THE NAT GEO TOUCH Lindblad


Expeditions has joined up with the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY, which provides additional expertise and staff, especially photographers. Including


Lindblad’s, the expedition team numbered 14 and covered a wide range of disciplines.


snow, massive glaciers, jagged mountains and numerous fjords. Norway acquired the archipelago in the Treaty


of Versailles following World War I and Svalbard is now a semi-autonomous region, once noted for whaling and coal mining and now fast developing as an off-beat tourist destination.


A number of firms offer expedition-style cruises that last about a week, all involving much less time and money than an Antarctic cruise, yet offering many of the same rewards, with the giant polar bear substituting for varieties of penguins as princi- pal wildlife attractions. I chose to sail with Lindblad Expeditions, an American firm with whom I had travelled to the Pacific North-West, Central America and the Nile Valley. Based in New York, the firm is headed by Sven-Olaf Lindblad, who learned the expedition business from his father, Lars-Erik Lindblad, who pioneered expedition-style cruising to the Antipo- des in the 1960s with the first ship purpose-built for such journeys.


I booked the second trip of the season for mid-


June and found my way to Oslo where passengers gathered, a smallish group of 130 that included


42 WORLD OF CRUISING I Spring 2011


mostly Americans but also representatives from Britain, India, Singapore and Australia. There were a number of children in tow who were about to have the time of their lives. Appropriately, our first destination was to see


the Fram, a Norwegian exploration vessel that had ventured to the Arctic and Antarctic in the late 19th and early 20th


museum across the harbor from central Oslo. T


he next morning, a 2½-hour charter flight brought us to a place called Longyearbyen, the territorial capital named after John Monro


Longyear, an American entrepreneur who insti- gated a coal mining rush at the beginning of the 20th


century. Added to his surname came byen, the


Norwegian translation for city. Approaching Longyearbyen, we flew over a whit- ened landscape with bare rough edges and sharp peaks (literally ‘spitsbergens’) poking skyward. The main town has a year-round population of approximately 2,000, sits in a shallow valley facing the Isfjord and is encircled by low hills dotted with picturesque industrial relics from the coal mining era. A formerly dreary settlement has given way to


centuries and was now displayed in a


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92