Day 632 - Longyearbyen
Exploring an Arctic City, Strange and Interesting
Statue of a coal miner outside of Lompensenteret
The more you explore Svalbard the more interesting it gets. Being at the top of the world was wreaking havoc with our circadian rhythms. At the end of October, the sun rises at 10:38 AM here and it sets at 2:34 PM. And the window of daylight closes more about 20 minutes every day. Soon Longyearbyen would be enveloped in shadow, hidden from the sun. It made you want to sleep late and go to bed early. The cold made you seek warmth which tended to make you doze. Something like hibernation was always on my mind. Was this some ancient gene that resided deep in my mammalian, DNA?
Svalbard is economically and politically strange. Any money made here, under Norwegian law, must remain here. Housing: you only get it if you're a student or have a job. Only one of a few coal mines still operate here. If you have a mind to, you can still get a tour at Coal Mine Number 3, which is a kind of museum.
Russia still owns parts of Svalbard: the coal mining towns of Barentsburg and Pyramiden, a city that was designed and built as the ideal Soviet city before of the fall of the USSR. Before Russia, invaded Ukraine, anyone could visit Pyramiden, walk, it's distinct, blocky, Soviet architecture, stay in a five-star hotel, visit the northernmost statue of Vladimir Lenin in the world. Now since Svalbard (formerly known as Spitzbergen) is part of Norway and Norway is a NATO country, it finds itself in the uncomfortable position of dealing with Russian citizens living within the bounds of its territory. There's a legacy of Russia's long relationship with Norway and Finland. The empire explored the Arctic Sea in the 19th century and set up several coal mining operations. Coal is still mined in the town of Barents, but Pyramided is nothing more than a tourist attraction now. We had hoped to visit (you have to take a ferry), but the ferry only ran on the days we would not be there so we never had the opportunity.
While coal is being phased out under Norway’s efforts to accelerate the use of green technologies, the archipelago has large reserves of other metals the world wants: gold, silver, copper and other rare metals useful for electronics and batteries, which are becoming quickly becoming the oil of the 21st-century.
Polar Bears and the Challenges of Exploration
We didn't have a lot of time to explore. For food we found a simple kind of mall next to a string of stores that included a nice-sized and very new grocery store, and various retail shops, mostly arctic clothing. At the tourist center I asked if I could take hike up around a path into the mountains and she said, "Sure, but you should take a rifle." This was in case a polar bear showed up. I was told that if you find yourself in the unfortunate position of facing off with a polar bear without a rifle, you should not roll up in a ball, but should fight with all your might. Apparently a good way to make you escape is to hit the bear as hard as you can right on the tip of it snout and then run like hell. This, of course, before the bear has swatted your head off or sunk its jaw into your jugular.
I told the young woman at the tourist office that giving me a rifle would be a very bad idea, I'd surely be more dangerous than any bear or more likely shoot my foot off.
I later went into the local newspaper office to get the low down on the man we heard had been disemboweled by a polar bear nearby a few years earlier. The 38-year-old Dutch citizen Johan Jacobus Kootte had been camping with others in his tent not far from the airport when the three-year-old male bear, with one swipe, opened up his stomach. The man survived for a few hours. The bear was killed.
