Amazing how dark it gets now. We've been without the midnight sun for less than a week and yet it is almost dark outside during the night. Not pitch dark, but dark enough for the guys down at the harbour to have to turn on the floodlights. The thick cloud cover does its best to help. And the bare ground. The snow-covered earth of March and a lot if highs, bringing with them cloudless skies, make the spring so bright, long before the advent of the midnight sun.

Went to the movies tonight with Ingunn, it was Episode II: The Attack of the Clones on the menu. IIiii, it was good. Just switch off your brain and enjoy. Wonderful! The perfect way to spend the last evening, at least for the time being, in Longyearbyen. And round it all off with a hamburger and BudIce at Puben.

As much as I've bitched about Svalbard and my work here on this page, I'm sad to leave. I've come to have such good friends here and it's sad to leave them all behind. But then again, I just remind myself of the fact that if I stay here too long, working with tourists of the sort I told you about yesterday, I'll go terminally insane. It's such a shame that as a guide, you actually have to put up with tourists all the time! No, they are ok, most of them. Just in slightly smaller doses. And Svalbard holds a claim to a huge lump of me; this wonderful am-Arsch-der-Welt hillbilly community that I love, full of mine workers and rocket scientists and big guys carrying their 15 cm Sami-knive with them wherever they go. And most important of all: Honest and unpretentious. Takes itself for what it is, no more and no less.

btw, didn't the trapper's life appeal to anyone?? I won't do it alone, you know...