwegian. In fact the economy can be thought of as having three legs: coal mining, international research into climate change and the polar ice, and tourism.
We’re staying at the remote Isfjord Radio station, a telecommunications outpost rumoured to have been installed to spy on the USSR, but now strangely having no mobile phone signal despite bristling with every conceivable satellite dish and aerial. It’s been converted into what you might call an extreme boutique hotel, in that it’s full of anachronisms: exquisite food is served in simple surroundings; there are shared bathrooms but with Molton Brown toiletries; it’s a business, but the restoration work was mostly carried out by volunteers. It’s also hopelessly inaccessible: in the summer you take a boat to get there but now, at the end of the winter, you get there by snow scooter.
If you’re not familiar with them, you might think of these Skidoos as being a motorbike, with ski stabilisers at the front and a go-anywhere tank track at the rear. My only prior experience of a snow scooter was about 20 years ago at Lake Tahoe, where the 10 min ride frankly felt 9 minutes too long. I have memories of them being bumpy, unstable and noisy, with almost no luggage space. This time we had 100km (99.7km in fact, I measured it) to travel so I hoped their refinement and comfort might have improved over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, they haven’t.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised we see no polar bears, as our raucous convoy, screaming like Mobilettes ridden by pubescent French lads, winds its way along icy river valleys, over mountain passes and along the seaside. There’s not a soul to be seen, in fact very little sign of human activity at all: no fences, poles, signs or paths; no road markings or other traffic. We stop regularly to rest, sip water (very little water, as the moon suits we’re wearing are not easy to get out of if nature calls), take in the spectacular scenery and to right scooters that have been tipped over. Our guides are strict as the dangers are real and at one point a helicopter needs to be called to rescue one of our party after a snowmobile accident. This is tourism at the edge.
The next day we take the scooters out for a “safari” along the coast. There are some seabirds, a few white-coated Arctic reindeer in the distance and some polar bear tracks, but nothing that demands our guides to reach for their guns to protect us.
It’s warm, with the sun shining 24 hours a day, so certain river crossings are becoming rather wet. The technique needed to make it across without falling in is to get some speed up and try and blast across the top of the water, not giving the scooter enough time to think that gravity might win and for us to sink. Roald Dahl’s poem ‘the Toad and the Snail’ springs to mind, when in reply to the toad’s suggestion of jumping across the English Channel into France the heroine replies, “Do you think we oughta, I’d hate to finish in the water”.
Quite an adventure for a bunch of late middle-aged tourists, you might say, but for the youth party it was even wilder. Travelling on dog sleds and staying in tents, with the dogs tied up outside to warn of any polar bears, our little trip was a comparative walk in the park.
