Tromso/Svalbard, Norway Day 4

Today we left Tromso and flew to Svalbard in the High Arctic.  Seeing the pack ice ice as we flew in made me extremely excited.  This was properly the Arctic!  They were just reaching the end of polar night so during the day they had an eerie twighlight but the sun never came up over the horizon (even when it does you have to hike up a mountain to actually see it for about another month!).

We were supposed to have just a two hour turn around between our flight landing and our evnening activity.  This would have been fine but the pick up point was a hotel a 20 minute walk away.  Thankfully, timings had been rearranged so the delays to our flight didn't matter.

When we arrived at the hotel, we were greated by a member of staff who kindly asked us to remove our boots.  It is a tradition from the coal mining days (Svalbard was a mining settlement) so miners didn't traipse coal dust in to buildings but it has lasted.  It makes sense though so you don't bring ice and puddles of water with you.

After unpacking we headed out for an early dinner at Nuga, delicious Japanese food.  I was glad to have brought ice spikes with me for my boots as it made walking on the compacted snow a lot less daunting.  It was about -18'C but really really windy and the wind whipped the tiny dry ice crystals at your face with great ferocity.

Our activity for the evening was a trip out in a snow cat (a big truck pulling a cabin on caterpillar tracks) to hunt for the Northern Lights, the wind and snow made visibility nearly impossible just a metre ahead, let alone in to the sky.

Not one to miss out, when we stopped at a crashed World War 2 plane I decided to set up my tripod and take a couple of shots.  With the sky not in view, we went hunting Svalbard Reindeer.  We found some ahead in the distance, not the best view we'd get this trip but nice to see.  The reindeer on Svalbard are endemic, they've been there around 5000 years.  They are the smallest subspecies of reindeer, short and stocky, adapted to the harsh climate and the lack of vegetation, grassing on the small mosses and grasses that grow on land locked with permafrost!