![]() ![]() Luckily we won the bidding and had our first real home.” © Cecilia Blomdahl © Cecilia Blomdahl We fell in love with it immediately and put in an offer. “Only a few cabins are sold each year, and this one looked really nice so we went and saw it. “My boyfriend and I were living in a friend’s apartment in Longyearbyen when the cabin came up for sale,” she explains. Longyearbyen maybe one of the remotest outposts above the Arctic Circle, but Cecilia Blomdahl lives even further away in a simple, cosy cabin ten minutes outside of town, with a Finnish lapphund called Grim for company, and a view out of her window of seven glaciers. We want to go further and further into the Arctic lands, the islands in the ice, the frozen earth, which is still lying there as on the day that God created it.” © Cecilia Blomdahl Life is easy, even though we don’t have running water at home in our cabin, life is just simple and beautiful.” Or as one Svalbard explorer put it a century before: “we are seized by an uncontrollable longing for remote places. “We have no car queues, no commuting time, and things like that. “Living on Svalbard doesn’t have many of the daily stresses of the mainland,” says Blomdahl. Wander around Longyearbyen, by far the largest settlement in Svalbard, and you’ll come across nomads from as far away as Brazil and Tunisia, who’ve made a home in the freezing cold landscape. Regular flights from Norway mean you can have breakfast in Oslo, and be secluded in the Arctic Circle just after lunch. Part of the appeal of Svalbard is that it is entirely visa-free although a sovereign part of Norway, a treaty signed soon after World War I means you can simply move there, provided you can find work or support yourself. I was only supposed to stay for a few months, but I fell in love with the lifestyle here.” I thought it sounded super interesting, so I followed along and got myself a job there too. My boyfriend at the time had some friends that had gone to Svalbard to work for a few months and they got him a job. “I was working in the hospitality industry in Gothenburg when I heard about Svalbard for the first time. “I am originally from Sweden and moved to Svalbard five years ago,” explains Blomdahl. ![]() But dotted around the frozen earth are peculiar glimpses of civilisation: the mysterious looking Global Seed Vault lies half buried in the snow like a fallen alien obelisk deserted Soviet coal mining towns lie abandoned, preserved in the permafrost as Communist time capsules and even further north, are the desolate polar research institutes of Ny-Ålesund.īut what draws people to this frozen Arctic wilderness with months of perpetual night? We caught up with one such intrepid adventurer, Cecilia Blomdahl from Sweden, who gave up the creature comforts of Gothenburg to go and live in a simple cabin in one of the remotest places on Earth, the last stop on the way to the North Pole. Covered mostly in glaciers, the islands of Svalbard are largely uninhabited, with most people living in the town of Longyearbyen. Svalbard is filled with freezing superlatives: it is the northernmost, year-round settlement on Earth, where you’ll find the world’s northernmost church, kindergarten, weekly newspaper, (the Svalbardposten published every Friday), and even a pub. It may be a place where the polar nights last for four months, closely followed by four months of never-ending sunshine, but Svalbard is home to over two thousand hardy souls, almost as many people, it’s said, as there are polar bears. ![]() The far flung Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ice lies just six hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole. For the adventurous of spirit, and those who yearn to pack a bag and disappear to somewhere as remote as possible, arguably nowhere quite captures the imagination as Svalbard. ![]()
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