(Svalbard)…In August, I strolled up, after taking my shoes off, to the bar of the Mellageret and ordered a drink, and thus doing so, I claimed a Travel Superlative, that of having a beer in the world’s most northerly pub. I’d also done this in the world’s most northerly settlement, Ny-Ålesund in the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard. Generally, everything here, is the “Most Northerly this” or “Most Northerly that.”
The accolades start as you land at Longyearbyen Airport, the world’s most northerly scheduled-flight airport at 78° 14’ 50’N (from now on, W’sMN will stand in for this superlative). The records continue as you enter Longyearbyen—named after an American miner, John Munroe Longyear, from Lansing, Mich.—which is the W’sMN settlement with more than 1,000 residents. Longyearbyen, approximately 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 600 miles south of the North Pole, is light for every minute of the summer, which is the time to come.
Spend a couple of days here and then embark on one of the adventure cruises that go northwards in search of whales, seals, glaciers, misty fjords and, most stunning of all, Polar bears. I saw five, all fat, lazy and contented, lying on ice packs high above an easy meal of a dead Fin whale. The name that I knew the region by when I was young, Spitsbergen, is in fact one part of the island group of Svalbard. The W’sMN spot I have now been to is 80° 00’ 3’N, a little atoll (and, yes, you can have atolls in cold places, as well as in warm) called Moffen Island.
Anchored 1,000 feet from the shore (being a wildlife refuge, this is a legal requirement). I gazed at the walruses wobbling down the stony beach towards the sea, which on the day I was there registered 2°C. If you want to be an official Svalbard Polar Bear, and have a certificate to prove it, you need to go swimming in this water, which I did for exactly five strokes. The water on your skin resembles a thousand knife pricks.
One Brit crazier than me, Lewis Gordon Pugh, recently swam for two-thirds of a mile in water like this, ice bobbing close by, but he is trained and has a unique way of raising his core body temperature. His swim took him just a shade under 19 minutes, when any time more than one minute in water that cold can have irreversible effects. Three seconds was plenty for me, but that dot of water by an old burial site called Gravesnet is now the W’sMN spot in which I’ve gone swimming, smashing my previous record of the public swimming baths in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, at a measly 64° 11’ 27’N.
Anyway, let’s get back to Ny-Ålesund. It is predominantly a research station, but it is permanent, with 150 inhabitants during the summer, 30 during the winter. It has a store, a post office, an abandoned steam train ideal for photographs and the W’sMN Arctic marine laboratory. It is not a temporary community, and it is not formed of heated tents, which other upstart claimants claim makes them the W’sMN settlement.
Do not believe them. And what makes Ny-Ålesund the winner is that it acts like a town, with residents chatting on street corners, shoppers sharing jokes with the clerk in the store and friends sharing a pint—well, at least they can the two summer evenings a week (one in winter) the pub is open. Life can be felt here. Stories are told. One I heard at the pub was when I started chatting with Mehmet, a Turk from Istanbul. He told me a great tale about Ny-Ålesund. The famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, left from here in a zeppelin (you can see the tower from which this craft was tethered) to be the first man to reach the North Pole. This was in May 1926. Earlier that year an American, Richard Evelyn Byrd, claimed he had reached the pole, but his data was confused and his achievement doubted. Amundsen went with an American explorer called Lincoln Ellsworth and an Italian pilot called Umberto Nobile, who brought along a crew. Nobile told Amundsen and Ellsworth not to wear furs because of their weight and to bring small Norwegian and American flags, which they intended to leave at the pole, for the same reason. When Nobile arrived, he and his crew were decked out in heavy furs, which infuriated Amundsen, but not as much as he became when he realized that the heavy crate he believed was full of technical equipment actually contained a massive Italian flag that fluttered down to cover the pole for, seemingly, acres: The W’sMN con trick.
No con trick from me. While Amundsen et al only floated over the North Pole, rather than landing there or taking sleds and dogs, I actually walked all the way on foot to the pub. A little to the south is another town, Barentsburg, which is on the same fjord, Isfjord, as Longyearbyen, which, incidentally, is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a climate-controlled underground warehouse that is off limits to most and in which have been deposited seeds of every plant known to science. Its building was completed last year. Barentsburg, a Russian-Ukrainian mining community that is fascinating to wander in but very rough around the edges to look at, does not provide such an easy life, so it seemed to me.
I would not be surprised if it was abandoned in the next decade, a decision that would probably have more to do with the commodity markets, rather than the desire of people to live there. A statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stands in the central square beneath a stylized mural of three strong women workers and a sign on the hillside that in Russian says “Peace to the World,” the—you guessed it—W’sMN mountainside message. But the Lenin statue here will have to make do with second place, for there also is a statue of him in the now-abandoned town of Pyramiden, 50 miles to the north. Hardly anyone goes there now.
Cruise ships do stop in Barentsburg, though, and it is worth seeing. Some of the prettier buildings are deemed unsafe following a 2008 earthquake, and the wooden walkways that crisscross the town are not for the unsure of foot, but there exists here a definite atmosphere of adventure and “otherness.”
A bar—inside a hotel that surely has seen better days—is compelling in a let’s-go-back-in-time manner and offers a curiously inscrutable menu that includes “soup noodles ‘Rolton’ in assortment” for 20 Norwegian kronor (NK), “cappuccino ‘MacCoffee’ in assortment, 12.5 grams” for 15NK, “dry rings of calamaries (sic), 18 grams” for 8NK and “bus trip: port—birch grove—port” for 50NK that I did make serious enquiries about but was told I’d already missed that day’s exciting itinerary. Shame, that, as it might just have been the World’s Most Northerly Birch Grove Adventure, and who would not want to pay the equivalent of $7 to see the World’s Smallest Tree, all of them no more than two inches in height.

(Greenland)...This place is massive. Greenland measures 2,166,086 square kilometres, of which 755,637 square kilometres forms its massive ice sheet, the middle of the world’s largest island. Its coastline also is staggering, being some 39,330 kilometres in length, which is roughly the size of the Earth's circumference at the equator. On this huge piece of land live approximately 60,000 people.
That is one person for every 36 square kilometres of land. Of course, the people—Inuit; outsiders are known as qanuallit—can live only on a much smaller piece of land, along the coasts. Ilulissat was the farthest I was north, at 69°10'N/49°45'W, some 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. It is a pretty place, but no doubt harsh at many times of the year. The sound I will remember is of the 8,000 dogs here, howling away as I went for a walk at 5 in the morning, unable to sleep because of the perpetual light.
Every one of them was chained by a five-foot length of chain, which meant that they had a circular span of 10 feet, which is good to know, for they certainly are not pets. They are related to husky dogs and are not allowed south of the Arctic Circle (other breeds, in turn, are not allowed north) in order to keep the breed strong and pure and ready as working dogs. Also given the Danish name of grønlandshund, the dogs work hard, but during the summer they just sit around, not being fed too much in order to keep them fit. I walked around Ilulissat many times, between the rows of brightly coloured wooden houses. All the wood needs to be imported from Canada or Denmark, Greenland’s mother country. When the road runs out, a small trail winds along the coast, passes several fishing boats and ends at the beginning of the great glacier here. A hill here is where in olden times the elderly, no longer wishing to be a burden on their families, would throw themselves off to their deaths. Only those who contributed could live, was the unwritten rule, seemingly.
The glacier, called Sermeq Kujalleq, is the most active in the northern hemisphere, each day discharging into the icy sea more fresh water than New York City consumes in a year. It is spectacular, and the temperatures dropped noticeably when one is close to an iceberg, which here are immense. Think very large, and then think again. The scenery constantly changes, due to the migrations of this ice. One morning I awoke (I hardly got to sleep, really), and two Minke whales slowly passed by my window amid a few icebergs and a few more patches of floating, condensed snow. Two days later, and the whole bay—which stretches to Disko Island—was cluttered with ice. It was as though some giant had moved the hotel overnight. Equally of interest to me were the huge expanses of tundra. One could either jump from grassy tussock to grassy tussock or huge stone slab to huge stone slab. Rivers occasionally meandered from one small pond or lake to another but mostly quickly disappeared into the damp sod. Ravens jumped around. I walked for quite some time and found myself at the cemetery, which views icebergs from a distance. Who knows how many here died as a result of the elements?
A Greenlandic saying goes, If you do not fear the sea, you will not last one year in Greenland, and even in July, the water was frigid. One local told me that the only way to survive a soaking is by not panicking and being young to begin with. He told me of three young men who somehow let their boat drift away as they were out hunting. One of the men jumped in to retrieve it, but the current moved the boat faster than he could move towards it. His friends ran to get help. An hour later, the man was plucked out of the water, having survived by grabbing hold of a small lump of ice. The air ambulance was called, but apparently after being cared for on the boat, he promptly walked straight past the ambulance crew and was seen later that evening down the pub having a beer.
The town—it has 4,800 people and is Greenland’s third-largest settlement—is known also for being the home of Greenland’s greatest explorer, Knud Rasmussen (as I write another Rasmussen is currently leading the Tour de France cycle race, although as I revise this, he has now been thrown off for irregularities concerning drug tests), and by his childhood home, now a museum, was going on a kayaking competition, in which competitors manouevered around a set course (small Inuit boys guided them by waving red flags) before lifting their long, heavy kayaks on their heads and shoulders and running approximately a kilometre before doing it all again and again and again.
I had no idea how many laps constituted the race; one competitor was Spanish. I know this because I replied to him in his language after hearing him swear at dropping his kayak upside down in the water. He was not about to put his hand in the water to re-right it, not without at least a pint of Spanish jerez inside him. His name was Xavier, and being the only qanuallit competitor had become quite a celebrity. He had been given an Inuit name, for the locals could not pronounce his Spanish one.