'We were a cast of characters that seemed perhaps more fit for a reality TV show than an Arctic expedition to a place with more polar bears than people,' Terry Ward writes for CNNTravel. 'And I wondered how being the only woman aboard would play out.'
The summer before I turned 40 -- with my fertility ebbing, as everyone with a vested interest in such things felt the need to remind me -- I decided to set sail on the biggest adventure of my life., we cast off from southern Norway, bound for the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard on a four-month expedition that covered more than 4,500 miles.who grapples with seasickness, I've traveled the world mostly on land.
As the saying goes, though, the best boat is the one you have. And Heide had tricked out Barba to the max with all manner of safety gear -- including radar, a forward-looking sonar to scan for ice and a dinghy for getting ashore and exploring tighter spots -- so she was as seaworthy as possible for our journey to Svalbard and back.
Visitors to Svalbard are required to travel with heavy duty rifles outside of the main settlement in Longyearbyen because of the presence of polar bears. And while we never had to fire a flare gun or a real gun to scare off a bear, they were the most vital tool in our kit for going on land .
Svalbard is a glacier-covered archipelago roughly 600 nautical miles off the northern coast of Norway that's considered Europe's last true wilderness. It's home to roughly 2,600 people, including a slew of scientists and over 3,000 polar bears. There were times when the captain just left me to it with the flailing sails on deck and a panicked look on my face while he went back to sleep with the others below -- but being thrown into the deep end is the best way to learn, I realized.
For 40 days, there was no internet, not to mention anywhere to provision for food and fuel . I had the boat's larder stocked with dried beans, potatoes, cabbage and other foods in it for the long haul, and once we ran out of fresh produce and meat, we kept happy with Arctic char we fished from the streams.
"Polar bear! Swimming toward the boat!," he shouted. What I thought was a joke meant to send me scurrying for the bear bunker turned out to be the real deal. We popped up on deck to see a polar bear paddling toward Barba, just a few yards off stern. Another kept two of the crew hostage inside a hunter's cabin on the beach, where they'd been trying to heat up a sauna so we could wash up. The bear paced back and forth outside while those of us on the boat kept in VHF contact with the crew to let them know when it finally moseyed on.
Time has no significance with the combination of no darkness, no stores or restaurants, no internet to distract you, no busy work to busy you -- and nobody else around for hundreds of miles. Our only job was staying alive and enjoying all that wilderness.
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