Detour #116: Svalbard, Norway
Photo Vince GX / Unsplash
It’s a flat tarmac road about 12 miles long. Pick up a hire car and you can do the whole round trip in about 20 minutes. Yet it’s one of the most memorable drives Simon Heptinstall has ever done.
Welcome to the bizarre Arctic outpost of Svalbard, where polar bears outnumber humans but there’s a Toyota dealership and a boutique bakery. A cheap 90-minute flight from Tromso will get you there and give you a chance to tackle the world’s most northerly road system.
The cynical would say the drive from the airport (the world’s most northerly with scheduled flights) to the capital Longyearbyen (the world’s most northerly town) is rather uneventful. The road is smooth, wide asphalt. There’s a little traffic, mostly luxury SUVs driven by bored looking men with beards. On one side, barren mountains rise in a 2,000ft cliff, on the other is the fjord of icy black water with white-topped mountains on the far shore.
But here’s a bit of geographical context for you: Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago high in the Arctic, Spitzbergen is the main island. It’s the most northern place in the world, just 650 miles from the North Pole.
Across Svalbard’s 61,000 square miles of snow, ice and tundra there are just 25 miles of roads. They include the world’s most northerly (henceforth abbreviated to WMN) roundabout, taxi rank and hotel car park. To a quirky motoring nerd like me that is irresistible.
I spent a week exploring Svalbard and it’s definitely recommended for lovers of the strange. For example, to go anywhere other than the very centre of Longyearbyen you need to carry a large calibre gun. By law. Svalbard’s 3,000 polar bears are a serious hazard with regular human fatalities yet strict eco-protection rules mean they are allowed to wander freely through the streets.
Yes, the streets. It’s enormous fun driving around Longyearbyen’s streets. There’s not many of them of course, but it feels so weird, cruising along in a normal car on a normal road with the local radio on (WMN) in such an extreme polar environment.
Head out of town in any direction and the roads seem to get rougher after a few miles, turn into crumbled tarmac and then peter out. The best routes are up to the old mine workings (WMN) on the slopes above the town or along the Adventdalen valley to a lake that’s usually frozen. I went for a night out there in a wooden restaurant serving hearty meat soup around a central open fire. I sat on a pile of furs.
Longyearbyen itself is tiny. There’s only 2,300 people, although they come from 53 different nationalities. Judging from the new Cayennes and Landcruisers these scientists, geologists, environmentalists and outdoor activity providers are well funded. That’s why there’s a limousine service (WMN), gourmet restaurant with wine cellar and sommelier (WMN), craft brewery (WMN) and sauna (WMN). There are even two rival taxi companies.
Photo Janik Rohland /Unsplash
So it doesn’t feel like you’re braving the Arctic wilds. Every time you get up from a restaurant table, of course you have to say “I may be some time” and it’s funny because it all feels so unlike Captain Scott. Svalbard is so civilised.
You can drive with a UK licence and the world’s most northern rental company, Arctic Autorent, offers a nice selection including Kia Sportages and Landcruisers.
There are a few other settlements in Svalbard but the roads don’t go to them. You have to take a snowmobile, boat or fly. Even if you could get over the mountains, off-road driving is prohibited.
So I drove up and down between apartment blocks, spotting the school (WMN), arts centre (WMN), leisure centre (WMN) and museum (WMN) on very well-lit streets – after all it’s completely dark half the year.
I almost bumped into a herd of reindeer but didn’t see any bears despite the frequent roadside warning signs (a polar bear in a red triangle).
Perhaps my biggest danger was accidentally veering into Svalbard’s OTHER road network. That’s because there’s a completely separate road system for snowmobiles, also illuminated and signed with a normal red warning triangle containing a graphic of a snowmobile.
It maybe strange to find there are more than a thousand cars on Svalbard – but they are easily outnumbered by transport that can be used however deep the snow and cold the wind. So Longyearbyen has more than 1,000 sledge dogs and 2,100 snowmobiles. There’s even a sort of well-behaved Hells Angels group for hardcore snowmobilers… It’s called the Sons of Svalbard.