From Jan Mayen we headed north and spent another two days at sea before pulling into Bergerbukta at the southern tip of Svalbard. We took a Zodiac cruise and saw a seal lounging on the ice. The next four days were spent traveling the coast and fjords of the island.
We spent some time enjoying the view of the Fourteenth of July glacier.
We hiked over deep snow in Ny London to an old deserted mining town. They thought they had found a fabulous deposit of beautiful marble and set up shop with about 70 people. When their first shipment arrived in the UK they opened boxes only to find rubble. Because of the climate there were tiny cracks in the marble and so it had disintegrated during transport.
We passed by an old blubber gathering and whaling station. We stopped at an old unsuccessful site where they were looking for gold deposits.
There were sightings of walrus, seals, Orkas, beluga whales, reindeer, lots of glaciers and tons of birds, but no polar bears.
At one point we were headed to the northern edge of Svalbard and came across some beautiful blue ice. On the fourth day we reached 80 degrees North. We were closer to the North Pole than to the Arctic Circle. Six hundred nautical miles to the North Pole and 807 nautical miles to the Arctic Circle.
The weather was cloudy, snowy, foggy, and a bit mysterious until the last day when the sun finally came out.
