In August, I strolled up, after taking my shoes off, to the bar of the Mellageret and ordered a drink, and thus doing so, I claimed a Travel Superlative, that of having a beer in the world’s most northerly pub. I’d also done this in the world’s most northerly settlement, Ny-Ålesund in the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard.

Who doesn’t love superlatives? Especially when traveling, I adore them. Of course, superlatives can and often are qualified by tourism bureaus and travelers wishing to spice up their experiences. I am guilty of this, too. You might be forgiven for thinking you’re in trouble when tourism bureaus start adding adjectives to such superlatives as the “World’s Highest Mountain.” Perhaps something along the lines of—and I’ve come up with a purely fictitious example—“Nutkins: Home of the World’s Highest, South-facing, Moraine-laced, Evergreen-draped, Permanently Snow-capped Mountain.”

A classic example of this is Lake Titicaca in Peru, which tourism bureaus, travel agencies and travelers routinely parrot as being the World’s Highest Lake. It isn’t. That would be a crater-lake in the Nevado Ojos del Salado, a dormant volcano on the Argentina-Chile border, which I saw when I was slowly baking to death in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the World’s Driest Desert. So, then the tourism bureaus began to spout that Lake Titicaca—a gorgeous, fascinating place, by the way, where I had to move slowly in the thin air of 13,000 feet above sea-level—is the World’s Highest Navigable Lake, but that is a senseless statement. I could, I assume, navigate this crater-lake if I was in a boat dropped down into it and had a pair of oars to glide across its 300-foot diameter. Wikipedia lists Lake Titicaca as “one of the highest commercially navigable lakes in the world,” a statement of far more sense. Then again, perhaps you can accuse me of narrowing travel down to mathematical equations, rather than the joyous-sum-far-larger-than-its-parts that I know it to be.

I was recently in Baker, California, just to see what a town named the same as me looked like, and I was delighted to see that it has the World’s Largest Thermometer. There it is, just opposite The Mad Greek diner, standing at 134 feet in height, one foot for each degree of the United States’ Highest Recorded Temperature in nearby Death Valley. In fact, Baker bills itself as “The Gateway to Death Valley.”

Back on the island of Svalbard (svalbard.net), everything was most definitely the “Most Northerly this” or “Most Northerly that.” The accolades start as you land at Longyearbyen Airport, the world’s most northerly scheduled-flight airport at 78° 14’ 50’N (from now on, W’sMN will stand in for this superlative). The records continue as you enter Longyearbyen—named after an American miner, John Munroe Longyear, from Lansing, Mich.—which is the W’sMN settlement with more than 1,000 residents (there’s a couple of qualifiers creeping into this paragraph, aren’t there!).

Longyearbyen, approximately 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 600 miles south of the North Pole, is light for every minute of the summer, which is the time to come. Spend a couple of days here and then embark on one of the adventure cruises that go northwards in search of whales, seals, glaciers, misty fjords and, most stunning of all, Polar bears. I saw five, all fat, lazy and contented, lying on ice packs high above an easy meal of a dead Fin whale. Hurtigruten is one cruise company that goes to this region, which I first knew when I was young as Spitsbergen (in fact, Spitsbergen is one part of the island group of Svalbard, which combined is as large as New York State). Hurtigruten’s ships are wonderful, with good food, excellent guides, lots of books and information and far, far fewer passengers than on, for example, a Caribbean sailing.

The W’sMN spot this writer has ever been to now is 80° 00’ 3’N, a little atoll (and, yes, you can have atolls in cold places, as well as in warm) called Moffen Island. Anchored 1,000 feet from the shore (being a wildlife refuge, this is a legal requirement). I gazed at the tusked walruses wobbling down the stony beach towards the sea, which on the day I was there registered 2°C.

If you want to be an official Svalbard Polar Bear, and have a certificate to prove it, you need to go swimming in this water, which I did—you would have wanted me to, right?—for exactly five strokes. The water on your skin resembles a thousand knife pricks. One Brit crazier than me, Lewis Gordon Pugh, recently swam for two-thirds of a mile in water like this, ice bobbing close by, but he is trained and has a unique way of raising his core body temperature. His swim took him just a shade under 19 minutes, when any time more than one minute in water that cold can have irreversible effects. Three seconds was plenty for me, but that dot of water by an old burial site called Gravesnet is now the W’sMN spot in which I’ve gone swimming, smashing my previous record of the public swimming baths in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, at a measly 64° 11’ 27’N.

Anyway, let’s get back to Ny-Ålesund. It is predominantly a research station, but it is permanent, with 150 inhabitants during the summer, 30 during the winter. It has a store, a post office, an abandoned steam train ideal for photographs and the W’sMN Arctic marine laboratory. It is not a temporary community, and it is not formed of heated tents, which other upstart claimants claim makes them the W’sMN settlement. Do not believe them.

And what makes Ny-Ålesund the winner is that it acts like a town, with residents chatting on street corners, shoppers sharing jokes with the clerk in the store and friends sharing a pint—well, at least they can the two summer evenings a week (one in winter) the pub is open. Life can be felt here. Stories are told.

One I heard at the pub was when I started chatting with Mehmet, a Turk from Istanbul. He told me a great tale about Ny-Ålesund. The famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, left from here in a zeppelin (you can see the tower from which this craft was tethered) to be the first man to reach the North Pole. This was in May 1926. Earlier that year an American, Richard Evelyn Byrd, claimed he had reached the pole, but his data was confused and his achievement doubted. Amundsen went with an American explorer called Lincoln Ellsworth and an Italian pilot called Umberto Nobile, who brought along a crew. Nobile told Amundsen and Ellsworth not to wear furs because of their weight and to bring small Norwegian and American flags, which they intended to leave at the pole, for the same reason. When Nobile arrived, he and his crew were decked out in heavy furs, which infuriated Amundsen, but not as much as he became when he realized that the heavy crate he believed was full of technical equipment actually contained a massive Italian flag that fluttered down to cover the pole for, seemingly, acres: The W’sMN con trick.

No con trick from me. While Amundsen et al only floated over the North Pole, rather than landing there or taking sleds and dogs, I actually walked all the way on foot to the pub.

A little to the south is another town, Barentsburg, which is on the same fjord, Isfjord, as Longyearbyen, which, incidentally, is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a climate-controlled underground warehouse that is off limits to most and in which have been deposited seeds of every plant known to science. Its building was completed last year. Barentsburg, a Russian-Ukrainian mining community that is fascinating to wander in but very rough around the edges to look at, does not provide such an easy life, so it seemed to me. I would not be surprised if it was abandoned in the next decade, a decision that would probably have more to do with the commodity markets, rather than the desire of people to live there.

A statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stands in the central square beneath a stylized mural of three strong women workers and a sign on the hillside that in Russian says “Peace to the World,” the—you guessed it—W’sMN mountainside message.

But the Lenin statue here will have to make do with second place, for there also is a statue of him in the now-abandoned town of Pyramiden, 50 miles to the north. Hardly anyone goes there now. Cruise ships do stop in Barentsburg, though, and it is worth seeing. Some of the prettier buildings are deemed unsafe following a 2008 earthquake, and the wooden walkways that crisscross the town are not for the unsure of foot, but there exists here a definite atmosphere of adventure and “otherness.”

A bar—inside a hotel that surely has seen better days—is compelling in a let’s-go-back-in-time manner and offers a curiously inscrutable menu that includes “soup noodles ‘Rolton’ in assortment” for 20 Norwegian kronor (NK), “cappuccino ‘MacCoffee’ in assortment, 12.5 grams” for 15NK, “dry rings of calamaries (sic), 18 grams” for 8NK and “bus trip: port—birch grove—port” for 50NK that I did make serious enquiries about but was told I’d already missed that day’s exciting itinerary.

Shame, that, as it might just have been the World’s Most Northerly Birch Grove Adventure, and who would not want to pay the equivalent of $7 to see the World’s Smallest Tree, all of them no more than two inches in height.