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.