Monday October 13th, Brussels

D-day ! A part of the EPIC team - Carole Haine (account manager), Long Cao (designer), Benoit Rondeux (managing director) and Jonathan Berger (documentary photograph) - is about to take off!

Final destination: Longyearbyen, a small settlement located in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago located in the Arctic Ocean, halfway between Norway and the North Pole.

In 1900, going to Svalbard would have taken months not to forget a long laborious boat trip. Nowadays, we can fortunately reach our destination by plane…despite the fact that there are still only 2 airports connected to Svalbard: Oslo and Tromsø with only 1 flight per day.
This means that before being able to join our clients from the Crop Trust in Svalbard, we must stop in Oslo where we spend the night.

Side note: In our times, taking a plane seems to be a simple formality but flying with dozens of lenses, flashes, cameras and batteries as we do is quite an adventure! From monopolizing a X-Ray machine for 15 minutes to complete body search, our team is actually relieved to reach the Arctic without having lost anything in-between!

Next morning, direction Tromsø, a city located in northern Norway.
This is the moment where we put our first steps above the Arctic Circle. We notice it immediately when we get out of the plane as the temperatures has dramatically dropped down (difference of 17°C with Brussels)!

After an extra 2-hour trip above the clouds, our plane begins to go down when suddenly…here we are: like a curtain revealing the stage, we are literally surrounded by steep mountains covered with fresh snow from the sea level to their summit.
No forests, no beaches, just rocks and snow contrasting with a deep black colored sea. It seems to be a complete no man’s land at the edge of the Arctic.

We finally land in the Arctic (78° North) in Longyearbyen to be warmly welcomed by Layla and Brian from the Crop Trust.

For old kids like we are - passionate about adventures movies and stories - you can imagine how impatient we are to discover the clearness and purity of Svalbard!

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