Now this trip that is just about to end now must be the second best cruise I’ve had up here in Spitzbergen. I mean, nothing will ever outdo the cruise on Viktor Bunitskiy (Russian names, am I supposed to remember how to spell them??!!) in summer 2000, when my friend Tine Borgen form Oslo and I cruised in Svalbard waters for 6 days with 15 or 17 passengers, had two hilarious Russian sailors like BREIMAKETTIR around us all the time, saw a polar bear mommy and her two two-year old cubs (who were so curious about us that they ignored their mom nagging in the distance and came so close to the ship we almost could touch them) and had a swim in the ocean next to a walrus colony where a walrus actually stuck its head and a good portion of its 2 ton body out of the water where we had been 10 seconds earlier. I got a small adrenaline kick there, as you might imagine.

This time we didn’t actually see any animals, apart from the birds that we find all over, but we had the most fantastic weather a person can ask for up by nearly 80°N. It was 16-20°C yesterday and we made a landing in the morning with our T-shirts on, not the usual thermal underwear, fleece jacket and Gore-tex jacket and pants. I was even able to sport my Bolivian sunhat instead of my windproof fleece hat and actually looked so much like a tourist, with my camera on my belly and my pants rolled up to the knees, that Håkon, the Expedition Leader, didn’t find me in the crowd! That sort of sums up how the day felt for me, it wasn’t work yesterday but rather pure enjoying and relaxing. The first day ever on the boats that I don’t feel like I’m at work but actually just travelling with a bunch of nice people.

After this trip I have five days off, until I go on the Polar Star for a 6-day cruise that will hopefully take us all around Spitzbergen Island. I’ve never been around and I’m dying to do it, actually in my wildest fantasies I’m hoping that we can make it all the way around the archipelago, including around the island of Nordaustlandet. On that island the glacier Austfonna reigns supreme, a glacier pretty much the size of Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland. It calves into the Barents Sea along a front 110 km long, by far the longest glacier front on the northern hemisphere. Now that would be something for me, to cruise along that wall of ice.

I really can’t understand what you guys are doing down there in temperate climates. You have no idea what you are missing.