I went to Svalbard over Christmas. I’ve travelled to many places, but this one left me with a surprisingly small vocabulary.
Wow.
Longyearbyen sits at 78° north. The North Pole is at 90°. Those numbers sound abstract until you arrive and realise how far you are from everything familiar. Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago with only a few thousand people, surrounded by mountains, ice and a wilderness where polar bears live.
At Christmas, the sun doesn’t rise. It is dark when you wake up, dark in the afternoon and dark when you go to bed. I stopped looking at the sky to tell the time. And because the sky stays dark, the Northern Lights can appear even in the middle of the day, if you’re lucky.
It’s cold. It’s quiet. The emptiness is almost impossible to explain. Look at the photos and you’ll see what I mean: a handful of lights against an enormous landscape, snow stretching beyond the roads, and darkness that somehow makes everything feel more vivid.
Then there’s the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, often called the Doomsday Vault. Inside a mountain are backup copies of crop seeds sent from gene banks around the world. They are there to help protect the diversity of our food if collections elsewhere are lost to war, disaster or another crisis. In a place that feels so remote from the rest of the world, people are safeguarding a piece of its future.
I still don’t have a clever way to sum up Svalbard. It made me feel small, curious and very awake. If you love travel for the places that change your sense of what the world can be, put it on your list.
And when you get there, you may find yourself saying the same thing.
Wow.