HOLIDAYS TO SPITSBERGEN

SPITSBERGEN EXPEDITION CRUISES
9 days from £2300 pp

Follow in Amundsen’s footsteps to these islands of extraordinary beauty with their glacial landscapes, migratory bird life and remote settlements. Here, where the sun never sets in summer, you lose touch with time, whilst slowly savouring a mountainous beauty unmatched anywhere in the world.

Spitsbergen is the largest of the Svalbard archipelago’s islands, whose capital, Longyearbyen, is the most northerly point in the world reachable by scheduled flight and where (between April 20th and August 22nd) the sun never sets. The name means “land of the jagged peaks” and geologists estimate that millions of years ago the archipelago was at the equator, subsequently drifting north over millennia to produce a dramatic cornucopia of mountain rock formations; heat hardened sea beds now pointing skywards and glacier walls, some as long as 200 km.

The largest settlements are Longyearbyen, with a population of about 1400, the Russian mining town of Barentsburg that is frozen in time and Ny Ålesund from where Amundsen began his epic voyage across the North Pole by airship. The old trappers’ huts, made from drift wood and logs carried down the Barents Sea, bear witness to the winter hardships still borne by a handful of hunters.

For botanists Spitsbergen’s some 200 species include the delicate Svalbard poppy; abundant Saxifragas particularly the prolifically purple oppositifohen; white heaths of Cassiope; pink mounds of Silena acaulis and the delicate blue hues of the Boreal Jacob’s ladder.

For the ornithologist the sheer abundance of the literally millions of Brunnich’s Guillemots and Little Auks are just mind boggling. With King Eider, Ivory Gull, Sabine’s Gull and Snow Buntings to add to the show, Svalbard is something of a photographic paradise.

If you take one of our expedition cruises partway round the archipelago then the arctic mammals are the stars of the show. This, of course, is Polar Bear country and you will have a good chance of seeing females with their cubs searching out food along with lugubrious walruses hauled out on sand banks and the Svalbard reindeer grazing.

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