A visit high above the Arctic Circle includes a stop in Longyearbyen, the northernmost town on Earth.
If being in the land of demented-looking ever-present trolls wasn’t quirky enough, I’ve now entered Norway’s Twilight Zone high above the Arctic Circle. This would be Longyearbyen, the northernmost town on Earth, where you’re not allowed to die or give birth, a global “doomsday” seed vault insures the world’s food supply, the midnight sun currently glares 24 hours a day, and cats are banned to protect the array of wild birds.
Eccentric Longyearbyen was the next-to-last stop on our 14-night strikingly scenic “Iceland & Norway’s Arctic Explorer” cruise aboard the Viking Saturn. Passengers are actually only in Iceland one full day which was enough to visit bird bonanza Vigur Island, home to just three humans, 7,000 breeding eider ducks and more than 100,000 cartoonish puffins. Indeed, this entire Viking sailing was far, far north and at times far-out.
Hands down, the visual stars of this July journey were Norway’s famous, exceptionally gorgeous, fairytale landscapes. Our buoyant hotel floated through magnificent emerald-green fjords, past cascading waterfalls, shimmery glaciers, quaint fishing enclaves and jagged mist-cloaked mountains. During the early evening of day four, our Viking vessel crossed the Arctic Circle, an invisible line signified by a globe-shaped monument perched on the teeny islet of — get this — Vikingen.
Later, sipping a latte at Cafe Huskies, I had an American to thank for fluffy all-white blue-eyed Tequila sniffing my shoeless stocking feet. Michigan businessman John Longyear founded his namesake town in 1906 as a coal mining operation; in 1916 he sold to a Norwegian company and today only one active mine remains.
The colorful UNESCO-listed buildings on the historic wharf of Bryggen were once merchant houses and part of a trading empire.
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