Northern Lights in Tromso

Lights over Grotfjord

We did two northern lights tours whilst we were in Tromso, well actually three if you include our night dog sledding adventure. But the actual night tours were all about seeing the lights, no distractions, with the dogs you barely had time to look at the sky! The company we went with, I'm not sure if I would recommend them, were all about guaranteeing northern lights viewing, which is good. But it does mean if most of Norway is under cloud then you are driving to Finland, which is a 2 hour drive away. The tour then ends up being 11 hours long, which is not really what I expected. We got to bed at 4:30am!

The frozen lake - not many lights

The thing is we had great light shows within the first 2 hours of the tour, then the next 9 hours are spent driving around, getting colder and colder. Other companies will give you the option of cancelling or rescheduling your tour, if there is very little chance of seeing the northern lights, which I think is a better option than who we went with.

We did learn a lot from this first, arduous, tour though, so we were definitely prepared next time round. The trick is, at the first stop, change your boots, get on their arctic suit, and get some heat packs. The second time round we were also luckier though, in that it was a crystal clear night, so we only had to drive enough to get away from the Tromso lights.

This spot was amazing, and the lights were incredible

I'm not sure what skills you needed to be a northern lights guide, it's not quite what I expected. It seemed more that you had to be unfailingly upbeat, able to withstand immense cold, and good at night photography. When we drove to Finland it was -14 degrees, that was cooooold! And yet our guide seemed to only have 3 layers on. We were all in these incredible Arctic suits that could handle temperatures of -40.

We even got some purple

It kind of made me want to get into night photography, I do need a better lens though. The guide had a camera with a lowest aperture of 1.4, my lowest was 3.5. His pictures were amazing. It's also actually kind of hard to figure out if you are in focus, since it's pitch black, and your photos are not very bright. Thankfully I took a lot of photos, so at least some turned out ok. But that's definitely something for me to figure out, how to tell at night, whether the photo is perfectly in focus.

Can't get enough of this fjord

The lights themselves were amazing, mainly green, though when you see them with the naked eye they look almost colourless. The amazing photos you see are not what you will see with your eyes, they just aren't sensitive enough. We did manage to see some purples and reds though, so that was kind of cool. The lights were really going crazy on the second tour, dancing all over the skies, and coming down in sheets, it was really quite special.

The effect of clouds on the light visibility

The guides did know how to pick some pretty spots, so even if there were no lights, you were going to get some nice landscape photos. The first tour we stopped at this frozen lake. We weren't allowed to wander off though, as they weren't sure how thick the ice was in the middle. We saw some lights there, but you could see the effect of low cloud. As soon as there is low cloud you can't see anything.

Surrounded by mountains

The next tour was to the next island over from Tromso, Kvaloya, we ended up visiting this island 5 times whilst we were in Tromso. This spot was amazing though, right at the end of a fjord, with a little town right at the other end, surrounded by mountains.

Just a great spot

Polar Nights in Norway

Looking across to the mainland, and the Arctic Cathedral

We are just back from a week in Tromso, which is a town in northern Norway, about 350km north of the Arctic Circle. Which means the sun doesn't rise throughout winter. It's not a pitch-black day though, there are about 3 hours of twilight, and the rest of the time, because of all the snow, there is still a lot of light around. A night in Tromso feels a lot brighter than a night in London.

I think it was a pretty good time to visit, though perhaps even later in winter is better because you are probably guaranteed snow and no rain. You don't want to visit Tromso when it's still raining. It's definitely set up for snow, not ice. Our main purpose for the visit was to see the northern lights, and yet there is so much other stuff to do, it turned out that the northern lights tours were probably our least favourite out of all the activities we did.

Another status of Amundsen - 11am in Tromso

Tromso centre, the pile of snow is from the roads

Norway is definitely an awesome country, out of everywhere I have visited it's one of the only places I have thought I could actually live in. Even given the cold temperatures and lack of sunlight. The infrastructure is great, everyone seems really fit and intelligent, the scenery is stunning, and they are set up for outdoor pursuits. Plus they just seem harder than other nationalities.

Tromso was definitely a tourist town, every evening when we came out of our hotel there would always be a bunch of people standing around waiting for various tours, often we were also waiting. Everyone in Tromso also speaks English, and I mean perfect English. It's the tour guides who aren't Norwegian who don't speak such great English. It makes being a tourist there super easy, and enjoyable. One thing we noticed is that not many Norwegians were tour guides, especially not for the northern lights tours, they were always foreigners. I'm not sure why that is, perhaps the lights tours are the worst, you are basically working the night shift for months on end. 

There is also a surprising amount to see in Tromso itself, and it has some pretty great restaurants. We ate so well the whole time we were there, and yes there was a lot of fish. I even had prawns when I was there, I think the last time I had prawns I enjoyed was in Australia. In the UK we just get these prawns from Thailand, that taste of iodine. And, I recently learned, are prepared by slaves. So no more prawns for me whilst I'm in the UK.

The pretty Tromso harbour

Back to the stuff to do in Tromso, obviously it is expected that you are there to do various tours and activities. But we couldn't do something every minute of the day, so there were some free hours to see the local museums and art galleries. We went to the Polaria first, cool building, it looks like a bunch of ice blocks that have toppled over. There we learnt about the aurora, which was going to hold us in good stead over the next week. They also had 4 seals there, which was kind of cool, I was hoping for a polar bear, but I guess that is a bit harder to keep in captivity. There were a lot of fish and sea creatures at this museum, it was kind of cool to see all these types of creatures that you don't normally see. Normally aquariums go overboard with the tropical fish, but this was all cold-water stuff.

Clubbing baby seals

We also went to the Tromso museum, this was a bit out of the city centre, so we had to catch a bus to get there. And again Norway just does it better. When you got on the bus, the driver would actually wait for you to take a seat before driving off, are you listening London bus drivers! This museum was more of a natural history museum, so stuffed animals from the surrounding environment. They also had a bog person, I love bog people, but it seemed the body wasn't that well-preserved, so it was just their clothes. There was quite a lot on the Sami people, who are a race of people who live through northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, and have their own language and culture. Unfortunately this section was all in Norwegian, so we couldn't learn a lot about them.

A polar bear with trap, about to shoot itself with a gun inside the box

The final museum we visited was the Polar museum, different from the Polaria. This was more about Norwegian explorers and history in the Arctic. There were a loooot of stuffed animals. And a lot about all the seal clubbing, whaling and polar bear hunting they used to do in the Arctic. There was a lot about Amundsen, as you would expect. I never knew that he carried on adventuring after the South pole, and disappeared whilst trying to rescue some other expedition.