Cape Farewell Youth Expedition 2007

The first 3 days in Svalbard have been incredible. When we arrived from Oslo I was really tired because we didn’t get much sleep the night before but when we got to Longyearbyen I woke up immediately. We had a tour of the town of Longyearbyen and went to the museum to find more about Svalbard. We went to the youth centre to meet the youth of Longyearbyen and they were great! Some were Norwegian and some were from other places but they apparently don’t give stuff about climate change. This is weird because if sea levels rose by just a little bit then the whole town would be underwater. When we got back from there we all went ff in little groups. The people I was with went for a wander to the frozen river coming off the glacier. The hotel we stayed in was called Base Camp, it was really swish and we four boys shared a room big enough for six. We went to the school that the pupils visit and it’s better than ours! There’s only about 200 people going to it at the most and they have a huge sports hall and a swimming pool! The boat is… cozy. The cabin I’m in is a small room with a bunk bed and a sink, there is about 50 squared centimeters of floor space to put two bags and a guitar on. It is very cramped. Today we went onshore in Svalbard; we got a Zodiac (dingy) onto the shore and walked along the beach and part of the way up a mountain. When we got back onto the boat we started sailing again, the boat had been going on a diesel engine the day before because there was no wind. It was fun hoisting up the sails and tying up all the ropes and as soon as we got inside to eat lunch we noticed that there was a polar bear outside. The polar bear was walking along the shore towards where we were just 10 minutes earlier. If we had stayed there we could have seen it a bit too close. We were on the boat so we followed it down the coast trying to get a good photo. It was a bit far away but the pros got some good ones. We saw a puffin as well. I also went on watch were I put up the sails again and had some time to relax.