Thursday 28 August 2025 – Our time in Longyearbyen is, I suppose, Phase IIIa; Phase IIIb starts tomorrow afternoon and you’ll have to wait to read all about it, possibly for quite some while. But between now and then, we had free time in Longyearbyen, and the sun shone today, unsurprisingly giving the whole place a different and lighter vibe. (We learned later that weather like today’s was unusual; cloudy like yesterday’s is the norm, so we have been very lucky.)

We had a coach tour of the place booked for 4pm, but nothing to do beforehand but go for a walk. Obviously.

The church

was something we certainly wanted to visit. As the arctic tern flies, it’s some 500 metres from our hotel, and Jane plotted a route which would take us down through the town, across and up the church. It also gave me an opportunity to take some more photos of the place in its summer coat.

It was not a warm day, probably around 7°C, but it was nice to sit outside one of the cafes and have coffee and cake in the sunshine.

The route took us past an object so mysterious that even Google Lens can’t identify it,

and past an interesting statue, labelled “Jason Roberts Productions”,

towards the industrial quarter.

I noticed that the fuel prices at the Toyota dealership here were much less than we’d paid when driving around in Norway’s mainland, which was a surprise – in these remote parts, one might expect higher prices. However, Svalbard is a tax-free zone, hence the cheap petrol.

We turned up the road to the church. Which was closed for roadworks – no way through.

Bugger.

We had no choice but to retrace our footsteps and seek a different route to the church. Simply heading across was not an option, as there was, rather inconveniently, a river in the way.

We ended up going all the way back up the town and across the river from the top end, so our 500 metres ended up as a 5km walk. However, it ended up being really interesting.

As we approached the church, we noticed some regular formations of what looked like tree stumps.

We were entirely puzzled as to what these could be, until we passed a stone plinth.

Looking closer,

we discovered it was a monument to John Munroe Longyear, an American from Boston, who visited as a cruise tourist in 1901, decided he liked the place and in 1906 effectively founded the town by establishing a mining operation there. The stumps are the wooden piles which underpinned the buildings of the original Longyearbyen town (the only way of building on permafrost) and are virtually the only remnant of it – with the exception of only a couple of buildings, it was burnt to the ground by the Germans as the second world war drew to a close, to stop the facility falling into the hands of the Allies. This information was vouchsafed on info boards by the site.

You can see traces of one of the old mines high up in the side of the hills above these remnants.

We went into the church, which is light and pleasant, open at all hours and to all religious denominations.

Half of the hall is given over as a community space, and it was being used by a toddlers and parents group when we were there, which was rather charming.

We made our way back to the hotel and at 4pm waited for our tour bus to arrive. As we waited a group of young things walked past. At first, I thought they were carrying some kind of surveying equipment,

but, no; they were carrying rifles. Maybe they were learning how to deal with importunate polar bear intruders?

Our minibus turned up, piloted by a very engaging chap called Kai. We collected two other couples, one from the very eccentric-looking place called Mary-Ann’s Polar Rigg,

which, as well as a collection of trees from past Christmases (apparently all lit up each Christmas) has one of those signposts.

I found it interesting, beside the fact that it pointed the way to various of the mines that were once operational, because it also mentions Pyramiden, a Russian settlement of some 450 souls on the island. This brought back memories of our Antarctic trip, on which one of the guides, Sasha, had spent a couple of years as a tour guide there.

We then went on a tour of the town and its environs. Kai gave us huge amounts of information about the history and culture of the place throughout two very interesting hours. Here are some of the nuggets he imparted:

• Norway has sovereignty over the archipelago, according to a treaty signed in 1920 between 43 nationalities. Among the conditions of the treaty is the stipulation of no military presence or activity in the archipelago.
• The population of Longyearbyen is about 2400 souls, of about 53 nationalities.
• 60% are Norwegian, and a very large number of the remainder are Thai and Philippino, who do a lot of the jobs that Norwegians are not prepared to – cleaners, waiters, etc. (Such a common situation in so many western countries, eh?)
• The Norwegian government, in pursuit of eco aspirations, is trying to reduce the population there, and are doing so by some fairly draconian measures, such as: forbidding the building of any new houses (even to replace ones which have been demolished); closing mining operations which not only bring in revenue but, as a by-product, also heat the houses (with the only viable alternative for energy being the distinctly non-eco use of diesel); and – this I find quite shocking – removing the right of any non-Norwegians to vote, no matter how well-established they are in the town. We found this reminiscent of the shabby treatment that Madagascar gets at the hands of the French government.

Kai took us to the edge of the town, to see (allegedly) the most Instagrammed polar bear signpost in the world.

There are a couple of hundred polar bears on Spitzbergen and about 3,000 in the whole archipelago, if I remember my figures correctly.

Our next port of call was the Global Seed Vault, which is up in the hills overlooking the town.

There’s not a lot to see, really,

the vault is way down in a mine shaft in what was No. 3 mine, kept at -18.4°C, and no-one’s allowed in. But its job is potentially vital – countries can contribute seeds for preservation, and this allows them to take seeds out in the case of disaster. The example Kai quoted was Syria, whose seed bank in Aleppo was completely destroyed in the Syrian civil war; courtesy of the Global Seed Vault, they have been able to repopulate their crops and lands.

We also got a great view over the airport and the port,

where you can see a huge pile of coal waiting to be exported (mainly, I think, to Germany, where it’s used in their steel industry), and the arses of a couple of reindeer which were wandering around in the area.

Photographic note: Jane took this photo with her phone. It’s better than I managed with my Nikon

The next port of call was the church, where we had a chance to take pictures in the now-empty community hall.

The church site offers good views over the town, for example of its characteristic coloured houses.

The snow fences on the hill overlooking the town were also clear to be seen,

and you can see where coal is still leaking out of the hillside.

We passed the town’s “cemetery”

where crosses pay tribute to people who had been buried in the early 20th century before it was discovered that burying coffins in permafrost is not a good idea, as they tend to reappear after a while. This caused the whole area to be cleared and the crosses put there as a marker. Some seven of the deceased had died from the Spanish flu of 1918, and there were fears that the permafrost had preserved the pathogens, so great care was taken in the clearing up. It is now illegal to be buried in Longyearbyen, although in special cases ashes can be spread or interred. It’s also, we learned, against the rules to be born in Longyearbyen. For normal pregnancies, the mothers-to-be are sent away some four weeks before the birth is due, to somewhere, often Tromsø, where there are proper medical facilities; the Sykhus on Longyearbyen is an emergency room, not a fully-equipped hospital.

Up the road from the cemetery is a viewpoint over the town and also the oldest part of the town rebuilt after the war which, counterintuitively, is called Nybyen, or “the new town”. It actually includes a couple of buildings which survived the German exit, which are understandably now culturally listed and reserved sites, and several that were built in the 1950s, well before those that sprang up further down the valley.

The shadows from the sun going down over the horizon* made photos of the town tricky, although you could see the glacier clearly,

and mine no. 2b (or not) across the hillside.

And so ended a most informative and engaging tour, as part of a very good day. We took dinner at a restaurant next door to the hotel called Kroa, which we’d heard was renowned for its pizzas. What we ate would not have been called a pizza by an Italian, but it was delicious, as was the smoked whale meat that we shared as a starter. Whale met again, indeed.

Tomorrow, we leave Longyearbyen to embark on Phase IIIb, which will very likely involve us going completely off grid for several days. I promise to regale you with our exploits when I next have decent internet access, but I don’t actually know when that will be. The best way to ensure that you can continue to read my deathless prose is to subscribe to these pages. If you haven’t already done so, simply leave a comment and tick the “stay informed” box and All Will Be Revealed.

* I had been expecting that we were in the area of the midnight sun. We weren’t. Like many other things on this trip, we’d missed it by a couple of days – the sun first set on August 23rd.

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.