A hotel like no other in Arctic Norway

 Kevin Rushby -

A trek to a ship-hotel frozen into the ice in the middle of the Arctic wastes makes for the trip of a lifetime – as long you can keep your feet warm.

It's an idea so simple, so beautiful, that you can't believe it was not thought of before. Sail a ship into the Arctic as the winter freeze grips, let it get trapped in ice, then run visitors out there by dog sled or skidoo. And if that vessel is special – like a two-masted tall ship – all the better: the trip becomes something imbued with adventure, redolent with the traditions of Shackleton and Nansen, something to conjure up faded sepia images of the Fram and the Endurance, of explorers with icy beards, and heroism on the limits of human endurance. This is what Basecamp Explorer has done.

Flying in to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard from Tromsø in northern Norway, I am gripped myself, with the sheer excitement of it all. Behind me a group of men with fur-lined hoods are trading extreme travel anecdotes. "So we built a barrier with skis to keep the bears out..." "There were narwhals all around the ice floe..." But for me there are no such stories. I'm a hot country person – always have been. This is a first taste of the Arctic and, before I even contemplate anything as extreme as narwhal-besieged ice floes, I want to know if I could handle the conditions. I have – I have to admit – two very large doubts, both of them size nine and already encased in three pairs of socks.

The first surprise is how light it is at midnight in late March. The Arctic changes from total darkness to total light within two months, a difference of about half an hour a day from mid-February. The second surprise, as I walk to the small modern airport terminal, is the cold. It settles around you like a super-cooled over-excited lover: nibbling your ears, licking your eyeballs. And it doesn't stop. Not for day, not for night, not for man, woman or beast. For the entire trip, it goes on trying to get inside your clothing.

Longyearbyen, the capital city, population about 2,000, stands on one of the fjords of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the archipelago. Around the few buildings, which are mostly grey, the ground is white. The surrounding mountains are white, too; the fjord is frozen white and nothing at all is green. I get out of the car and stand in the street, looking down towards the fjord and the mountains beyond. When the wind blows it smudges away the certainties of ridge and horizon, and replaces them with subtle suggestions of great and aching beauty. It also bites the end of your nose off.

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