Opening my laptop on this hot summer day in Romania I thought it would be an excellent idea to cool down a bit while writing one of the many trip reports I planned to write for ages. In particular, a winter trip report of a journey I embarked on in March to the Norwegian island of Svalbard, which is perhaps better known under the name of Spitsbergen.
The island of Svalbard, located waaaaay above the arctic circle, has always intrigued me for several reasons. To start, as an aviation fan it is famous as being the northernmost airport with commercial scheduled flights (if I believe correctly, Alert Airport in Nunavut, Canada, is located even more northerly – but only sees a military charter twice or so a year). Given that I have a weird liking of remote places and that the island has an interesting history and geography (there is still an active Russian mining community still active since a concession was sold by the Dutch to the Soviets in 1932) and you know my second reason. The third reason? Well, the snowy winter landscape is supposed to be gorgeous.
You might think it would be slightly mad to visit the island in early March. On first sight that might well be true as temperatures easily dip below -20 degrees Celsius and the main tourist season is indeed summer. Sure it is cold, but as last year I had an
awesome winter trip to Siberia I thought I would survive Svalbard as well.
Of course, you would not want to visit in the middle of winter in January or February as you would not even have any daylight at such an high latitude. Yet from early March to mid-April the sun slowly starts to come above the horizon in the season called the “pastel winter” by the locals. It is usually clear weather and there is enough light during the day for winter activities such as dog sledding or embarking on a snowmobile ride. The name pastel winter refers to the unique and beautiful light conditions where the snow-covered mountains of Svalbard shine in beautiful pastel colours due to the bright blue sky and the first sunlight of the year.
Booking the trip was rather easy. You can only fly to Svalbard's Longyearbyen Airport (LYR) from two cities in Norway: Oslo and Tromsø (EDIT: While typing this I found that this summer TUIfly starts an intriguing flight from CDG directly to LYR!). The only two airlines having scheduled flights to Longyearbyen are Norwegian and SAS – so it is easy to keep a watch on price fluctuations. One-way flights can easily hit 350 EUR or more, so when I saw return flights going for 200 EUR on both Norwegian and SAS from Oslo I instantly booked a trip up north (naturally on SAS, given I have *A gold and could earn some miles too). The connecting flights were fairly easy as well. On the outbound I would fly from Bucharest to Oslo Torp on Wizzair for the grand price of 12.5 EUR (and an additional 18 EUR for seat reservation and priority boarding which allows me to bring two pieces of hand luggage), with a day in Oslo to have a safe cushion. The way back would be a bit more risky, having only thee hours in Oslo after my SAS flight to make it to a separate booking on Turkish Airlines to Istanbul and on to Bucharest (155 EUR).
On a map, the flights look like this:
To get an idea on how high of a latitude Svalbard is located one just has to take a look at a globe (or Google Maps). Just compare the location of the island with Greenland or the left. Or consider that the distance from Oslo to Longyearbyen is about as far as from Oslo south to Barcelona..
Things to look forward to in this trip report are:
- Flying to the northernmost commercial airport in the world
- Freezing, freezing cold temperatures in Svalbard
- An amazing adventure on snowmobile
- A visit to the Russian mining town of Barentsburg
