Part 1 was to be picked up at 10 o’clock, the earliest I’ve been out so far, by Father Christmas – actually a Norwegian called Viggo with a huge bushy beard, a fur hat and a pipe. While we waited for the other half of our group, he and the Danish man discussed the BBC, who apparently here filming again (“too much!” said Viggo), presumably a second series of The Hunt. According to Viggo, Jeremy Clarkson is here in the Svalbard Bar “too often” and “Prince Harry – Carrothead – he is here in the pub also!”

We started off with a lecture on population in the bus. 2186 people in town, 600 children (three kindergartens and a school that teaches in every language necessary). The biggest nationality here in Norwegian, then Thai, then Philippine then Swedish (“always the Swedes are there!”) and fifth is “Russian-speaking people. It was easier when it was just Soviet. Now it’s Russia, Ukraine, etc. Russian-speaking people”. The 42 nations of the Svalbard treaty, signed in the 1920s, are allowed to place citizens here, under three conditions. I forget the first but the second is that they must have a job and the third is that that job must pay enough to live on. Taxes here are just enough to for the cost of living. There are no old people here, there are no disabled people – other than the children, this is entirely populated by people of working age and ability. There is one policeman who has nothing to do because there’s no crime, so he gets bored and invents things to do (you wait until a mammoth comes out of the permafrost, then there’ll be plenty for the police to deal with…). The current governor is Kjerstin Askholt, who did not come to the window of her house to wave at the minibus. I’d thought “the governor” was just what the Svalbard administration was called but it does refer to one person. Fortitude may have been filmed in eastern Iceland but this is the real thing.

There are currently only about 250 people working in mining, 29 people working at the satellite station and 50 or so in the governor’s office. Viggo didn’t say how many people worked at the Polar Institute but he did say that about 80% of jobs in town now are in tourism.

We went past the governor’s offices and buildings, down to the church, where we heard all that’s been officially released about the history of Svalbard during WW2 and then paused at the cemetery. There have been 729 deaths in the mining industry here since John Munro Longyear set up operations in 1906 – some of them before that, when people fell off the boat on the way. A lot of them have been buried and sealed inside the mountain, some of them were blasted across the entire Longyear valley when one of the mines exploded and all in all, there are only 30 crosses in that graveyard.

Next stop was the far end of town where the mining barracks used to be. The toilet barrels, delightfully, were kept in the basement of the mess hall to stop them freezing, so it smelled lovely in there!

Our first proper stop, first time out of the bus, was on the outskirts of town. We were told the story of the bear who ate all the dogfood again and we stopped at the polar bear sign where Viggo produced his rifle and we all posed with it. It’s heavier than I expected and I wasn’t sure how comfortable I was with us playing with it, especially on ice so slippery Viggo kept having to rescue us.

Next stop was at the top of the mountain above Mine 7, at the satellite station. Mine 6 isn’t finished but they had a problem with the entrance tunnel and rather than go to the time and expense of repairing it, they just left the mine and opened a new one, so Mine 6 is dormant rather than empty, mined-out, finished and closed. They were using the radar so we couldn’t get close but we could get photos of the enormous dishes against the mid-blue sky. Dishes up here can apparently stay in constant contact with satellites around the equator whereas further south, they’d vanish every now and then around the back of the planet. I think the Americans started this project and as part of it, they funded fibre optic internet here in 1983. That’s the same year the power station was opened, to finally provide the town with running water (it’s cold. In order to keep the water liquid, you have to keep it warm, so all the pipes flow together and the warm water pipes keep everything defrosted). The airport was opened in 1975, the previous one having been a patch of frozen swamp. That’s what we were riding out snow scooters over – swamp. Before the current airport opened, the terminal consisted of a hut and the runway markings were a car parked at each end of the swamp to give the pilots something to aim for and it could only operate in winter.

Although Svalbard’s mountains sort of resemble Iceland’s, in being layered and flat-topped, there is nothing volcanic going on here (although the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates do meet out in the fjord). The mountains here are higher than the ice caps during the last Ice Age so they haven’t been flattened by glacial action, they’re just flat because they’re sandstone, they’re really old and they’ve been eroded for several billions years.

The last stop was the Global Seed Vault. Previously a Norwegian thing housed in Mine 3 until they realised they’d lose it all if the mine exploded so they started storing it inside solid stone inside the mountain. And then one neighbour asked if they could borrow a corner for their seeds and then another neighbour and then somewhere around 2008, “it was easier to rename it – the Global Seed Vault” and amongst many other things, it stores something ridiculous like 140 thousand different species of wheat.

Viggo did say one thing I was a bit suspicious of – there are a few species of bear in the world but all vegetarian except the polar bear. Is this true? I can’t picture a grizzly bear not eating meat. I can imagine it as an omnivore but would a grizzly bear really reject tasty human flesh if it caught it? Apparently polar bears are moving westwards and some of them are breeding with their grizzly cousins (having once, half a million years ago, been the same species) and creating a hybrid bear, which I’ve also seen called a superbear, which is far bigger than a polar bear and far more aggressive than a grizzly bear and eats everything. The only drawback (saving grace?) of the superbear is that it may not be able to breed. Apparently no one’s sure about this minor fact yet.

Is that everything Viggo told us? Almost certainly not but I think it’s probably a lot more than most people would remember and be able to write down at the end of the tour. I only wish I’d thought to take my notebook with me.

Oh! I remember one more thing! In the summer, there are 92 species of bird nesting on the swamp. Viggo can recognise a parrot from a swan but he can’t identify 92 different birds and he doesn’t know their names in 42 different languages. “But I do have a favourite bird. Fried chicken! Or tandoori chicken. That’s a bird.”

We came back home for lunch. After lunch, I decided I really had to drag myself into town as I needed a little more food and I’m not at all sure what time Svalbardbutikken is open on Sundays – possibly not until the afternoon which is no good for someone who’s leaving town at 12.30.

In the afternoon, I was picked up for looking for the Northern Lights by Alex of Spitzbergen Travel, who really does seem to be the only employee of the entire company. He was the one who took me on the snow scooter on Thursday.

We paused by the polar bear sign because it’s apparently one of the most famous landmarks on the island but Alex doesn’t wave the rifle around unnecessarily (although when he produced it later on, it was wearing a bright green sock on the business end) so we didn’t get to take rifle photos. We also heard the story of the polar bear that raided the kennels for dog food again, only with a personal touch – Alex met the polar bear in question because those kennels are where he keeps his own dogs. He saw the nose marks where the bear stood on its back legs to look through the window of the hut, he saw it when it returned the next day, looking tired and lazy and overfed and he also talked to the men in the helicopter that took it away. It seems dog food doesn’t necessarily agree with polar bears and the pilot said the return flight was a very long one.

We spend an hour or so at Camp Barentsz. I’m not entire sure what the place used to be or is but it consists of a handful of wooden huts (one contains “the nicest bucket in town”) and we had a fire and some bonfire coffee – you heat the kettle over the fire, then you stick your hand in the fire, take out a burning piece of wood and stir the water with it. Alright, he had a glove on but a glove isn’t much protection against a burning log taking straight from a roaring fire. I declined the bonfire coffee and was given instead some more hot blackcurrant. I assume it was made using the same water, it didn’t really taste of burnt wood.

There was also food – healthy, doctor-recommended salted meat, flatbread and butter. The trouble was that it’s cold – the butter is rock-solid and the flatbread is so flat and crispy (exactly the same texture as poppadoms) that when you try to spread solid butter, they just crack and fall on the floor. I eventually decided the best way of dealing with it was to put a lump of butter on the flatbread and hold it over the fire until the butter was soft enough that I could slide it around with my fingers. It was tasty! I wish I’d been able to spot any in the supermarket.

We also watched a little video on Svalbard – just pictures taken year-round with a few of the Northern Lights and then Alex talked. About what people used to believe the Northern Lights are, about Norse mythology but pronounced in Norwegian, so I didn’t immediately recognise them (Thur and Udin, apparently), about Snorri Sturlasson’s opinions on them (Snorri being a famous Icelandic politician and writer who Norway are trying to steal – they call him Snorre and I have been to his house and dipped my feet in his private pool), about the Inuit belief that the lights are sparks caused by spirits playing football in the sky with a walrus skull and finally, to what they really are.

Then we diverged. The entire rest of the group spoke Norwegian so although they talked to Alex in Norwegian, he answered them mostly in English but then they drifted off into something and I just enjoyed the fire and tried to pick out a word here or there – I could recognise “Svalbard” and “thirty” and that was about it. When he switched back to English, he was talking about his dogs – there was no vet on Svalbard until two years ago. A vet would come “from the south” twice a year for rabies vaccinations and he’d deal with whatever problems he could with the 800 dogs in the two days but apart from that, if you had dogs, you had to deal with any problems yourself. One of Alex’s dogs has Alzheimer’s, which I didn’t know dogs can get (apparently it’s fairly common in dogs over about eight) and the dog has tablets which can only be got now there’s a proper local vet.

We packed away the food and flasks, the socked rifle was collected and we got back in the car to climb the same mountain as this morning, to park next to the same satellite dishes to look at the view. Looked a bit different. That noontime pale blue light was gone, it was quite cloudy apart from a patch of stars directly above us and it was freezing! Alex suggested to keep moving my toes inside my boots (I was already doing that) and if I needed it, he had a sharp knife. Thank you, Svalbardian.

The Northern Lights were not playing. Not a flicker. Not even a flicker that can only be seen by a camera. Nothing. Eventually, when we all had hypothermia, we got back in the car and descended, to stop next to Camp Barentsz for the penultimate story. There is a little field of antennae – short ones four or five feet high researching clouds made of crystals that glow and longer ones measuring meteoroids. “In winter, I like them. In summer, I think they’re quite ugly. But they’re the closest thing we have to a forest. That one on the right is going to be my Christmas tree”. Pause. “That is a good joke. I will write it down in my notebook.”

The last story was about another polar bear. A few people were camping around the next fjord and some bears were getting a bit close. They fired their flare guns and the bears would run away to the next camp, who would fire their flares and scare the bear away to the next camp etc etc and then when the bears got used to the flares, they banged saucepan lids because the bears had never heard that before and they did not like it. But one day, the camp next door failed to scare the bear off and had to evacuate to their boat and watch while the bear destroyed everything. And then it ambled into their mess tent, stayed in there for a while, presumably eating everything it could get its paws on and when it finally emerged, it had a shopping bag (from Svalbardbutikken) hanging from its mouth. This very bear, in fact:

That was the last story. We were on our way back into town, delivered back to our various warm rooms, I wrote a blog and ate some cheese and now I’m going to have a bath. Because that’s what you do here in the evening – and it was a longer evening than expected because I thought it was at least ten o’clock only to find it was half past seven.

I didn’t have any adventures planned for today.

I got up at a relatively leisurely pace and went into town. Nothing in Longyearbyen opens until 11, so I wandered down the hill towards the Polar Institute and watched the sky behind the mountains to the south east. No, the sun doesn’t rise but yes, the sky does change colour and by the time I was going home for lunch, it was quite an astonishing pale blue – almost a sunrise. The path down the hill is tricky to get down, a bit icy and slippery until you get a quarter of the way down and realise that while you’ve been clinging to the edge, the middle is pure gravel and about as slippery as sandpaper. Coming back up is much easier.

I stopped in the shopping centre. There was a shop inside selling jewellery that I wanted to look at and very quickly established it wasn’t to my taste (I’ve not quite got the hang of currency conversion but I suspect it wasn’t to my taste in pennies either) but they did have some wonderful badges for my camp blanket and that was the one and only important souvenir I desperately wanted. As Svalbard doesn’t have a flag (it’s sufficiently not-Norway to not be part of Schengen but it is sufficiently part of Norway to use their flag. That doesn’t entirely make sense) I had no idea what kind of blanket badge I could get but a badge I indeed have.

Next stop was Svalbardbuttiken – the supermarket-vínbúð-department store-junk shop. I had run out of anything to drink and was getting low on bread, plus my face was starting to freeze. But the trouble with leaving -9 outside and wandering around a heated supermarket for a while, while still wearing the outdoors clothes is that you reach a point where you just overheat and that came as I was waiting to be served, when I could have yelled “forget them, serve me before I die of heatstroke!” (I didn’t. I am good. Sweaty, but quiet). I found the real drinks, hiding away right at the back, next to the baby food, nowhere near the fridges full of cans and juice and 800 types of milk. I knew there was some kind of blackcurrant syrup somewhere on the island because I was given some yesterday out on the snow scooters and told that they drink a lot of it but I hadn’t spotted it before.

The last stop, after I’d paused on the road behind the shop to behold the really light blue sky, was one of the outdoors shops. The majority of Longyearbyen’s shops sell the sort of warm clothes you need to survive this climate and since I already have those clothes, I haven’t been in them thus far. I don’t really know why I did today but as I prowled and contemplated buying a Svalbard woolly hat, I spied water bottles and flasks, an entire rack of them, all stamped with a little map of Svalbard and I couldn’t resist. It’s come in handy for drinking that blackcurrant syrup, although I was getting on fine with the mugs provided in the room when I was drinking the apple and mango juice.

Actually, the last last stop I made was the tourist information centre next door, and finally I found one of these mythical places where you take your shoes off when you come in. I acquired a map of the town at long last and a glimpse of the airport bus timetable. When you look more closely at the map, you see that Longyearbyen is highlighted in pale pink and you don’t think much of it at first – emphasis that here is the only town on the archipelago but no, the pink is to show this is a polar bear-safe zone, this is where you don’t need to carry a rifle. Incidentally, because it’s dark, you can see right into any window where the lights are on inside and I have observed stuffed polar bears in a lot of windows. They’re protected now and although you can shoot them in self-defence, it’ll still result in an enquiry by the governor but I suspect in less careful times, they’d kill them and then find themselves with a huge body to deal with – the answer seeming to be “just stuff it and give it to someone”. I don’t know. I’m guessing, based on what I’ve spotted.

In the afternoon, I ambled up to the swimming pool (followed the “main road” rather than the footpath through town and decided that’s not the best way to do it – no visible pavement under the snow and I’m not wearing anything reflective. All the kids here wear hi-viz vests and all the adults wear either reflective sashes, armbands, or my favourite, the blue flashing LED armbands) only to find that the pool doesn’t open until 5. At least, I was fairly sure of that. I was certain that reception wasn’t open and I attempted to interpret the Norwegian sign up next to it. But my Norwegian isn’t even as good as my Icelandic and the two languages don’t look as closely related as they’re said to be. I like to think I would have been able to understand much better if it had been in Icelandic. I came home and I didn’t do very much until quarter to five.

The pool was open and the Shower Ordeal is alive and well here too. The pool is upstairs, which is weird, and a third of it is a five-metre deep diving pool. I’m not a huge fan of swimming over deep water, even if it’s only in an indoor swimming pool, even though I know two metres, five metres, makes no difference, so I stuck to the shallow end and played in the water like a child. There were quite a lot of people there – not “quite a lot” like at home, but quite a lot considering there are only 2000 people on this archipelago. 20 or so people in the pool means 1% of everyone. Imagine 65,000 people in one swimming pool at home.

On the way back, the five or ten minute walk back through the town, across the bridge, daydreaming about what would happen if a polar bear strolled across the street, my hair froze. Of course it did. It had been -9 at lunchtime. I have no idea what it would be by evening but probably colder and I had wet hair which I had deliberately not put inside my hat because it would get my hat wet. It froze! It went solid and I could bend it as if it was made of pipecleaners! It didn’t freeze so badly that it just snapped off but frozen hair!

Of course, after that, there was only one thing left to do with the last of a very cold dark evening. I had a bath.

Tomorrow I’m doing the local sightseeing tour in the morning (the Global Seedbank, the mines etc) and in the afternoon, I’m going looking for the Northern Lights. The website hasn’t mentioned snow scooters so I’m assuming a bus of some kind. I’ve definitely had my fill of snow scooters. It was cloudy for the first couple of days but the cloud has lifted today and I’ve seen stars and actual blue-ish sky so that’s promising for seeing the lights.

I’ve always called these things snowmobiles but apparently on Svalbard they’re snow scooters.

That’s what I did today. Body clock completely confused by the neverending darkness, I didn’t wake up until 9.20 this morning and still wasn’t entirely awake by the time Alex picked me up to take me for a ride on the scooters.

We were given special padded boots, overalls, balaclavas, helmets and finally big mittens (no real need to take your own big warm clothes; if you’re doing anything outside, they’ll provide it all) and we were shown how to use the scooters, on a huge one they’d somehow got not just inside the building but upstairs. At least, I thought it was huge, but Alex said these are the small ones. It’s bigger than the one I drove in Iceland, I’m sure.

We had a scooter each – none of this business of two people to a scooter, one drives out and one drives back. We all drove all the way. We had to cross the road twice but that was ok – very little traffic in Longyearbyen – and then off we went across a knobbly rocky field while I made “I don’t like it!” noises as we bumped and skidded and the engines kangarooed because they weren’t warmed up yet. The handlebars had heating and we could fiddle with that if we wanted but there was really no need -if the gloves could protect us from the snowstorm, they could protect us from chilly rubber handles.

We stopped not far away from town -Alex had spotted a small herd of wild reindeer nibbling on the sparse grass, reindeer who felt it was worth taking the chance that we might kill them over using their energy supplies to run away from the food. We kept our distance – didn’t want to scare them away from the food but we got quite close considering they’re wild reindeer living on an island where everything from the climate to the environment to the wildlife is trying to kill them. Unlike Jakob yesterday, Alex has seen polar bears and this is the area they tend to be seen in, but he thought it was unlikely there would be any. The population of bears on Svalbard has tripled in the last few years, research says they’re very well-fed around here and they’re venturing into human areas more and more often. They’re often followed by Arctic foxes, so if you see little fox footprints, there might well be a bear nearby. The foxes like to eat the bears’ leftovers and there are apparently lots of foxes – about five separate populations. There’s the one that hangs out by the sea with the bears, the one that follows the reindeer, the urban ones that no one is confessing to feeding and I forget the other two – all Arctic foxes but using five different strategies to get food.

Stop two was at the Iron Beds. Every local guide has their own story about why there are two iron bed frames abandoned in the middle of the valley. Alex’s version, which he claims to be the boring truth, is that they were renovating a hut further up the valley and bringing stuff back on the dog sled when they discovered that the river was higher than usual so they simply abandoned everything in their quest to get home without drowning. The Iron Beds are now a landmark and they’re also a race – when the snow comes, who can be the first person to get out to them?

Our last stop was next to a pingo, a sort of bubble of a mountain formed over thousands of years when an air bubble trapped in the ice gets forced up and out by ice expansion. I have no idea how this work. I know the pingo was the bed of the river but how could the ice bubble be underneath the ground? We stopped for coffee or hot blackcurrant (much less dehydrating than coffee and much more sugary – very popular in winter with the snow scooterers) and I tried to take some photos of the scenery. It’s hard because you can see plenty. Yes, it’s dark but the snow is very white and your eyes adapt to the tiniest bit of light from the sky but the camera’s not seeing it at all. I was glad the scooters had headlights but you can get off and amble around with no lights whatsoever and it’s fine. It’s dark. That doesn’t mean it’s pitch black, even miles from civilisation. We were supposedly travelling about 35km. I assume that’s half there, half back but I’ll find out how far I was from town when I get home to a computer that can cope with my GPS tracker. I guess we must have been about ten miles from home, which is actually quite a long way to ride even on a big chunky snow scooter. It does get easier and less scary after a while – it gets smoother if you can get some speed up and it’s a lot easier when it’s flat and smooth. We drove in convoy with me in the middle because I happened to jump on scooter number two back in town.

Having made a few stops on the way out, we drove the entire way back in one go. My hand kept getting cramp from holding the throttle and if the wind went the wrong way, it went under my visor and froze my face but other than that, no, it actually wasn’t particularly cold driving along at 30-35kph.

At least, that’s what I thought. Until I got home and discovered that everything other than hands, feet and face was stone cold and needed to be put on the heated bathroom floor for a couple of hours to defrost. All the same, I had begun to wonder if Svalbard is better in summer when it’s all covered in sunshine and wild flowers and I’ve concluded that it’s not. You can’t go dogsledding, you can’t ride snow scooters and you can’t… well, I don’t know what else there is to do. I don’t think there’s much skiing or snowboarding here, not least because you’re risking polar bears if you leave town (although they’re making the polar bears sound less of a problem than they sounded when I was doing the reading before I came here). I suppose kayaking on the fjords opens up in summer, boat trips etc.

No idea what my plans are for tomorrow. I’d like to go looking for the Northern Lights before I leave but it’s been so cloudy it hasn’t been possible. Of course, clouds mean lovely fluffy snowflakes falling from the sky and that’s very nice too,