Kayaking glacial fjords and watching hundreds of walruses loafing about on a beach is just the tip of the iceberg while cruising the Arctic .

A gaggle of black and white barnacle geese and their downy goslings waddle across the road, bringing our bus to a grinding halt. They’re everyday traffic in a summertime Svalbard , where their burgeoning population outnumbers human inhabitants 10 to one. Today, though, it’s hardly the wildlife that’s proving to be the driver’s biggest foe. That would be the tourists.

They’re everywhere – walking along, across and on the roads as freely as the geese and reindeer. It’s the busiest I’ve seen Longyearbyen . Just a month earlier, the Svalbard Archipelago’s capital felt every bit as remote as it truly is, with just a few hundred tourists roaming at

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