Friday 29 August 2025 – The very final bit of this trip, Phase IIIb, starts soon and may see me absent from the connected world for a few days. Before we disappear off the radar, though, here are a few photos from our final day in Longyearbyen, for we didn’t just lounge about drinking coffee, oh dear me no. We went for a walk. Obviously.

Just down from the hotel is a statue of a miner entitled “Gruvebusen”.

Given today’s much cloudier conditions, the light was much better suited to a photo of him than either of the previous days.

As one would expect from somewhere with a unique location and history, as well as somewhere Nordic, there are a couple of museums at the northern end of town,  so we walked down towards them, pausing at a viewpoint to, erm, look at the view. There was a cruise ship in which had a familiar outline.

It was reminiscent of the boat we’d visited the Kimberley coast in Australia, which was an APT cruise on Le Laperouse. Sure enough, on more detailed examination, this turned out to be an APT boat, called Le Commandant Charcot. That resonated with our time at the other end of the world, actually;  we had come across the name of Jean Charcot in Antarctica, and I hadn’t realised that he fossicked around up here, as well. 

The first of the two museums we visited was the North Pole Expedition Museum.

What I hadn’t realised before going in was the extent to which the race to reach the north pole was done in the air – airships and balloons were the vehicle of choice. People had claimed to have walked across the ice to the pole, for example Robert Peary in 1909, but these claims were disputed, and the first verified successful expedition was not until 1968. Amundsen successfully flew an airship over the pole in 1926 – after his successful expedition to the south pole. He was then involved in a rescue attempt for someone else’s failed expedition, during which he disappeared and neither he nor his remains were ever seen again. Not a lot of people know that.

The exhibition was full of information

but a bit low-key. Round the corner is the Svalbard Museum, which is very much bigger and better laid out, with huge amounts of information about the archipelago – history, geography, culture, politics, everything. A very impressive piece of work, and probably the only picture I’ll get of an arctic fox.

We walked back up through the town, and stopped off at the Radisson hotel to investigate a Small World story. An ex-colleague with whom I’d kept in contact via Facebook had noticed that we were in Svalbard and told me that her stepdaughter was working there, which is a pretty amazing coincidence. So we were able to meet Ruth, who was running the bar in the world’s most northerly pub.

She had come to Longyearbyen on a 9-month contract, and, like many, was still here two years later, really enjoying her life and also having success as an artist and illustrator (that’s her work on the blackboard, for example). It was a lovely encounter, and all the better for being entirely serendipitous.

All we had to do then was to buy some more tea, just in case Phase IIIb couldn’t provide, and make our way back to the hotel to await pickup to be taken to its start point. We passed the final statue that we would see in Longyearbyen, another nod to its mining history

before the taxi came to take us away.

These are final hasty notes before leaving Longyearbyen, and i don’t know when I’ll be able to update you on the progress of Phase IIIb. But bear with me for any errors in the above and I’ll write again when I can.