|Places| On the Flåm Railway in the Norwegian countryside Arctic Wonders There’s no better way to experience the Arctic than a private-jet tour that can open all the right doors – and land in all the right airports, says Brian Noone I ’m running up Trælanípa – also known as Slave Cliff – in the Faroe Islands. A few of us have dawdled on the hike, chatting and taking pictures, but now we are insistent on reaching the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime viewpoint – where the ocean is carving out cliffs underneath the lake above – before we pace back to rejoin the others. There are many reasons why you might wish to spend just 16 hours in the Faroe Islands, as we are doing. To glimpse, rather than immerse yourself in, a culture that is as brutal as the persistent whale massacres here suggest; to behold a landscape that is stunning but relatively samey with angular cliffs, sweeping fields and the iconic isle where James Bond met his death in No Time to Die (one visit is enough for most); and, perhaps most of all, because it rains 300 days a year. We have the good fortune to be there on a relatively clear day (at 21°C, it’s the warmest day of the year in early July) and we move on with a little bounce in our steps, PHOTO MORTEN RAKKE 52 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
There is nothing quite like kayaking through icebergs in Greenland; below: grass-roofed houses in the Faroe Islands PHOTOS FROM TOP: MATHIAS RHODE / ISTOCK, GORJAN STOJCHEVSKI / ISTOCK less than three hours after being on the clifftop, boarding our private plane in the tiny airport, direction Svalbard. There can’t be more than a few dozen planes that have ever flown this 3.5-hour route; it’s certainly never been a commercial connection, with just 52,600 people in the Faroes and just under 3,000 in Svalbard. “Our mission has always been to look at the remote and exotic and try to build a reliable experience, with a certain level of luxury and safety,” says Bas Bosschieter, CEO of Captain’s Choice, the Australia-based organisation that has run private jet tours for nearly 30 years. “The world is getting smaller,” he continues, “but we’re the only [tour company] going into that region using our own aircraft.” In Svalbard, one of the tour doctors and one of the passengers fall ill with Covid. It happens on many journeys nowadays, and the team treats it with suitable calm and forthrightness. The two are dispatched to appropriate locales to recover – the passenger, it is hoped, will rejoin the group in time for the farewell dinner. “We are forever trying to manage situations, whatever comes,” says Denise Van Sever, the tour manager, as we stand on a Svalbard beach, recovering from the appallingly scented colony of walruses that we have just visited by boat. She has led many trips for Captain’s Choice, to locations as varied as Uganda and Sri Lanka, and the sorts of spontaneous inconveniences that arise on every journey are just what she and her team are Our mission has always been to look at the remote and exotic CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 53
