Each year, more and more people are opting for an Arctic adventure and the island of Spitsbergen is where I went! It’s home to 2,500 inhabitants, who are outnumbered by 3,000 polar bears. Halfway between Norway and the North Pole, Spitsbergen is in the archipelago of Svalbard, and was originally a base for whalers in the 17th and 18th centuries. It home to one of the most dramatic landscapes I’ve ever seen. Enjoy the clip :)

I just read this fascinating account in The Guardian, written by Stephen Pax Leonard (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stephen-pax-leonard), who lived with the Arctic Inugguit for one year, while learning their language and ways of life. What he discovered was a “cold heaven,” where life was stripped to its basics. This sentence, in particular, struck me: “I am a romantic, and I discovered that romantics are always disillusioned because the world is no longer how they had hoped it to be.”

Life in Greenland’s polar desert
by Stephen Pax Leonard

An excerpt:

“For me, the appeal of the remote settlement was immediate and unforgettable. Smiley children were magnetised to the stranger and the adults invited the visitor in for a supper of polar bear or fermented little auks, followed by endless refills of black coffee… The eldest hunter in the settlement and a story-teller with whom I worked, Qaerngaq Nielsen, gave Savissivik 10 years. Climate change has meant that the settlement is almost impossible to get to by dog-sledge and there are few who wish to live in complete isolation in the 21st century with no medical facilities.”

FULL ARTICLE at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/30/life-greenlands-polar-desert