Trip to Colesdalen from Longyearbyen

We had been looking forward to our 11-hour speed boat trip to Ny-Ålesund ever since we started looking into booking a trip to Spitsbergen. It was supposed to be the highlight of our weekend stay. The linear distance is only 114km, but only government, scientists and emergency services are permitted to do inland flights (even though you can buy unfilled seats on scientists’ flight connections for large amounts of money), which is why boat is the only option. This means that the actual distance travelled one-way is roughly 200km.       You pass by some decent whale spotting locations (including 45m long blue whales), a giant walrus colony, and, if going from Longyearbyen by boat at this time of year: your best chance of seeing a polar bear, unless you’re happy with the stuffed variety in the local museum. We had booked our trip with Better Moments, the highest-ranking Spitsbergen […]

Continue Reading

You may also like

Fine Dining at the North Pole: Gruvelageret

During our visit to Spitsbergen last weekend, Gruvelageret Restaurant in Longyearbyen (the capital of Svalbard, Norway) invited me to try out their 4-course fine dining menu with wine pairing. I was joined by my wife, Ms B. The restaurant, whose name translates into mining warehouse, sits 30 metres up the hillside, no more than 200 metres direct distance from Coal Miners’ Cabins, where we were staying (0.5km by car), but – being cautious (everyone seemed to think: overly cautious) people, we took a cab anyway. At least in winter, polar bears occasionally stroll around in this northernmost human settlement on planet Earth, and we didn’t want to end up as polar bear picnic. Like most structures in town, the building doesn’t look like too much from the outside (even though the whole building has a beautiful history and a lot of love and hard work went into it), but as […]

Continue Reading

You may also like