Erstellt am: 30. 5. 2015 - 09:47 Uhr
Life in the far North: Svalbard (Spitsbergen)
Reality Check Special
Listen to a Reality Check Special with Johnny Bliss and a whole bunch of nomads, adventurers and drifters, in the far northern archipelago of Svalbard Spitsbergen.
Saturday, May 30th, 12-13, and afterwards seven days on demand.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
Flying into Longyearbyen on a mid-Summer night is a surreal experience. You leave Oslo (in the dark) just a little before midnight. It is not long before you begin to sense your changing location in the world in a very visceral way, as the sky outside the airplane gradually becomes inappropriately bright, and you see the sun rising steadily up into the air.
At about 2 a.m., when you begin your descent, the world looks (and feels) like it normally would at late afternoon.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
(1) Someone who believes the world is flat. (A few people still do, even in the 21st century.) (2) Someone who believes the world was literally created 6,000 years ago by the Biblical God.
(Ditto.)
Were I a Flat Worlder(1), I would've given up my membership at about that point. Were I a Creationist(2), those days would already be numbered.
This second point is because Svalbard is a paradise for geologists, and the mountainous landscape is visibly strewn with fossils that date back to when the islands were thick with tropical jungle, millions of years ago. Hiking on any of the mountains, if you look at the ground a lot, you are almost certain to spot a fossilized leaf or shrub, or even an insect.
(3) Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, um, climate change.
Despite all its sunlight, Svalbard has not been a tropical paradise for millions of years. Generally speaking though, thanks to the Gulf Stream (3), it is far warmer than any place so far north has any right to be.
Of course, I have only been there in summer, when the sun never actually sets and temperatures average a few degrees above zero.
In the depths of winter, when the sun simply doesn't rise for 110 days and temperatures can fall as low as −20 °C on average, it would have been a vastly different experience, but still much warmer than a Siberian winter!
Johnny Bliss, 2014
Whatever. The polar bears seemed to like it. If it was cold enough for the polar bears, it was more than cold enough for me.
Historically, the archipelago of Svalbard has been a much more amicable environment for polar bears than for humans; there is, for example, no indigenous people associated with the island group. Nearly everybody is some sort of immigrant - only in the early twentieth century did people come to live permanently here, and only then for coal mining.
(4) Also, the whole archipelago is under Norwegian sovereignty, owing to a bunch of history I won't get into here.
There were three mining settlements established. One was near the capital Longyearbyen, which is Norwegian(4). The other two belonged to Russia - Barentsburg, which is still active today, and Pyramiden, which was abandoned in the late 1980s (more on that later).
Nowadays, however, adventure tourism has also become a formidable Svalbardian industry. As an economic force, it is second only to coal mining. Tourists aside, there is a year-round population of nearly 3000 people, just a few below the year-round population of polar bears.
I knew all of this before I even arrived, thanks to the Internet.
(5) Because, Polar Bears.
What I didn't know - and couldn't know - is why somebody would want to come live in a place where you need a rifle to leave the town centre(5), and the extreme seasons seem designed to drive any reasonable person mad.
(6) Because, Guesthouse.
Fortunately, the very first local I met - the mild-mannered receptionist of Spitsbergen Guesthouse, Bjørn Egil Strathmann - turned out to be a very friendly and talkative fellow. So after I caught up on some sleep(6), I asked him if he would mind telling me what exactly he thought he was doing here, in this claustrophobic little town, surrounded by mountains and glaciers.
Siegi Schulz, 2014
Personality Profile, #1: Bjørn Strathmann
I'll give to Bjørn, he's got a very positive attitude. He could easily be the spokesperson for the entire Svalbard tourism industry. Every time I asked him about a situation that I thought would be problematic in Longyearbyen, he turned it around and made it a good thing.
For example,
ME: I get how the 24 hours of sunlight can be pretty cool, in a way. But how do you deal with the long dark winter?
BJØRN: I'm really looking forward to [the dark season]. You sleep a lot during the dark season. The dark season is cozy, especially at the beginning when it's still new, and you're so used to the sunlight.
ME: I would think it would be a bit depressing.
BJØRN: Yeah, we get really social here though. We arrange a lot of dinners, drink a lot of red wine, and take good care of each other.
Siegi Schulz, 2014
ME: I was going to ask you if the isolation gets to you, but you make it sound like that's not a big problem.
BJØRN: I think you have a bigger possibility of being lonely in a big city than you have here. There's so many different [types of] people here, you can always find your crowd.
ME: Is there a bit of cabin fever though? I mean, without a shotgun, we're sort of trapped here, actually. The town limits are quite small. So does that ever get to you a bit?
BJØRN: No, but it kind of feeds on my male ego. I kind of like taking on my rifle and flare gun and going out for a hike. I don't mind it at all.
Bjørn Egil Strathmann, 2014
By the end of our chat, I damn near wanted to move over here too.
However, before arranging to get all of my stuff shipped to Svalbard, I also thought it might be sensible to get a second opinion.
(7) Well, as local as anyone in Svalbard ever really is.
The next day, with the help of Bjørn, we booked a boat trip to take us around some local fjords. On this boat, we met a local(7) guy who worked in Svalbard as a guide. He had a dark sense of humour, and a tendency toward trolling people. He was also quite possibly a Viking.
Siegi Schulz, 2014
Here! I thought, here is a person with a little bit of darkness in him. He will have a strange and dark story, which led him here.
I knew instantly when I met him that I wanted to interview him.
Jim Johansen, 2014
Personality Profile, #2: Jim Johansen
As it turned out, Jim was all too happy to do an interview with me, so long as I agreed to two conditions. One, to conduct the interview onboard a particular boat called the Skydancer. Two, to drink vodka with him during the interview, and match him shot for shot. As terrifying as I found this second condition, sometimes you have to make sacrifices for your work.
(8) Small, fast boat.
It was mid-evening that day - not that you could tell from the position of the sun - when Jim picked me up in his truck, drove me to the harbour, had us board a Zodiac (8) and took us across the fjord to a big handsome sailboat.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
With all the formalities sorted out, we finally started our interview.
ME: So how long have you been here, Jim?
JIM: I was only supposed to be here twenty hours, and I was standing here for two minutes and I already decided that I really want to live here.
ME: So now that you've been here for a while, perhaps you have a good perspective on whether or not it is a good idea to live here!
JIM: It could be hell, or it could be heaven. It's all about the attitude of the people who live here. If you want to live here, you should be prepared for this place. A lot of people come up here, have a contract [...] and they spend two days here, and they have to go home. They cannot handle it at all. Other people were supposed to stay [one season], now have been here almost forty. It's totally up to the person who comes here.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
ME: Why do people come here to begin with?
JIM: The people who come here, the way I see it, come for [one of] three reasons. Either they just love nature, running up and down mountains all the time, or they're stupid, or they are running from something.
ME: Which one would you categorize yourself as?
JIM: Oh I'm running away. In Svalbard, we have a very low income tax. I owe some tax money, so that's why.
It's worth noting that while we were doing this interview, a polar bear had just been sighted on a nearby fjord, and was walking around openly.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
JIM: Longyearbyen has a darkness to it. The only cheap thing in Svalbard is tobacco and alcohol, and because of that, people tend to drink a lot. Many people know, you can't drink away your problems... but you can try. You can try really hard. It goes hand in hand with depression. Because of lack of sunlight of course, people get depressed. But [they might also] get depressed during the summer months, because of sleep deprivation.
ME: I've found, if you have a tendency toward depression, it's almost better to have tangible reasons to be depressed.
JIM: Yeah, because then you have something to blame.
The next morning I woke up with a terrible headache, and a strong urge to stay in bed. This was not an option, however, because my friend and I had already made arrangements to go trekking with the founder of Svalbard Trekking, who was going to take us up a very tall mountain.
As horrifying as I found the whole idea of going outside in my state, let alone uphill, sometimes you have to make sacrifices for your work.
Personality Profile, #3: Morten Wied
Although it was hard to argue with that migraine, as far as trekking guides go, it is hard to imagine one more charming than Morten. With a vaguely British accent, this tall, gangly, but nevertheless Danish man reminded me very much of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, with his long wild hair and a weapon strapped to his back.
Despite our sluggish, sleepy demeanours, Morten managed to keep us entertained for the duration of the hike, with many charming and intriguing stories of frostbite, wildlife encounters, and general knowledge of the local history both geological and human.
Morten's excitable, boyish energy turned out to be quite contagious, and sooner than I would have thought imaginable, I forgot how miserable I'd been feeling that morning. The equivalent of striking gold for a radio journalist is meeting one of these people who just talk articulately, and tell fantastic stories. You just have to turn on the microphone and occasionally nudge them in the right direction. Morten was one of those people.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
MORTEN: Everyone who does come here has a story, and anyone who says they just randomly ended up in Svalbard is lying through their teeth. Of course I have an official story and I have an unofficial one, and this is the case for everyone. Some people have experienced some sort of personal tragedy, others have unresolved issues they want to resolve by coming here, others seek the adventure! And this is one of the places on earth where you can walk a hundred metres out of town and be in a perfectly pristine and untouched landscape, well away from everyone and everything. That's one of the reasons why I'm here, this place is simply more adventurous than any other place that I know.
MORTEN: It's a bit like the 'wild north' as well. Everyone carries weapons. The city is not a democracy, it is run by a governor. About 25% of everyone who lives here, changes every year. People who are here, both for longer and for shorter periods of time, halfway settle and halfway don't. You'll see dissidents from the old eastern European blocs, you will see intellectuals who come here to do nothing more than think and stare at rocks, you'll see movie makers hoping to top the National Geographic with what they do here, and you'll see strange radio hosts from Austria coming as well!
Johnny Bliss, 2014
ME: You said that everyone has an official story and an unofficial story. So what are yours?
MORTEN: Honestly, I'll give you my unofficial one - because I found my life in the city to be unsatisfactory, for lack of adventure. The future comes about through either disaster, drift, or design. Now, disaster didn't happen to me, and this clearly isn't design, so I suppose it's drift.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
(9) Last adventure for THIS TIME, that is!
Recharged from our upbeat trip with Morten, we decided that for our last adventure in Svalbard(9), we would do something really special and visit the abandoned Russian mining settlement of Pyramiden, so named for a nearby mountain that did look very triangular indeed.
Back at the guesthouse, we booked our trip with Bjørn... and lo and behold, who was our guide on the boat? Jim Johansen!
These were all very good omens for our trip.
I've always had a thing for ghost towns.
One of my as-yet-unrealized dreams has been to visit Chernobyl and Pripyat, in the Ukraine. However, going to Pyramiden was exciting in a similar way: as I'd heard it, the town was preserved almost exactly as it was when all the Russian miners left in the late 1980s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like a northern Chernobyl!! I was so excited.
So excited, in fact, that I totally forgot that we were going to visit a humongous glacier first, until that moment that we were right in front of it.
That got my attention! Then they told me that there had been polar bears sighted in the area. Maybe there were polar bears on the glacier? Although I couldn't see any, just to be on the safe side, I started taking photographs.
I remembered something Morten had told me: that it is difficult to see polar bears on ice because their fur acts as a kind of invisibility cloak. Dang.
Well, if you see any, please let me know in the comments, or per e-mail!
Onwards to Pyramiden
As we approached, I first saw the mountain after which Pyramiden is named. First impression: yes, it is very pyramidish.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
As we came closer into shore, I caught my first glimpse of the man who was to be our guide through this ghost town. Dressed very much like a Russian man of a different era, he was standing at full attention at the edge of the pier as we slowly docked and disembarked from the boat.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
Personality Profile, #4: Aleksandr "Sasha" Romanovskiy
"Dear English Speakers!" he bellowed at us, as we all congregated around him. "My name is Sasha. Originally, I am from St. Petersburg. But now I live and work here, in Pyramiden. It is very important NOT to forget how ordinary people look like, so thank you very much for coming!"
Sasha seemed in earnest about being very happy to see us. At the same time he had a dry and self-deprecating sense of humour, which made him quite sympathetic as he led us around the settlement.
There was some sarcasm there as well, but it was directed toward himself and Pyramiden, rather than anyone else.
Johnny Bliss, 2014
"This street is the main street," he told us at one point. "It's called Street Named After the 60th Anniversary of Great October Socialist Revolution!"
That got a laugh out of all of us. "But the official name of this street was too long to pronounce," he explained, "and local people hardly ever used it. Usually they called it Champs-Élysées, because it is wide."
Johnny Bliss, 2014
This kind of thing - it could just be dry information, but he told us all of these stories with a kind of smirk, like 'this is how absurd the world is'.
Nearly all of Sasha's stories were like that. Later he would tell us a story of his own personal hardship, with the same sort of detached amusement.
"Now we don't have a hospital in Pyramiden," he was telling us, "and sometimes it's a real big problem. If somebody gets sick here, we need to call for a helicopter to pick the sick person [up] and to deliver him or her to Barentsburg. [But] they really don't like to make flights to Pyramiden out of schedule. So, to call for a helicopter, first we need to convince them that it's really necessary. For example, last year, I had a terrible toothache, and they did not want to pick me up! I was in pain, and I even started my guided tours with the question, 'are there any dentists among you?!'"
Johnny Bliss, 2014
At one point, he related a story of seeing a polar bear - up close - as it was eating a seal, and coming in closer to take some pictures. What would have surely been a frightening situation in real life became a very funny story, all in the way he told it.
"I was very close to the polar bear, but he was eating the seal, and he was devoted to his dinner, and so he did not notice me around. So I was just crawling with my camera, snap, snap, snap, taking pictures!"
Aleksandr Romanovskiy, 2014
During a quiet moment, I asked Sasha why a capable man like him would choose to live at the edge of the world.
SASHA: I've been to many many countries, and Pyramiden I consider to be the best one. No people. Beautiful nature. Polar bears. Arctic foxes.
ME: But why did you choose it to begin with?
SASHA: Well, I was looking for a job. I was doing my PhD thesis, but I did not complete it. And I saw an announcement, 'a guide to Pyramiden is required immediately', and of course, I applied and got this job!
Johnny Bliss, 2014
Well, it seems to me that there are far worse places to drift than Svalbard or Pyramiden. Everyone I spoke to gave me compelling reasons to think this really may be one of the most amazing places to reside, even if it is a little off the beaten path.
Especially when you consider that you get to hang out with cute guys like this arctic fox!
FM4 Reality Check Special on Saturday, May 30th
Listen to a Reality Check Special with Johnny Bliss and a whole bunch of nomads, adventurers and drifters, in the far northern archipelago of Svalbard Spitsbergen.
Saturday, May 30th, 12-13, and afterwards seven days on demand.