My Arctic Sojourn

I hadn’t heard of Svalbard till very recently. We learn of the Arctic circle and explorers to the North Pole but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would go this far north. Cold is an anathema. Having grown up in hot, humid weather anything below 20 deg C feels like torture. Out comes the monkey cap and socks and sweaters. So when my husband proposed a trip to Svalbard, I just laughed. And didn’t really give it too much thought till 2 days later he again brought it up saying, The slots are filling fast, we need to decide. I’m not much of an advance planner. Deciding on a trip 2 years in advance seemed a bit of an overkill. SO I said ok, but if I change my mind, you find someone else to fill in the slot. A year went by. Emails about the trip and prep for it started flooding my inbox. I read a few. Then I got interested. Temperatures below freezing. A place filled with permafrost year round. The northernmost airport. Northernmost town with a grand population of 2000! I was kind of hooked esp when it was pitched to me as the trip of a lifetime.

So armed with many layers and jackets and sub zero thermals, we set off for Oslo and then Longyearbyen with Wild Focus Expeditions who were our organizers. Longyear is a surreal place. There’s no vegetation except small shrubs – really small ones. The scape is rather bleak but oh so beautiful. Shades of white and grey and browns… And of course the most fascinating aspect is the endless day! It’s bright and sunny 24×7. The sun does change position through the day and non existent night but it is bright throughout. Only the clock tells you the time. We spent a few days marvelling and acclimatising to the Arctic as our boat had developed a glitch and we got a couple of days to chill before actually setting sail. Oh yes, it was a sailing trip, did I forget to mention that? We were going to be sailing in rather tiny sailboat around the coast of Svalbard looking for polar bears, whales and other arctic wildlife. We took a speedboat to the Russian owned island of Pyramiden. Once a booming mining town, it’s now a ghost town after being abandoned almost overnight by the miners and their families. The northernmost Lenin bust is found in Pyramiden. Polar bears regularly pass through. We made acquaintance with the Arctic Fox there. That was the only sighting of the Arctic fox through our trip. And it was a great sighting. We followed the fox for at least half an hour. The fox, which was in its summer coat, was clearly used to people and trotted around languorously much to our delight. On our way back we spotted some seals and a pod of beluga whales. The belugas used to come out and go in, like dancers and it was fascinating to catch a glimpse of the fin or the snout and the tail. They moved in silvery flashes. Against a backdrop of a glacier, it couldn’t get prettier than this.

The next day we attempted some sea kayaking. Well, we kayaked across the fjord and back. For someone who has never kayaked it was a pretty decent attempt and I was happy to be able to keep pace with the rest. Almost all flora and fauna in Svalbard is protected. And rightly so. As a result humans are not allowed to touch or move anything in the wilderness. If a log of driftwood is in a particular place you cannot move it and everyone follows this pretty rigorously as they understand the significance of all this compressed history.

Finally the big day dawned. Arctica II, a beautiful sailboat that was immaculately maintained was to be our home for the next 10 days. We were warned to bring aboard only what we absolutely needed. It seems we need a lot of things. I had a big bag of clothes and other essentials. My husband had that and a bag of cameras and other equipment. One of our hosts, Jami, had said that the initial reaction will be one of shock when you realise you have to fit in your stuff in a tiny cubicle which barely has standing room or that you have to spend 10 days in this enclosed space with 10 other people. And that was what indeed happened. Then we unpacked and found place to put everything away. And when spread out on the boat, it didn’t seem all that crammed. And so we took our seasickness pills and the journey began. We were really lucky that through the duration of the trip, we only had really bad weather on one of the days. That was the day we moved out of the internal fjords and went up north. The swells were so bad that at times from my porthole under the deck it felt like we were completely underwater! I just slept through the worst bits.

The first time we spotted a bear, two bears actually, it was from a great distance. We were sailing past a glacier when Jami spotted them at a distance. Pixel bears as the crew liked to call them, because any pictures you took of the bears would be pixel sized. We could see them only through the binoculars and it was really tough sometimes to figure out what they were upto. They were a playful duo – chasing each other, running from one end of the glacier to the other. One of them used to vanish into seal holes and swim underwater to emerge somewhere else. The other used to put its nose in through hole and try to pull the first bear out. You think polar bears are white, they’re not. They look a light yellow against the snow and that’s how you try to spot or track one. By looking for a yellowish patch amidst the canopy of whites and greys.

Our holiday could’ve been called fifty shades of white and blue. The sky, the ice, the water, the glaciers, the pack ice, the drift ice, the mountains that were always on the horizon and the snow on the mountains – every possible shade of white and blue. Sometimes it was all bathed in a soft white light, sometimes it was harsh sun and sometimes it was in a magical orange and pink. This scape will stay with me, all my life. As there are no plants or trees or any manmade structures, it’s very difficult to judge distances or measure the scale. Often, we would think we’re close to a glacier but we would’ve sailed for half an hour and still the distance would look the same. The first ‘night’ spent on board was magical. We had dropped anchor in one of the most beautiful spots on earth. There’s not another soul around. The water is still like a sheet of glass. There’s no sound except for the breeze when it picks up. It’s bright and everything is crystal clear. I sit on the back deck, nursing a cup of hot chocolate. It’s cold but not freezing, and I feel so alive, so moved and so grateful to be able to experience this. One of the funniest yet most magical moments happens one night. We take turns to stay up at night and scout for bears. Jami has been telling us to keep ours ears open for the song of the seals. I’m sitting with he binocs looking around occasionally, when I hear the most haunting melody coming out of nowhere. It feels like someone’s playing pipes under the ocean. The whales’ song. Maybe even merpeople! I excitedly wake up Jaya and we both spend an hour listening to this haunting melody that comes and goes. Much later we figure it’s the wind that hits the pipes holding the sail and produces this sound. Never mind, we’d still like to believe it was the whales!

The best sighting, unarguably, was the 16 hours that we spent with a polar bear up close. One beautiful morning, as we were sailing past many ice floes, Jami, who was scanning the horizon with her Swarovski, when she gave a squeal of delight. Soon there were at least 6 pairs of eyes looking in the same direction. And there it was, a lone bear, on an ice floe, feasting on a dead seal! Since we were on a small boat and we had a very skilled captain, we made our way really close to the bear. What a day it was. The bear put on an excellent show for us. It ate, rested, ate again, dragged the half eaten carcass to the other side of the floe, then stretched, rolled on its back with its legs in the air and looked incredibly cute… Just like a stuffed toy. It was easy to forget that it’s the apex predator in the Arctic and can kill a human with one swipe of its paw. Of course, there were many gulls and kittiwakes around the bear who also seemed untroubled by its top predator status and they set up a racket often attempting to get close to the seal when the bear wasn’t looking. Despite the freezing cold we were camped on the deck of the boat unable to tear our eyes away even for a minute. Finally when the bear looked like it was fast asleep some of us decided to call it a day. We were woken up a few hours later. The bear was swimming, looking for its next meal. You’d think it had just eaten it won’t be hungry for a long time. But the bear is large, the seal was tiny – it probably was just a snack for the bear. A reminder of how tough it is to survive in the wild. The bear had spotted a seal resting on an ice floe. It was swimming silently towards the seal. It swam under the ice floe. Our skipper decided to position the boat so we could witness the hunt. Soon enough, the bear surfaced just below where the seal was seemingly fast asleep. But the ice floe was very thick at that point and the bear couldn’t make the jump to the seal. In a flash the seal has scampered off the ice and into the water. And the poor bear was left hanging onto the side of the ice floe rather foolishly. 

Another memorable sighting was of the giant walruses, plenty in number. We saw them swimming gracefully in water, we saw them move clumsily on land. We saw them sleeping on ice floe and we saw them sleeping on one another. And then there was this island where there were hundreds of them and they all lay one of top of the other in total disarray.

Svalbard is a place not just for bears and other big beasts. The birdlife is fantastic and it is worth visiting this place only to see them. Noisy gulls, forever fighting for that scrap of meal. The atlantic puffin perched majestically on a sheer cliff. The artic terns constantly diving into the water. The majestic king aider, hard to spot and harder to photograph. The Northern fulmar which constantly raced close past the boat. The list is just endless.

Ten days went by in a jiffy. We had seen polar bears, seals, walruses, reindeer, humpback whales. Everyone was happy, yet wanted more. I would’ve loved to see a big blue. Apparently there was a big blue whale in the fjord near Longyearbyen the previous summer. As we getting close to the port and we were starting to pack up all the camera gear, there was much excitement. There were at least 2 whales near by. What a great end to our Arctic holiday. We’d been gone for about 10 days and we had gone up north. The weather in Longyear had become warmer and we had gotten accustomed to colder temperatures. So when we got back, it was indeed a very warm welcome.