26.06.2011 – 26.06.2011  5 °C

Had to get going early this morning as we were in our zodiacs at 8.30am for a long walk along a beach to see plenty of tundra plants and incredible scenery. The weather today is just perfect, almost no wind and nice and sunny! Perfect weather to be tripping around the place.

We landed at this cove south of Longyearbyen on the western side of Spitsbergen. The cove itself was once home to some whalers so you could see remnants of old whaling boats and some piles of old bleached whale bones. It’s quite surprising how well some of these old relics have been preserved considering how harsh the climate must get up here!

The walk took us about 2.5 miles around the cove to an old whaling hut. The walk itself was very spectacular, sheer cliffs on either side, still flat water in front.. Indescribable! Conductor and I went on the slow walk which meant we had plenty of time to enjoy the scenery and observe plenty of plant life! Our guide is an arctic plant expert so he spent the whole of the journey telling us about each of the plants we were seeing on the way.. Purple Saxifrage is the main type of plant up here in the arctic, it’s a small purple flowered ground cover which is actually very pretty when it covers the whole side of a hill.. Only problem is that our guide gets super excited at every plant we see so it is almost the going joke on the boat of whether we will find another saxifrage!!

After lunch we again boarded the zodiacs and this time went on a cruise in front of a huge glacier. It is really incredible to get so close to a glacier and just spend time slowly cruising up and down near it. Really quite beautiful. We were very fortunate to see a small part of the glacier break off in front of us and plunge down on to the waiting ice pack below! (Unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough with the camera to catch the glacier in full flight but still incredible to see)

All in all a really beautiful day out and about on Spitsbergen!