Longyearbyen at last

Norway is one of those countries that keeps going and going and going – north. Once you get to a place called Nordkapp (North Cape), which is the northernmost point of mainland Europe, you might think you’d reached the top of the country’s territory. But you’d be wrong. To find Norway’s northernmost extremity, you need to get in a boat or, as is more common these days, a plane, and continue 800 kilometers north to Svalbard.

Once called Spitsbergen by the Dutch who discovered it, the glaciated archipelago is sovereign Norwegian territory. Governance, however, follows an unusual set of rules in accordance with the Svalbard Treaty, signed after World War I in 1920. While Norway administers Svalbard, any nationality can live or work there once they arrive – though you aren’t allowed to be born or die there. As a result, Svalbard’s only city, Longyearbyen, whose population hovers around 2,500, is a cosmopolitan hodgepodge of Thai restaurant workers, Russian coal miners, Ukrainian hoteliers, British baristas, and Norwegian researchers and engineers.

Due to the extremeness of Svalbard’s geographical location, its whales, fish, and coal, and, more recently, its peculiar governance and geopolitics, Svalbard has long attracted the intrepid type. I finally made my first journey there last week, arriving on a flight with discount airliner Norwegian Air. While departing from Tromsø airport, I noticed the gate for Longyearbyen was in the international terminal, which at first seemed puzzling. Svalbard, however, is not in the Schengen Zone and has its own unique visa regime. That is why I had to exit Norway through a one-way set of doors, only to have to stand for 30 minutes in a state-free purgatory.

Norwegian customs officers had not yet arrived to stamp departing passengers’ passports. Everyone bound for Longyearbyen, especially the Russian travelers, grew frustrated in the amenity-less corridor. We were not permitted to go back out through the doors to re-enter Norway, where overpriced, sour black coffee at the Cafe Ritazza (which musters a pitiful 2.2 stars on Google Maps, though I quite liked their shrimp sandwich), would have awaited us. Instead, we – a group of Russians, many of whom work in the still-active coal mining town of Barentsburg, Chinese tourists, a handful of grizzled Norwegians, and a Spaniard who I would later encounter in the shared kitchen of my Longyearbyen accommodation – stood neither here nor there. It was like a curtailed, High Arctic version of The Terminal, the 2004 movie starring Tom Hanks, in which he is stuck indefinitely at arrivals due to his home country having collapsed mid-flight.

The Norwegian customs officers finally arrived. “Going to Svalbard?” the blonde woman asked me. I nodded, trying to contain my excitement. Soon after, the plane was northward bound at last. After a 1.5-hour flight over a cloud-free Norwegian Sea, with even the usually shrouded Bear Island (named by the Dutch for a polar bear spotted swimming nearby) visible out of the windows on the airplane’s right side, we started descending over Svalbard’s glacially carved fjords. A riot of rainbows stretched across the lime-green and brown tundra below. The spectacular explosion of color was a far cry from the snow-white vistas I had expected of the archipelago.

As rain showers buffeted the jet, we touched down on an island for which I have long tried to divine a work-related reason to visit. Without any specific events coming up, I decided to come on my own time and dime. After all, the flight from Tromsø, where I had just wrapped up a week of travels with the Fulbright Arctic Initiative, was only about 100 euros. Accommodation at the wonderful Ukrainian-run Haugens Pensjonat was only 100 euros a night. So, there wasn’t much standing financially between the world’s northernmost settlement of over 1,000 people and me.  

After disembarking, I passed by the stuffed polar bear at the baggage claim, so typical of airports across the circumpolar north as they try to cultivate a certain “Arctic-ness”, or nordicity, as the Canadian writer Louis Hamelin called it. Outside, past the cigarette-smoking Russians, the boisterous Norwegian Air flight attendants gathered around another predictable feature of a remote location: a pole with signs denoting the distances to different cities around the world. A similar pole can be found at the airport in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. It must have been some of the flight attendants’ first time in Longyearbyen, for they were excitedly taking photos.

Eager to avoid the pole that has arguably become more of an Arctic tourist trap than the North Pole itself, I raced down to the parking lot, from where I could see a rainbow stretching out over the ocean with a Sami lavvo nearby. I’m not sure what it was doing at the airport, but the Sámi could well ask the same of outsiders and their infrastructure on their lands.

I hopped on the airport bus, which soon started driving the short distance towards Longyearbyen along the rain-soaked asphalt. Already, I could see the infrastructure of the coal mining industry clinging on to a rusty afterlife. Along the road from the airport run cables that transported small buckets of coal to and from the shipping port, some of which remain dangling in mid-air. Norway’s last coal mine, much of whose output is exported to Germany to support automobile steel manufacturing, still operates on Svalbard at Gruve 7, though it is scheduled to close in 2025. The Russians, 36 kilometers away in Barentsburg, will likely keep mining the sooty stuff, although production has been decreasing.

At the Port of Longyearbyen, a bunch of Russians disembarked – likely to catch a boat to Barentsburg, where many of them work in the coal mine. A few minutes later, the bus began weaving through Longyearbyen’s lengthy streets. The town was bigger than I thought, with its mostly perpendicular streets nestled into a stunning glacial valley out of which flows a silty river towards the fjord. The lack of snow exposed the charcoal mountainsides, making the glaciers suspended above the settlement all the more apparent. I tried to snap some photos, but my camera lens didn’t want to cooperate. No matter. Somehow, the soft focus of all of my photos conveys something of the hazy dream in which I found myself upon finally reaching Svalbard.

The Spaniard from the gate in Tromsø and I hopped off the bus at one of the last stops near our modest nine-room hotel at the edge of town. He was surprised there was no receptionist. With nearly twenty years of travels throughout the high-trust country of Norway under my belt, I explained that it was just one of those situations where you let yourself in. We took off our shoes upon entering, as has been custom in Svalbard since the coal mining days, and found our way to our rooms, socks shimmying across the smooth, spotless floors. I put down my bag, brewed a cup of tea, and looked out the kitchen window. The sun was shining, turning the moss-covered rocks a fluorescent shade of green. Today would be a brilliant day in Ultima Thule.