As high as it gets

To further celebrate the ship's first trip to Svalbard, as we left Longyearbjen last night a small bottle of champagne was cracked open and shared with a lucky handful of guests.

Ny-Ålesund has an all-year permanent population of 30 to 35, with the summer population reaching 114. Our arrival swamped the inhabitants with hordes of bloody tourists. It is the northernmost functional civilian settlement in the world. And it therefore follows that it has many other northernmost things too, such as the northernmost post office.
As Ny-Ålesund is primarily a research settlement we were asked to turn off all our connected devices before we came with 20kms of the settlement in case they might interfere with any of their experiments.

Like most of Svalbard the town has its origins in mining and that is evident from the look of the place. The surrounding area is magnificently bleak with snow capped mountains, barren roads, glaciers and mini icebergs.

We now have a 40 plus hour or so sail back south across open seas to get back to Tromsø on Tuesday morning to resume our cruise back down the Norwegian coast towards Bergen. ⛴️🚢⛴️

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