Hike to Tunabreen

3 Germans, a Dutch, an Estonian, an Englishman and a Scot go on a 6 day hike.  Sounds like the start to a bad joke...

Before we left we bought our gestimated food budget for 7 people for 6 days.... I never want to see another rye cracker again.

We spent about £30 each for everything we needed for the trip, which makes that my cheapest week on Svalbard by half!

Day 1

The 7 of us set off in a taxi at 9am from Longyearbyen to the beginning of Adventdalen, the first valley on our route.  The sledge on the right of the photo, which had about 70kilo's packed onto it, was intended to help us over the snowy ground....see the problem? Yup, no snow!  The plan had been to drag the sledge most of the way on the snow and occasionally have to carry it, so the outlook on arrival wasn't great.  Thankfully, as soon as we reached the rivers we found them all to be frozen, which gave one person a nice easy task... 

The aimed destination for the first night had been the waterfalls near the mouth of Eskerdalen, 28km from our drop off point.  At 6pm the waterfalls were nowhere to be seen and it was beginning to get dark, so, despite our leader's insistance that they were merely 200m ahead, we made camp for the night.

Day 2

Morning's were a bit of a struggle, everyone was tired from having polar bear watch at some stage in the night, and to say it was cold would be a slight underestimation (we found out after the trip that the coldest temperature reached was -8°C, and if you take wind chill into account that has a feel of around -19°C!).  After eating our porridge we washed our bowls in the water hole we'd made in the river the night before. If you set you're bowl and cutlery on the ground for less than a minute, the cutlery would freeze to the bowl and the bowl would freeze to the ground. When you put water on your toothbrush to brush your teeth, it had frozen by the time the toothbrush reached your mouth and you were brushing your teeth with icicles!

The day before I'd asked Annika, a lovely Estonian girl, why she enjoyed trips like this one, she told me she loved remembering to appreciate the little things in life.  A couple of hours after breakfast she smiled at me and said 'I can now feel my toes'.

We reached the waterfall some two hours later (not quite the sworn 200m).... 

(boys will be boys!)

By the end of day two we'd left Eskerdalen, walked the length of Sassendalen in beautiful sunshine   and reached the coast at Tempelfjorden. 

As the beach was littered with washed up wood, our second night was blessed with a campfire... 

Barbecue....

Beautiful views....

And even my first glimplse of Polar lights in the Arctic! 

Day 3

We intended to set off earlier than usual so as to catch low tide as we followed the coastline towards Tunabreen.  Sadly our collective hatred of cold mornings meant we missed low tide by around half an hour.  Although this doesn't sound too bad, I guarantee had we known what we were letting ourselves in for we would have been a little more prompt at getting out of our sleeping bags. 

As you can see, there was no way round other than through the water, the near freezing Arctic water, in bare feet.  To describe the experience as cold is so unjustly un-descriptive it pains me.  The painful burning feeling that you get when you stick your hand in a bucket of ice and all rational parts of your brain tell you to remove your hand, comes close to describing the feeling.  Imagine the bucket of ice has rocks on the bottom, and you not only ignore your rational thinking, but you plough on through the icy rock bucket for 30m!

The remainder of the route to Tunabreen was nice and easy.  We set up camp with another roaring fire, another extraordinary view and another beautiful sunset.  

 

We even enjoyed our polar bear watches throughout the night, listening to icebergs calving off the glacier.

Day 4

Our fresh memories of missing low tide ensured we left bright and early.  Although the trip home followed back along the same route, the landscape seemed to have changed so much it could have been a different place.   It had snowed a great deal since we'd left and the sunny beach like desert of Sassendalen which we'd walked up previously, now resembled a true Arctic desert.

"The way the Arctic should be" as declared by Tobias, our somewhat eccentric German leader.

Day 5

Our last full day took us back out of Sassendalen and down Eskerdalen, where, again, two days had had a massive impact on the landscape.  The waterfall had almost ceased to flow completely. 

As we subconsciously acknowledged that we were on our way home, our minds and bodies seemed to digress.....

Our last dinner was a feast.  Sadly the big pot of stew, with lamb, beef, sausage and all of our remaining sauces, got knocked to the ground just as it was ready.  No-one said a thing.  Without a word, we simultaneously reached for various implements and began separating sauce from sediment.  I think it was a testament to our strange mental states (or possibly an indication to our lack of hygiene by this point) that dinner was eaten quite happily, not a drop of leftover gravelly stew in sight.

Day 6

Our last day was our shortest but it felt like our longest by far.  The morning started with a slightly forced shout,

"lets get ready to rummmbbbbbblllllllllllle!!!!"

which was met with silence, then a small weary voice emerged from a sleeping bag,

"I don't want to rumble. I just want to go home."

All said and done, we had a great trip and arrived home safe and sound.

If a little tired....