Date: 10th – 15th July
So we received some interesting news on the 10th of July, just as we were to start the journey home. Unfortunately, the SAS airline strike was ongoing and our flight from Longyearbyen to Oslo at 2.30pm had been cancelled! We disembarked early at 9am and made our way to a nearby hotel to either figure out some other way home or wait out the strike.
We decided to write this last blog to combine the next few days of our journey, because it ended up taking us so long to get home that we are now trying to repress the memory!
It took hours of refreshing the page, but eventually Gavin managed to find us four seats on an SAS flight out of Longyearbyen that would definitely (hopefully!) be leaving on the 11th. We quickly snapped those up but then it was on to the more daunting task of how to get home from Oslo – by the time we arrived, we would have missed our previous connecting flight.
On the 12th morning after a delicious buffet breakfast, we met up in the hotel lounge area and basically spent the next ten hours trying to work out the best and most economical way of flying home to Sydney without breaking the bank and/or our will to live. Eventually we settled on what was to be a 50-hour journey. We had one more night in Oslo and then the journey would begin with our first flight at 9.30am on the 13th. Oslo to Bucharest. Bucharest to Doha. Doha to Maldives. Maldives to Singapore. Singapore to Sydney. Touchdown at 11am on the 15th.
Somehow we made it back with hardly any complaints – we even got to make a quick run to our favourite curry house in Singapore, ‘Banana Leaf’, because that stopover was for about 6 hours!
With the journey (finally) at an end, we can safely say that we have achieved our mission to bring the Arctic’s most important issues to the fingertips of those who may not ever have the chance to experience it. Hopefully one day soon, we will be able to create a new educational program for Upschool.co from the next exciting location – the Antarctic!
See you again soon and thanks for reading!
Love from the A Team
Tanya, Gavin, Richard & Graeme
