This will be my last week on Svalbard as for now. On Sunday I will be flying back to Stavanger via Oslo. It has been a great experience. It’s one of the few real wildernesses left on Earth. From a safety perspective, it has also been very interesting. With unpredictable weather, remoteness, extreme cold and polar bears, the Arctic provides plenty of safety challenges. Safety management in the Arctic will also become more and more relevant, as new shipping routes open up and more drilling locations become available due to the melting sea ice more Arctic safety risks will have to be managed.
The AS302 course was well set up. The staff at UNIS is very motivated to share their knowledge and experience with everybody who wants to listen, which makes it a very pleasant environment to learn. The same goes for the people I’ve met around here. Everybody wants to have a good and safe time here and people recognise that they need each other. This increases reciprocity, which means doing something and sharing information without expecting anything immediately in return.
I will definitely be visiting again, hopefully with enough time to go and visit some of the more remote cabins. Also, I hope to be back sometime for the blues festival in October. This place truly breathes the blues. The darkness, the cold, the remoteness or maybe it is the vast amount of alcohol being consumed; you really can smell the blues in the air.
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