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North! to Ala…Svalbard

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Wednesday 27 August 2025 – The day started, as do so many when we’re on holiday travelling – with an early alarm call. We had decided to take the 0648 train to the airport, which meant leaving the hotel at 0630, so 0500 would give us time to get our arses in gear. After all, we’re out of practice, having had several weeks without having to get up, pack and bugger off somewhere. In the event, old habits meant that we were ready to leave the hotel by 0600, having checked out and picked up the sandwiches the hotel provided in lieu of the lovely, lavish breakfast we would have had if they’d only started serving early enough. Thus, we could aim for the 0618 service.

You’ll remember, of course you will, that we’d had a practice yesterday at getting the ticket. We knew that the ticket machine would balk at a contactless payment from our usual credit card, so had a debit card set up instead. But it was declined, so I tried the debit card for our joint account back in the UK. Declined. However, when Jane provided her debit card for that joint account, the transaction was accepted. There’s an algorithm at work there the workings of which I wot not.

Anyhoo…

Apart from a minor technical glitch with the departure board on the platform

which would suggest that we were due to catch the 81:90 service, all went well, and we got to the airport, deposited our bags and got through security in double quick time. We had, for some reason, been allowed Fast Track through security and also access to an SAS Lounge. Our destination was in Norway, so we went to the national departures lounge, where a nice lady told us that it would be a better idea to go to the international departures lounge, as we would need to go through passport control. I think this is because our destination (Longyearbyen) is on an island (Spitzbergen) in the Svalbard archipelago, which also has a Russian settlement on it (Barentsburg), which has Schengen-related complexities in monitoring and supporting travellers. Anyway, we went to the other lounge, where we had coffee, and then through passport control to our gate.

Since Longyearbyen is not what you might call a high-volume destination, I’d been expecting to get on some kind of propeller-propelled plane, but no, we had an Airbus A320, and we had seats quite near the front. I don’t know if the punters in the back of the aircraft got a meal as part of their ticket, but we were given exactly the same chicken-and-pasta meal we’d enjoyed on the way out to Oslo in the first place, except the hummus wasn’t still frozen in this one.

The flight was entirely uneventful until we got to the difficult bit, which was getting the aircraft down. The driver needed two goes at this; in his defence it was pretty cloudy.

It is greatly to the credit of the passengers that when the pilot actually touched down, there was no applause. We were quickly off the plane, and greeted by a local at the baggage carousel.

When we’d consigned our bags to the tender mercies of the SAS baggage system, I’d noted that the tag said “PRIORITY”, which is normally a fictitious description, designed to give the punter a false sense of importance. But my bag was fourth on the carousel and Jane’s was sixth, which got us out of the airport and on to the waiting bus very promptly. Of course we had to wait for all the other passengers, too, but no matter. The driver pottered down the bus taking payment – 110 crowns (about £9) per passenger. We had been expecting to have to pay in cash, but technology obviously has reached the bus system 12 degrees north of the arctic circle, and we could use contactless, which was very convenient.

It’s a short bus journey from airport to the town of Longyearbyen. The first part of the journey looked a bit grim, particularly under the lowering skies and because it leads past a mining operation – Longyearbyen’s history is very much that of a coal mining town.

The very low cloud seems to emphasise the very functional nature of the landscape.

The buildings all have a very modern feel to them, which is unsurprising, since the town was destroyed by the Germans during the second world war, to stop the allies from getting the benefit of the coal. These days, there’s only a vestigial mining operation, and the town mainly revolves around the university, research and tourism.

The bus called in at a few stops before ours – the Hotel Polfareren, which might be translated as “The Pole Traveller”.

Confusingly, several hotels are labelled “Svalbard Hotell”, but we stumbled into the right one, where it became immediately apparent that the first thing we should do was to take our shoes off.

It’s hardly surprising; people will generally be wearing heavy duty footwear which would trample snowy grit all over the place, so taking one’s shoes off is more than merely courtesy in these parts. So, shoes go in the Boot Room and the hotel provides guests with their own slippers.

Our room wasn’t immediately available, so we settled ourselves in the reception area

which had one very comforting sight.

In a matter of minutes, we were able to go to our room, which, as one would expect, is very well-designed and should be very comfortable. We found a little welcome present from one of the local cafes awaiting us.

We had the afternoon to amuse ourselves, so, after a little time to relax, we went for a walk. Obviously.

There’s not a great deal to the town itself – two roads bisected by the main shopping street. But there’s everything you need to support a population of 2,400 plus all the tourists – library, cinema, local government offices, a church,

some touristy, souvenir-y shops,

several hotels, cafes and bars and a supermarket, which is massive – not quite a major Tesco, but very substantial, selling a variety of food and non-food stuff. Unnervingly, it has a sign on the door prohibiting anyone from bringing guns into the store. We bought the essentials, which means mainly some milk to put in any mug of Twining’s finest Earl Grey that might happen to get brewed in our room, and then pottered off to look around.

You’re never far from seeing the influence of the town’s mining history

but there’s a university, research centre and museum complex down by the water’s edge.

We were also never far from a reminder that we’re here in summer weather. The place is literally littered with hundreds, possibly thousands, of skidoos.

The cuddlier side of the town is demonstrated in the Huskies cafe, which serves coffee alongside, erm,

huskies. Today’s grey weather has hardly shown the town off to its best advantage. The skies did clear a little, and, as we went for a stroll after dinner, we could see that even in summer as we are, there’s a glacier not far away,

and a lot of work has been done to protect the houses from the possible ravages of heavy winter snowfalls.

Tomorrow is forecast to be sunny, so I hope to be able to bring you some photos of the place looking positively cheery. We also plan to take a bus tour of the area, from which we should learn a lot more of its history, which I should think is absolutely fascinating. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Staving off boredom

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Tuesday 26 August 2025 – The only scheduled activity for the day was to meet a Swedish friend, Peter, for lunch. Well, dinner. Depends on your viewpoint. We’d chatted to the hotel concierge and settled on a rather interesting, eccentric-looking restaurant; but it didn’t open until 3pm. So we booked a table promptly for then, and I don’t care what you call it, really.

So, after a lavish breakfast in the hotel’s very handsome dining room,

we pottered off in the direction of the cathedral. It’s such an un-cathedral-like building that I had no expectations about what we’d find inside. Walking in, two things hit one: it’s very airy, light and largely unadorned; and the main exception to that is the ceiling, which really does make an impact.

It really is a lovely piece of work.

There’s some quietly impressive stained glass

and what looks very much like a Royal Box!

On the wall outside, inserted into the brickwork, is the “Devil of Oslo” – a man being attacked by both a dragon and a lion. The stone relief, once part of the ruined St Hallvard’s cathedral, is around 900 years old.

A few steps away is the view along Karl Johan’s gate to the Royal Palace.

We weren’t going to visit the palace, but headed off in that direction to get a ticket for the train to the airport tomorrow. Since this is going to be at 0630, and we can’t rely on the grey matter firing on all neurons at that hour, we wanted if possible to get tickets. We walked to the National Theatre station, and it was clear that Something Was Going On with kids and political parties. There were booths set up by the green, and hordes of kids were congregating at each one and whizzing between them clutching bits of paper.

We understand there might be local elections in the offing; presumably they had to prove to someone that they had engaged with all the parties, or something like that; anyway they appeared to be quite engaged in the process.

We found the station, found the ticketing machines and bought tickets – only to discover that the tickets we’d bought were only valid for a couple of hours. Ah, well…chalk it up to experience; it was only about a tenner down the drain. Had we not been Old People, it would have been twice as much.

I reckon that you can’t really say you know a place until you’ve engaged with the public transport, and our next objective was most easily reachable by bus. We knew it was the no. 30 and had read that you could pay on board the bus. We located the right bus stop and the no. 30 came by bang on time – but the only payment accepted was via an App, called Ruter, or – horror of horrors! – cash! We actually had cash with us so proffered a 100 crown note. The nice lady bus driver looked at it and said, with a hint of a Nordic sigh and possibly some well-disguised rolling of the eyes, that we should just sit down and not bother with the payment nonsense. We sat down, but weren’t comfortable with this arrangement, so I used the journey to download the app and buy the ticket anyway. Nice technology, but not quite 100% joined up, which is a surprise, given how tech-savvy the Norwegian systems are.

Anyhoo…

Our destination was a peninsula called Bygdøy, which houses several museums, including the one we wanted to visit, which was the Norsk Folkmuseum. Granted, we have a general interest in the history of the places we visit, but there was a specific reason for the visit which will become apparent if you keep reading. Sorry for the viewer bribery bit there, but I have to try to give you an incentive to stay awake, here.

The museum is similar in principle to the Weald and Downland Living Museum in the UK or Skansen in Sweden – the chance to see traditional buildings of historical interest relocated to or recreated at a single site. The no. 30 bus stops outside the doors, so we bought our tickets and, after a restorative coffee, went in, immediately heading for the specific thing we really wanted to see. Teasingly, it became visible through the trees,

until we turned the corner and

saw our second stave church! Originally built at Gol in the 13th century, it’s a lovely thing on the outside,

I had to wait ages for people to sod off out of my picture!

and the inside is just as enchanting.

There’s any amount of intricate carving, much of it with Viking influences – dragons an’that –

and a wonderful cloistery bit round the back.

It really was a delight – and it was our second stave church in three days. We’ve now seen two of the 28 extant stave churches in Norway and I’m rather worried to report that Jane has decided that she we now Have A Project which involves visiting all of the remaining ones. In a camper van.

The site of the Folkmuseum is really quite large, with lots of buildings from various periods, split into various areas, such as farm buildings, some with rooms that one can go into and talk to an interpreter.

Some are in small avenues, like this arrangement of alternating stores and farm cottages from the 1600s.

They even had saunas in those days! This one is from 1600.

Don’t believe me?

(It was also a drying room, of course.)

Some of the storage barns have very fine carving.

and the carving extends to runes and other ways of identifying the builder or owner of an establishment.

The runes are over the doorway of the world’s oldest preserved wooden dwelling, from the first half of the 13th century…

Another attractive area is called the Old Town – not really old like the farm area, but old enough, and very photogenic.

There’s a huge amount to see (and photograph). We barely skimmed the surface and there are many, many pictures I haven’t included; but I hope this gives a flavour of what the place is like. We had a very enjoyable couple of hours there, but had to leave in order to catch the ferry back to Oslo downtown for our lunch appointment. So we hastened there, past some really lovely houses which I would have liked to photograph if we hadn’t been hurrying for the ferry. But I couldn’t pass the Kon-Tiki museum without taking a picture, since we’d visited Easter Island, famous for its Moai.

At the quay

I used my nice new Ruter app to buy a ticket back to the Town Hall quay. Sadly, when the ferry turned up

and we boarded, it became clear that what I’d bought was a bus ticket, not valid for the boat. Another one chalked up to experience….

Once back at the town hall quay

we got a decent view across the water to the fortress and palace where we’d wandered yesterday

and we pottered along to Rorbua for our lunchtime appointment with Peter.

It’s a place which specialises in dishes from the north of Norway, hence some of the more unusual decor items

and, indeed, items on the menu. Yes, reindeer, yes, moose, of course, but also – whale! Peter had whale steak, and pronounced it to be very tasty – more meaty than fishy, which makes sense, given that a whale is not a fish. Jane had a taste and said that the texture was somewhat fibrous, the taste was fine, but she probably wouldn’t order it given the chance. Whale meat again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

The restaurant is in the popular Akersbrygge area, where there are loads of eateries and drinkeries, and also, incidentally, the Nobel Peace Hall.

After our Nice Lunch, we wandered back past Peter’s hotel and round the corner to Oslo’s oldest pub,

which opened in 1969 (same year as the Tudor Arms in Stockholm, for any of my Swedish readers). There, we took our leave of Peter and headed back to our hotel, since we have a sparrowfart departure tomorrow. En route, we passed something we should have seen as we arrived, but somehow missed – the parliament building

which, as is not unusual in Scandinavia, was the site of a rally, or demonstration; this one was in support of Ukraine.

So, that’s about it for our Phase II. But before I close the file on Oslo, I feel I should include some of the other odds and bits we saw today.

We’ve been really lucky with the weather, and Oslo has presented its best face. It hasn’t really resonated with us when compared with Stockholm, which is similar in many respects but has something that calls out to us more. But it’s been enjoyable wandering round, delightful to score our second stave church and great to meet Peter again. So we leave with pleasant memories.

Tomorrow is the start of Phase III, so please stay tuned to see what we got up to next.

Phase transition – to Oslo

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Monday 25 August 2025 – Rather than just bounce in and out of Oslo for the final phase of this trip, we had decided to spend a little time to absorb something of Norway’s capital city, making it Phase II of this trip.  All we had to do was to get there, preferably by 2pm, which was when our Dutch friend Hertz van Rental was expecting us to return his car. After a prompt breakfast, we were on the road before 9am.  We discovered, on checkout, why the hotel was happy for us to pillage the breakfast bar for our packed lunch – they charged us for it! They hadn’t made it clear that this was going to be the case, and it was actually a very modest charge, at least by Norway’s exorbitant standards. So we coughed up and only felt a faint twinge of guilt that we didn’t tell them about the second packed lunch we stole….

The journey down was pretty much the reverse of the one up, minus the rain showers – we drove all the way in bright sunshine.  Jane did manage to get a picture of something we missed on the way up – something atop a distant hill.

We’re not sure what it is, but it was nice to complete the set, as it were.

The milling devotees of these pages will know that Jane and I are fans of Interesting Churches; Iceland was a very fertile hunting ground for these, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor. We had passed many churches as we drove around, and Jane had commented that they all seemed to be in the shape of a cross, but with equal spokes, as opposed to the norm in the UK and other parts of a longer nave and shorter cross arm.  Jane whistled up ChatGPT to research the subject and found that the Norwegian churches we saw were higher-capacity replacements for original stave churches, which were deemed to be too small for the congregations. This set us off on a delightful diversion, because neither of us knew what a stave church is.

We learned that a stave church is a medieval wooden Christian church building once common in north-western Europe. The name derives from the building’s structure of post and lintel construction, a type of timber framing where the load-bearing pine posts are called stafr in Old Norse (stav in modern Norwegian). They often contained very intricate and detailed carvings. The replacement of stave churches by more modern ones has meant that there are only some 28 of them left in Norway, mainly built between 1150 and 1350, and that is only because in 2001, the National Heritage Board determined that they should be preserved for posterity.  Delightfully, one of these was just off our route, at Ringebu, so we diverted to take a look. And what a pleasure that was – it’s a delightful building. There were coaches in the car park and quite a few people there, so it’s clearly a popular site.

Jane had read en route that this church was only open during the summer, and we had missed that window by just a few days, so we resigned ourselves to just examining the outside, since this had joined the series of churches we’d visited that were closed.

The timber is preserved with tar, and it is educational to look at the shady side of the building,

where the tar has not been weathered so much by the sun. Like the Lesja church, this one had a side exhibit of old gravestones, crosses and other fragments.

However, on getting three-quarters of the way round, we found, to our delight, that the church was open!  The chap on the door explained that this was because there were several groups visiting (hence the coaches), and so we were very lucky to be able to piggyback on this to get a look inside.

It’s as striking inside as out.

Many parts of it go back to its origin, in the year 1120, such as the carvings around the door.

The inside is delightful.

There are, as expected, some very detailed and intricate carvings inside.

Altogether, it was a delightful diversion, made all the more so by the unexpected pleasure of being able to see the inside.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, and we handed back the rental car and found our way to the train station in the airport to head into Oslo.  The airport is a long way outside the centre – 50km – so train or bus are the only sensible options to get from one to the other. The bus journey takes an hour, so we decided to take the train. There’s a specialist train, the Flytog, but that’s twice the price of a standard train and no quicker, and we just managed to bundle ourselves into a VY train bound for Oslo as the doors slammed behind us. We were so rushed that we panicked a bit that we’d leapt on board the wrong train, but a nice elderly gentleman reassured us and engaged us in pleasant conversation until the guard came and told us to shut up because we were in a Quiet Zone.

We’re staying at the Hotel Bristol, which is something of an old-school hotel, occupying a large building, which makes the walk from the lift to your room something of a voyage of discovery. But it’s comfortable enough and furnished us with a nice lunch in elegant surroundings

(Jane had her favourite Toast Skagen) and an insight into Norwegian angst about alcohol.  At Trolltun, we’d tried and largely failed to get double-measure gin and tonics, as the staff there said they didn’t offer doubles. We tried again in the lounge here, and the nice lady who was serving us told us that it was actually against the law to serve double measures! Not only that but it was also against the law to try to game the system by ordering a G&T with an accompanying gin. You were allowed the one drink and could have another once you’d finished that.

This is very much in line with the general Scandinavian attitude to alcohol, which I think has its roots in Lutheran disapproval of anything that is actually enjoyable. I first came across it when I lived in Sweden, 40 years ago.  You could only get alcohol stronger than 2.5% by going to government-run off-licences, called System Bolaget, which was the only company I ever came across which ran adverts intended to dissuade you from buying their products. Things are a bit more relaxed now, but you can still only get spirits from System Bolaget to this day. On my first visit to Oslo – a business trip of just a couple of days – I inadvertently tried to order a post-prandial snifter of brandy, only to be told that they couldn’t sell me spirits because it was a Sunday, and I had to make do with port.

Anyhoo….having enjoyed our late lunch, we thought we’d go for a walk. Obviously.  So we pottered around trying to get a feel for the place.  I have to say that it didn’t call out to us. Perhaps we’ve been off the beaten track too much, but the noise and the crowds and the e-scooters all seemed a bit oppressive, somehow.  Still, we saw a few of the sights: there are some handsome old buildings among the modern stuff;

a striking cathedral with a lovely semi-circular cloister area behind it;

lots of modern stuff;

an Opera House which  is very proud of the fact that you can walk on its sloping roof;

plenty of museums, again well loaded with Architecture;

public saunas;

bits of sculpture in odd places;

“She Lies”, a public sculpture by Monica Bonvicini, which is supposed to be an iceberg, but which we thought was a listing ship

a remarkable town hall building;

and a sodding great fortress, which contains all sorts of buildings within its walls.

We have a full day here tomorrow, and the weather forecast is as sunny as today was, so maybe we’ll get a chance to get better under the skin of the place. Part of the day will be spent having a Nice Lunch with an old a long-standing friend but there are still some things we would like to see. So we are looking forward to an active day’s touristing, and you will be able to read all about it in these pages if you come back soon.