travels with janne

We sail through a frozen, monochrome blue landscape and get a feel for drift ice and glaciers.

The name Svalbard means “cold shores”. That is a very apt name for this country. We spend an afternoon exploring the cold shores from our zodiacs. Despite layers of warm, insulating and rainproof clothing, two hours on the icy waters among ice floes and close to glaciers has me feeling pretty cold during the last half hour. But what an experience to be surrounded by all this ice!

The blue colour is due to how the lights reflects from the ice that has been under extreme pressure for thousands of years, so the snow has compacted to what looks like blue crystal.

We sail up close to the glacier called Monacobreen in Liefdefjorden. It is named after the first Prince of Monaco, who was an explorer in the early 1900s and a pioneer of what would eventually become the science of oceanography. The face of the glacier is about four km wide and 30-50 m high. It looks like a landscape from some kind of fantasy movie.

We see a bearded seal in the water along with glaucous gulls and skua. A kittiwake floats nearby until it decides to leave us.

At one point we almost get trapped among the drift ice. It can be deceptively easy to find a lead (path) into the bay, but when you want to go back out again, the wind may have shifted so it blows the ice floes into the bay and you are surrounded. Fortunately, our guides are excellent zodiac pilots that always work in pairs, and we wend our way safely through the frozen labyrinth back to the ship.

I just love the feeling of total remoteness and stillness here.

Although the landscape seems barren, there are signs of life: polar bear footprints, nesting birds and even “Texas Bar”.

Today, we explore another fjord, this time leaving the zodiacs behind on shore and going for a two-hour hike.

We wander over granular snow and squooshy tundra. Because of the permafrost, the water from the melted upper layer does not seep through and the tundra is wet to walk on. We see boulders left behind by retreating glaciers at the end of the most recent Ice Age.

There are lots of fresh reindeer droppings here and there, old polar bear footprints at the edge of a glacier (I would be very nervous if they were fresh, despite the fact that our guides are armed), and recent fox footprints. Bones attest to the fact that animals die and are eaten by other animals. These bones are presumably from a seal.

An Arctic skua sits on its rocky nest, guarding its eggs.  A white-fronted goose looks askance at us before alighting.

Amazingly, a few plants find a toehold in this barren landscape. The spring is late this year, so the only flowering plants we see are the pretty little purple saxifrage. Their colour contrasts with the grey and black stones that are decorated with various shades of lichen. There are an incredible 742 species of lichen in Svalbard.

There are no plants that grow high here, but there are trees. So-called trees. Our guide points one out to us. To me it looks more like the flattened heather plant I had in my garden after it died.

We visit an old trappers’ hut, which for unknown reasons is called “Texas Bar”. The place is now used by a variety of people, including scientists. The place looks cozy, with room for two, a wood stove, a table, and a separate enclosure for a toilet. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the 12 m² cabin I had in Nova Scotia. Don’t ask me why there is so much liquor, though!