Day tripping in the Arctic: A cruise to Pyramiden

For all the time I’ve spent in the Arctic, I’ve only done a handful of touristy things. I’ve hiked up towards an active volcano in Iceland, but still haven’t driven the Golden Circle. I’ve gone dog mushing in Alaska, but haven’t sailed up the Inner Peninsula. I’ve ski toured up fjords with malamutes and down snowy slopes towards a Norwegian iron ore port, but I had yet to set sail on a day cruise around the Arctic – until earlier this month, as summer edged to a close in September 2024.

My experience began early one Tuesday morning, when I hopped onboard a bus picking up passengers from across Longyearbyen, the biggest city on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, for the thrice-weekly cruise to Pyramiden, an abandoned Russian coal mining town. With this being shoulder season, the Filipino driver picked up a mere 20 passengers for a boat that normally fits 100 people. We rolled up to the Port of Longyearbyen and stepped onto Henningsen Transport & Guiding’s state-of-the-art vessel. The operator is the only one based in Svalbard that still lets you set foot in Pyramiden. Their competitors don’t dock anymore, as they understandably don’t want to fork over money to the Russian state-owned company Artikugol, which runs the post-Soviet ghost town. I weighed my options and decided that I wanted to see Pyramiden firsthand. Given the current state of global affairs, you can never be too sure if this might be your last chance to see a place, whether for climatic or geopolitical reasons.

As we set sail, I dove headfirst into what it is like to be an Arctic tourist in 2024, decades into the Anthropocene: the epoch in which humans are altering the Earth’s geology, hand over fist. Most of the tourists onboard the roomy vessel hailed from China or Hong Kong. The rest were from Turkey, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The Germans, French, and Americans who might otherwise be filling the boat had already taken their summer vacations for the year. With school being back in session across the northern hemisphere, there were also no children, which kept things quiet to my liking.

Almost as soon as we left port, the guide beckoned us to the deck to spot some beluga whales. Their white backs rhythmically broached the still surface of the fjord, which was punctuated by the occasional whale spout. There must have been about 50 belugas, who the guide told us were in the process of shepherding the fish into one section of the fjord. As they chowed down, the tourists zoomed and clicked away on their phones and cameras.

After the whale watching interlude, nearly all of the passengers returned to their seats inside the boat. They sat contentedly and quietly, doing things like sipping coffee, solving jigsaw puzzles, or inspecting the thousands of digital pictures they’d already snapped during their holidays. Some napped during the seven-hour journey to our primary destination of Pyramiden. The scenery was relatively unchanging and unspectacular, save for when I’d reflect upon just how far north I was. I’d look at the sides of the mountains tumbling down into the fjord and think about the thousands of whalers who had plied these waters in the centuries before me, heading home with bloody, blubbery cetaceans rather than pixelated memories.

As the hours wore on, the crew began preparing lunch. This being the cruising industry, the captain and all of the crew members were from the Philippines. They largely kept to themselves and didn’t chat with the passengers much. One did, however, correct a few excited tourists who thought they had glimpsed a whale. While grilling pølser (hot dogs) and pork chops on the deck, one crewmember flatly noted, “It’s not a whale. Just the shallow part of an island,” killing the vibe. Minutes later, the barbecued meat was placed on the buffet table alongside marinated grilled salmon, salad, and copious amounts of steamed white rice. There’s nothing quite like carboloading on a cruise.

After lunch, we began approaching the Nordenskiöld glacier. The giant frozen river is one of the largest and fastest moving on Svalbard. One of the Filipino crewmembers threw a wire box with a chain attached down into the water to fetch a small iceberg. He pulled it out and began chopping it into bits on the deck. He and his fellow crewmember, an unsmiling woman who had been working the bar, poured whiskey and Fanta into plastic cups filled with the freshly harvested ice cubes so that everyone could taste the melting glacier. Most of the passengers opted for the spirit, but several of the Chinese female tourists preferred the soda. The bright orange fizzy drink looked downright alien in the many photos people took of their refreshments against the glacial backdrop.

In the frigid air blowing off the body of ice, our soft-spoken Russian guide proposed a toast. “This is not a glacier funeral, but rather a glacier that is still here,” she asserted. She persuaded us not to be sad as we imbibed the taste of climate change. The body of ice, she claimed, was in the process of recovery, and its rate of melt had slowed down now that it now terminated on the cold shores of Svalbard rather than in the fjord’s balmy waters. Unsure of whether to believe her, I contented myself with sipping my bottom-shelf whiskey on some very northern rocks. Fact-checking could wait another day — or at least until I had wifi again. (As it turns out, the glacier’s rate of retreat has in fact slowed in recent decades despite warming air temperatures, largely due to its shift from being a marine-terminating to land-terminating glacier.)

The whole situation was a strange pastiche of climate change and globalization. Here we were, a bunch of non-Norwegians standing, drinks in hand, in front of a glacier clinging onto dear life named for a Swedish scientist as the Filipino crew, who had forsaken the tropical breezes of their homeland for stiff Arctic winds, chopped up a cast-off block of ice. We consumed the bergy bits while listening to our guide from St. Petersburg speak. Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, she, like many Russians in Svalbard and elsewhere, might find it easier to make a living outside of her home country rather than within it.

Our guide, however, had been living in Longyearbyen for three years, since before the war. This winter, she planned to head to Antarctica for the first time to guide there. Making a living in Longyearbyen during the dark polar night is tough for people working in the tourism industry, as there are few guiding opportunities. People must find work doing odd jobs like serving breakfast in a hotel or working as a cleaner. Unlike working as a polar guide, the labor is neither glamorous nor Instagrammable. But it helps pay the bills until the sun begins poking back above the icy horizon in February, bringing with it the first tourists of the year.

As we traversed the fjord from the glacier to our main destination of Pyramiden, I fell asleep. I napped so hard, likely due to my inexplicably large lunch, that I nearly missed the entire walking tour of the abandoned Soviet coal mining town. When I awoke, I began idly fumbling with my camera battery charger, only to notice that all the other passengers were already off the ship. They were walking gingerly on the wooden pier under a huge metal crane that had been used to load coal onto Soviet and Russian ships. I ran down the vessel’s staircase but couldn’t see a way off. Desperate to catch up yet trying not to panic, I found the female bartender, who fortunately was able to put the ramp back down so that I could run across the dock to catch up with the group. My attempt to be a hapless tourist had turned out to be a little too good.

At the end of our cruise, as the vessel pulled into Longyearbyen in the flat, gray twilight, I struck up a conversation with the ship’s captain, who was sitting drinking tea at the bar. The cheerful man who helmed the vessel had been living in Longyearbyen for a decade. He had been recruited from the Philippines by the shipowner, who had bought the boat from Finland in 2014. The shipowner got in touch with a company in the Philippines that hires seafarers, and soon enough, the captain and many of the other crew members were on their way to Svalbard. At the time, only 29 Filipinos lived on the Norwegian island. Now, though, he told me that there were about 150-200 Filipinos calling Svalbard home, since many people had brought their relatives over the years.

The captain said that his favorite time of year is spring – March, April, and May – when it’s so colorful, and when all the animals come out onto the ice. “That would be your best chance of seeing a polar bear,” he assured me. I asked if he hunted animals, too, but he said he didn’t, as “only locals” do, snaring their annual quotas of reindeer, seal, and other Arctic fauna each year.

The captain of the world’s northernmost day cruise asked where I was from. I responded, “San Francisco.” He smiled and said he had visited the city by the bay last year on vacation, as it had been his dream to see the Golden Gate Bridge. He took a “good selfie”, rode the cable car, and ate clam chowder out of a sourdough bread bowl at Boudin’s Sourdough Bread Company. Coincidentally, that was the first place I ever worked. The captain and I had a good laugh about that. In the Arctic, where all the lines of longitude converge into a single point, the world seems even smaller.

The next day, the Filipino captain would sail to Barentsburg, a Russian coal mining town still in operation not far from Longyearbyen. He told me that many tourists were visiting Pyramiden or Barentsburg these days because they were interested in Russia, and this was as close as they’d be able to get with the war in Ukraine still raging. Admittedly, wanting to get close to Russia had motivated me to travel to Pyramiden as well.

Earlier in the summer, I’d traveled to Transnistria, the breakaway Soviet republic in Moldova, where the streets are also lined with Lenin statues. While Russians on Svalbard mine coal, in Transnistria, they mine bitcoin. Both are efforts to extract a living out of precarious, liminal spaces. Yet oddly, whereas traveling to Transnistria, with its border checkpoints and army outposts, felt like being on the margins of empire despite lying in the heart of Europe, remote Svalbard seemed like the center of a borderless, visa-free world.

Svalbard’s cosmopolitanness is fragile and perhaps even illusory. Great power conflict is ramping up on the northern archipelago, which the Wall Street Journal the other day called “a critical steppingstone for projecting power across one of the world’s most sensitive regions.” But in the meantime, I was happy to experience a world where people can live and work without visas, and where day-tripping to post-Soviet sites is still a possibility.