Epilogue





 So ends another wonderful adventure. We didn’t quite make it to the top of the world, but at 79N, what’s 700 miles or so between friends.


The good days far outweighed the couple of bad weather ones. As for highlights, the scenery around Ny Alesund was breathtaking and seeing the wildlife too of course even though that didn’t include a polar bear(apart from the stuffed one at the airport) ….so hopefully next time! Personally, I had been looking forward to Jan Mayen simply because it is so remote and so rarely visited, and I was not disappointed.

As for the journey itself, it was very different to anything involving cruising that we had done before. It wasn’t a cruise, it was an amazing adventure. The ship was the smallest and oldest in the fleet, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was the intimacy and friendliness of the crew, the expedition team and our fellow explorers….everyone got to know everyone by name, and as I mentioned before the Expedition team must be having the time of their lives. No question was too boring or banal, their boundless enthusiasm for everything was catching I couldn’t praise them enough.


We did discover that there was a chief engineer on board, but that he obviously preferred engineering to having to meet and speak to people. He turned up when required but never said more than a few words.


We also got to have a brief conversation with a couple of chaps who had boarded the ship in Jan Mayen. Were they highly qualified scientists doing important observation work or groundbreaking research I enquired? No, they were a carpenter and a painter and they were helping to build a new accommodation cabin. Just as essential and important though! They certainly got the luck of the draw being picked up by an expedition ship to get back to Longyearbyen rather than a rusty old cargo boat.


Oh…we met another couple of explorers on the train going out to Oslo airport and, as I mentioned before, despite taking 50 minutes to get through immigration to enter Norway it only took 50 seconds to get through on departure.


Where will the next adventure be? Who knows, but we will certainly go with HX again.


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