Blogging at 22:45 on Monday 5th August from N 78.21850°, E 15.63303° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:78.21850%2C15.63303
Well, we made it!
There were a few gremlins at the airport as Scandinavian Air Services hadn't amended our baggage allowances when we'd been forced to rebook last year. It meant we've had to, for now, pay extra for the baggage we checked into the hold. This one isn't over.
Apart from that the trip over was uneventful, but for the fact it was ridiculously hot again today, and the small matter of being able to see the far reaches of northern Norway, Bjørnøya Island, and then the mountains, lakes and glaciers of vast tracts of Spitsbergen from the air. Wow! The whole shebang was just other-wordly.
And so, we're finally on the ground in Svalbard. What to say? I think I'm going to have to cop out a bit and process thoughts a little more before trying to describe the place. The response 'sensory overload' is all I'm currently getting when asking my brain what it thinks.
What's easy to report is that we - like all regular visitors - had to take the (fare-to-pay) shuttle bus service from airport to hotel because of the rules and regs around polar bear mitigation. Basically, it's not permitted to stray outside of the town of Longyearbyen unless accompanied by a guide armed with a gun and flares (not bell-bottomed trousers).
It's also easy to report that the hotel seems nice, and that we've done a bit of exploring on foot with binoculars... and then even more exploring courtesy of a steady run.
Again, on objective ground, it's continued to be bizarrely hot, even here. It's been mid-teens centigrade well into the late evening: whatever late evening means now. I just looked at today's sunset and sunrise times and the local station just reports 'Sun up all day - 24 hours solar daylight'.
Birds. I'm on more comfortable ground here and have so far seen loads of barnacle geese, pink-footed geese, Arctic terns, eider, red-throated diver, Iceland gull, and glaucous gull.
Right, bedtime now ahead of the next three excursion-packed days: assuming all works out...
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