DAY 4 WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 11 2015 – NORTH TO BARENTSBURG
We signed up for a boat trip today to go north to Barentsburg. Not sure how long we will be there. The lady at the desk thought maybe an hour in Barentsburg which means it is about 3 ½ hours by boat to get there and 3 ½ hours back. She had to call and make sure there were enough for a minimum which is 15 I think but when she called, they drop the minimum in the dark (the winter) to 8 and they already had 10 so we're good. In all there were 13 tourists and 5 or 6 crew members. They are picking us up at 8:30
We got up in time to get dressed and eat breakfast and then at about 8:15 we went outside and sat on the benches, put on our boots and were ready. We are carrying the Basecamp dry bag we bought and have filled it with a few extra clothes and flashlight and long lens plus a couple of other things
. It is kind of heavy.
The van comes about 8:45 and he goes to pick up D&M from yesterday at the Svalbard hotel behind us. Then he greeted us, Sten, I think, who has lived here all his life and can remember a lot of different things about being a child here.
Some of the things he told us, the ice would freeze in the fjord every year until 1998 when it stopped freezing so in early Oct the last boat would leave and wouldn’t have a boat come back until late May or early June. That would be the last fresh food until the boat came back because the airport wasn’t built until the mid-seventies so until then, nothing fresh. There would be some flights overhead during the winter with the post and other supplies. All the cars would go line up in the valley in two rows and put on their headlights. The planes would come overhead and drop the goods on small parachutes and they’d fall into the snow between the two rows of cars, hopefully. Then everyone would run into the snow and dig out all the packages, they hoped. He says some years they would find everything and some years wouldn’t find a package or two until thaw.
With the airport being built, now there can be fresh food all the time and we were amazed to see bananas, avocados, fresh berries (not of the arctic variety of berries), apples, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and that sort of fresh produce in the grocery. Plus a wide variety of other imported items and food stuffs.
We are "in the dark" now
. It is the polar night. And when the sun is up and over the horizon in the spring until autumn, it is the polar day. Just two seasons really. We are kind of twilight now actually because the sun does shine a bit but it never gets above the horizon now and they lose 15 minutes on either end of sunrise and sunset every day. So before too long, there won’t be a sunrise at all until probably late march or April.
We get to the dock and he tells us to be careful because it is really slippery and to also stay on the back deck of the boat while he gives us our safety briefing. The van driver pulls way over to the right hand side of the dock and there is a small path where there isn’t any ice but I have to hold on to the side of the van to keep from tipping into the water as it is so narrow. Out onto the dock and step onto the boat. Sten has already made fun of our bag and how heavy it is but what do we know? We might need extra gloves or hats or clothes.
We are all on the deck and so is Nemo, Sten’s husky mix dog. He is going along with us. What fun. Nice dog. A crew member shows us the survival suit which is a bright orange suit with feet and hands included in the suit. We are told that if there is an alarm, we come to the back deck and will be given the suits and we are to get in them with all our clothes on, our boots and gloves included because the suit is not meant to keep us warm, is just meant to keep us dry
. I’m thinking I may be in trouble if we need it because it does look big but maybe not big enough for me and my coat and such as well. After we are in the suit, then we put the life vest over the suit. The guy looks like an orange alien.
Now we head into the small bar area and take a seat. We have to take the walking crampons off our boots so we add that to our basecamp dry bag. We are away from the dock almost immediately and start up the fjord. It is so dark and the water is so smooth that it is actually hard to tell when we are moving. Sten is going outside to give us some historical information about the area and such so we bundle back up and go outside to listen. He also says that if no one is in a hurry to get home, at the end, we will hopefully look for the northern lights and if we see them, we will slow down and take photos and such. We weren’t lucky and that didn’t happen.
Svalbard was a no man’s land for a long time meaning it wasn’t under the jurisdiction of any country but mainly Norway and Russia were busy establishing mining camps and such. The first explorers were the Pomors from Russia and also the Dutch and Swedes as they were all trying to find the magical but nonexistent Northwest Passage that would let them get to the Spice Islands and China to crash in on the Portuguese and Spanish trading
. Anyway, times goes on and eventually they realize that somebody kind of needs to be responsible for the land and take care of it and that goes to Norway in the south but Russia retains its basic commitment to the north up around Barentsburg where we are going. So it becomes rather like a protectorate of Norway but isn’t actually a part of the Kingdom of Norway so that’s why it’s like its own country although we didn’t have to go through passport control to enter. And while we are actually going to the same type of thing with Russia, again we won’t have to go through passport control. Makes me sad that I didn’t bring our passports though because the gift shop had some wonderful stamps with Barentsburg on them and we could have stamped one of those in our passports. That would have been cool.
We are passing high cliffs and such but even with a bit of light from the supposed sunrise, we are not getting much light along the shore. We pass a small abandoned Russian village where the houses are still there and haven’t fallen into ruins yet. The boat lights them up but they are still hard to see. This was a mining place as well but abandoned after only four years of trying to make a go of it. And also, it is never light enough to look for seals or anything else that might be in the water.
Sten tell us that we will be in Barentsburg for three hours with a guide and just before we get there, we will have lunch on the boat. So we go in and out for a while and up on the top deck to look around and take photos. Amazing that just a bit under a second of exposure will give a photo with enough light that it hardly looks as if it is twilight and kind of dark but it is. We can see the land on the other side of the fjord as well but it is all snow covered and except for the fact that it is continual, it would look rather more like an iceberg.
My husband plays with Nemo a couple of times and maybe we still smell like dog from yesterday but Nemo seems to love to turn around and grab hubby’s hand and start growing and shaking it and playing with it. He does it with me a bit too but not with anyone else so must be a doggy smell still attached to us.
Lunch is ready and there is salad, rice, bread, salmon, barbequed Minke whale and barbequed ribs. Yum, possibly. Hubby beat me through the line so I wasn’t sure what he had and when I went through the line, I got the smallest piece of whale meat I could find but he also had a piece. When I tasted it, I thought it tasted a lot like liver so I didn’t like it
. In the end, my husband didn’t like it much either so good old Nemo took care of the rest of it for us, happily.
We are about there and by the time we had put our coats on and ran out to the dock, everyone was practically off the boat and heading up the stairs. We were disembarking from the top deck so we had to run up there and then sit down and put on our walking crampons so we were the last ones off the boat and I was afraid they were going to leave without us as people had started walking up the stairs but at last I had on my crampons and hubby’s his and Sten was waiting for us.
We had to walk across a very icy parking lot to the stairs. We can see a couple of sets of stairs leading to the houses above the harbor. We walk up both those flights and then see a couple more flights of stairs. We kept walking up flights of stairs and then seeing more. In the end, there might have been 10 flights of stairs we walked up before we were on the road through Barentsburg. Luckily, somewhere along the line, we had passed some of the other guests so we weren’t the last ones up the hill.
Natalia is to be our guide and while she had good English, it was accented and a few words were hard to understand
. We learn later she is from eastern Ukraine and has only been here a few months and will probably stay for 1 or 2 years. Not sure what brings people to these parts to work through the polar night but it happens.
This is definitely an old Soviet town. You can see it in all the old construction that it is just block houses but they have worked hard on beautification since the soviet times as many of the buildings are painted bright colors and there are bright lights throughout the town. The miner apartments have been upgraded on the outside but she tells us they are still very Soviet on the inside. In front of the apartments is a bust of Lenin – the northernmost bust of Lenin in the world. At the end of the tour and on the way back to the boat, my husband and I walk past him to get a photo. It doesn’t look like Lenin in the dark but I think it does after I looked at the photo later.
She points out the main buildings and what they are for and we go into the museum which has a lovely section on the stories of Barentsburg and the people who came and made it into a mining town and also the people who explored the area. Mainly it was the Pomors who settled it and they look to have come from western Russia across Scandinavia and across the water to Svalbard
.
There was also a nice collection of stuffed animals that are in the area, arctic fox, seals, polar bear, birds. A collection of tools and such so a good little museum. The other side was geographic with the minerals available in the area and the different time periods and what can be found fossil wise and the coal mines and such.
We also learned that the coal mine is still working and the entrance is through one of their public buildings and then under the street to the mine which was across the street from the building and entrance where we were standing. They had a big problem with fresh water in the past and needed to have a boat come across the fjord several times a day with water but they finally laid a pipe to bring in water. Across the fjord is a lake where the water comes from.
In another building she says that it is usually full of Tajiks! They come for the polar day only and work at things like building houses and such but they won’t stay for the polar night. Small world since I have just returned from a trip to Tajikistan.
Their school building is their pride and joy as the entire building in the front and a good deal of it on the sides and the back is painted with different animals and different buildings from around the world like the Kremlin and houses that are like the ones they have here
. Then there are Russian fairy tales painted on the sides and the back. We walked around to the back of the building when we left to see the fairy tale paintings. It was after “sunset” by then and getting darker so it was hard to get many photos of the fairy tales.
We continued up the street and finally got to one of the original hotels which is still in use. There is another hotel that is open now and you can stay in it now. There is also a large sports complex with an actual small swimming pool in Barentsburg. We had to take off our boots and put on slippers in the hotel but then we went to the gift shop and here’s where it would have been good to have passports for the stamps but my hubby bought a post card to send to himself and put a stamp on it. They didn’t have stamps so it will get mailed next week after they get the correct stamps for it. I thought that pretty funny but at least he didn’t tell himself “wish you were here!”
We are then invited to the other end of the hotel where they have some of the local beer for us. Used to, alcohol was banned from the island and especially from the mining community. At some point they were allowed to drink wine but not hard liquor because a drunk man could quickly become a dead man in the cold. Then just a year or so ago, they allowed this small company to begin to brew its own beer. They were currently closed but they had some on draft for us to try. It was ok, nothing special but the northern most brewery in the world and we had some.
They also had some snacks for us to try, a crepe with sour cream, a Russian cookie, a couple of dough things, one savory and one semi-sweet
. We also had some coffee. So a nice snack in the middle. We bought a magnet at the souvenir shop. One person bought 4 or 5 of the books they sell on Barentsburg. Nice thought but they weigh a lot.
We left around 1:50. We are supposed to be back at the boat at 2:30 to leave and I think it will take me awhile to walk down the stairs. We walk behind the school for photos and walk up to Lenin for photos. Be the time we get to the stairs it is 2:15 and we don’t have enough time to walk to the chapel. They built the chapel and also a monument to the miners who died in a mine accident several years ago. Also there was a plane crash close by that killed 120 people or so and the chapel was also built for them. Just not enough time in the end.
So back down all those flights of icy stairs to get back to the harbor. It took us at least the 10 minutes I had allotted. When we got to the bottom, and across the icy parking lot, my legs were jelly. But we were back on the boat in time and so we’re good. I made my hubby carry our bag the entire time as I thought we might need stuff but we didn’t. and he was gracious enough to carry it and not make me carry it. Poor baby.
We did have to take off our crampons in the museum as well and when M put his back on, he snapped one of the leather straps. Poo. Should have lasted longer. So our crampons have to come off again and we decide that maybe we’ll leave them off to get back to the hotel and just put them on later when we go out at night.
Sten counts us and as we are all back, the boat casts off and Sten announces that there is a shot of whiskey for everyone with ice from a glacier in it and the glacier ice could be anywhere from 1000 to 5000 years old. Tasted the same as ice to me but was a really good thought. The whiskey wasn’t that great but it acted like a sleeping pill and both of us could barely keep awake. We were sitting with a Swedish couple who told us of a couple of restaurants to visit in Longyearbyen and then we kind of fell asleep on them.
I went out once on the way back but the wind had picked up a lot so it was quite windy and quite chilly. So I went back and we both snoozed a bit. So much that we were the last ones almost off the boat again when we docked. They dock so quietly and quickly that it is hard to tell that the boat has stopped moving. It is amazing how much you need the visual cues to know what is happening and when you don’t have the visual cue, it’s difficult to know if you are moving or not.
Back in the van and Sten drops off Radisson Blu customers which is odd because Green Dog thought they were closed for a while as they remodel. Others later said also that the Radisson Blu was closed for remodel but every time we went somewhere, there was a stop there to pick up people who came out of the entrance. Strange. The van makes a turnaround at our place and Svalbard and Basecamp gets out. We say goodbye again and finally to M&D who also got a bottle of champagne on the boat. Then back to our room and some bit of rest before we go out to dinner. We are back too late for checking on the crampons to see if we can get a replacement. We will do that tomorrow.
We have learned that we will have to check out of the hotel for our Trappers Night and it doesn’t sound like it’s that far away, kind of where the dogs are so don’t really have to worry about bears even though it’s outside of the bear free zone. The Swedes were telling us a couple of campers got attacked and one died and one had serious injuries but got away by sliding down the hill. (they were up the hill and the bear was taking a short cut from water to water – as they don’t usually go uphill as is far away from the water and seals) Ben also told us that when they get whale meat for the dogs, they go down to the harbor to get it and pick up these 40kg chunks of frozen whale meat.
Hubby was reading things around the boat and saw a sign that the occupancy limit on the boat was 70 people! 70 people! OMG. I would not want to be on the boat with that many. I thought it was a little cramped with just the 13 tourists and 6 crew or so. Can’t imagine where they would put 70 people.
We check on our timing for Trappers night and decide to do the drive around to just see the town boundaries and roads on Friday when we go to Trappers night. Tomorrow we will do the museum and shopping. Very slow pace we are maintaining here.
For dinner, we just walked across the street to the Svalbard bar. Their menu left a lot to be desired as they only had burgers and a fish soup. Hubby got the soup which was quite good. My burger was good but I couldn’t eat all of it so half came back with me and so did most of my fries.
Sten had told us we could walk down to the beach for the best place to see the Northern Lights but as far as we can tell, it is still cloudy so not going to walk down there and not have there be lights. Hopefully we will get lucky at the Trappers night because there won’t be any street lights.
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