Last year I had the singular opportunity to go to the ends of the earth, twice, as a guest lecturer aboard the good ship Akademik Sergey Vavilov. As her un-catchy name suggests – no mention of ‘harmony’, ‘symphony’ or ‘melody’ — the 6,000-ton Vavilov did not begin life in the same manner as a traditional cruise ship. There was no drawing board on which designers sought the optimum location for a lounge to sip those ice-breaking cocktails before dinner. This ice-proof Russian vessel was a product of the Cold War.
Stray below decks and you discover all manner of curious equipment that looks straight out of a spy movie. That is because the Vavilov began life as a submarine hunter, built to keep track of Nato’s underwater warships. When communism collapsed, the endless game of three-dimensional chess played by the military of East and West ended in stalemate. Today, she has been redeployed to the industry of human happiness, tourism, and a life of more-or-less endless summer, exploring the ends of the earth.
From June to September, the sun barely sets on the Vavilov. She plies the top of the world, threading through the mighty mountains of Svalbard — the archipelago that claws its way from the floor of the Arctic Ocean to create a jagged barrier between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Her home port is Longyearbyen, a forlorn port on the island of Spitzbergen. Then, between November and February, she plies the deep south from a base at the tip of South America: Ushuaia in Argentina, a forlorn port apart from its civic slogan ‘The End of the World – the Beginning of Everything’.
The ship, the crew and the expedition staff remain the same. So does the look of the leaden seas, which seem to absorb the darkness of the long winters, like liquid shadows. And the molecular structure of the ice at both ends of the earth is identical. But beyond those constants, there is nothing remotely similar about the remotest parts of the world.
Look north, and you see that the pole is in the middle of an ocean surrounded by continents. Indeed, the North Pole itself is tricky to pinpoint beneath a soup of sea ice, which is why there is much doubt about Robert Peary’s claim to have been first to reach the top of the world a century ago.
There are no such doubts about the location of the South Pole, in the middle of a vast, blank continent surrounded by ocean. The second explorers to reach it, a British expedition commanded by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, found the tent left behind by the Norwegian mission who beat them to it by five weeks.
Life aboard the Vavilov is about as far from the appalling privations suffered by Scott’s party as anyone could want. Fresh fare is served up three times a day, in a dining room both communal and convivial. No more than 100 latter-day explorers at a time carve a course through the polar seas. But how do the ultimate resorts compare?
Longyearbyen is one of those rare cities where hitch-hiking to or from the airport is perfectly normal. Even more unusually, visitors are warned that they must not stray far from town without a weapon: the polar bear, king of the Arctic, is said to be the one creature that considers man to be prey (the big cats, in contrast, attack only in extremis).
With daily flight connections from Oslo, WiFi and a pub, the northernmost town in the world feels strangely normal – even though the North Pole is closer than the Norwegian capital. But wrap up: the only months when the average Celsius reading in Longyearbyen strays into positive territory are June to September, with the peak a balmy 6°C.
