My final stop on my Hurtigruten expedition around the Arctic Circle last summer was the world’s northernmost settlement: Ny-Alesund, at 79 degrees north. It was nowhere near as ominous as the vacant Russian mining town of Barentsburg, but still had a similar feel of depression. Its inhabitants probably wouldn’t agree, but I’m not so sure [...]
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Way up North where the polar bears roam, where Buddy the Elf likes to frolic with his pals the narwhal and Acrtic puffin, there lies a sliver of land. You might not even notice it upon first glance; it’s perfectly flat and blends in seamlessly with the ocean. (That’s actually not said sliver of land. [...]
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Our first stop on the Hurtigruten expedition trip around the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Circle was an eerie one indeed. A permanent Russian settlement that’s more or less autonomous, Barentsburg is one of only three “inhabited” towns on the whole island and had this creepy feeling of a ghost town where something bad [...]
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After a very long trip from San Francisco to Chicago to Sweden to Norway, I finally arrived in Oslo, where I spent the entire day sleeping off the jet lag (a big traveler no-no!) before catching a Scandinavian Airlines flight way up to the archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle the next morning. Surprisingly, [...]
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