Northern Lights in Tromsø

Awesome view from the plane

Alright, I'm gradually catching up on my exploits from the final part of last semester! After our trip to Gaustatoppen in October, I had a very long and very boring month of exams in November. I'm happy to say I passed all of my classes with good grades, especially considering I was learning at a Master's level with a lot less support/lecture time than is provided at my uni (and spent more time travelling than studying!). Thankfully on the 27th November I finished my last exam, and regained my freedom - along with the arrival of a good friend from university, B! B is also studying abroad this year, in Belgium.

That weekend, we headed to Tromsø. Tromsø is in the North of Norway, within the Arctic Circle (70 degrees North). I highly recommend looking at its position on a world map - it's even further North than Iceland is. The plane journey there from Oslo takes around 2 hours, which is longer than it takes to fly from London to Oslo! We had assumed that we would arrive to be knee deep in snow given the whole 'Arctic Circle' thing, but there was almost none there at all - my snow boots turned out to be incredibly unnecessary...

Tromsø's Arctic Cathedral -
the most Northern Cathedral
in the world! 

One of the strangest things about Tromsø is that during the winter, there is two months when the sun doesn't rise above the horizon (and in the summer, there are two months of sunlight 24 hours/day!). I found it quite unsettling, and I don't think I could live there for any long period of time; there were a couple of hours of daylight/dusk when we were there, but once it got dark at 2pm I would start to feel like I should be heading to bed! On the plus side, those two hours of light were super beautiful - like a constant sunrise or sunset. 

On our first day, we checked out the town. It's a small place to be dubbed a city, but full of the traditional wooden houses you find in Norway. Being there before Christmas was cute too - lots of decorations were up, and they also had a Christmas tree lighting festival. We also realised that Tromsø (like all of Norway, really) is a rather expensive place to be a tourist - hence why I haven't done much of the touristy stuff in Oslo yet! In the night we tried to take a walk to a nearby lake to see if we could glimpse the Northern Lights by ourselves, but it was too foggy (and walking around a lake in the dark seemed like a creepy idea). 

Tired & happy after the hike! 

On Sunday we wanted to go up the nearby Mount Storsteinen on Fløya, to get a view over the city. You can get a cable car to the top, which B did, but given the good weather and my new Norwegian lifestyle (ha!) I decided to hike up! It was 423m upwards and I think about 3 miles or so, and took me just under an hour with multiple stops to admire the magnificent views of the nearby mountains.  I have to admit that it probably wasn't the safest idea; although there wasn't much snow, there was quite a lot of ice and at one point I slid about 5m back down a rather vertical bit of the hill. Oops. Nonetheless, the sense of achievement that I gained from doing that was awesome, and it made the view from the top look even more amazing! This was actually my favourite thing from visiting Tromsø.

Originally, we had hoped to do dog sledding whilst we were up there but the lack of snow meant that this wasn't possible, so we decided to book a tour to see the Northern Lights instead. We did the tour on the Sunday evening, and went with Arctic Guide Service who promised to take pictures of us (yay!), were really helpful when explaining about the best night to go and see the lights, and even gave us a much appreciated student discount! 

The evening was a long one as we headed off at 6pm and then returned at about 2am, but very worthwhile! We were taken to three different areas around Tromsø, far away from the city lights so that the Northern Lights wouldn't be dulled. We were very lucky as the first location (the picture on the left below) had an incredible display after around an hour of waiting; the lights were extremely strong and dancing right above us, it was awesome. My favourite location was actually the second one we went to, though - we sat on a frozen lake surrounded by mountains, gazing up at the stars and the (less vibrant) lights above us, and it was beautiful.

The third location we visited on the tour was Ersfjordbotn. We didn't see any lights there, but we decided to head back there and visit during the day because it just looked like an incredible location. We tried to do it on the Monday but somewhat unhelpful bus drivers meant that we ended up missing the very infrequent bus there, and therefore missed the daylight, so we did it on Tuesday instead - but unfortunately, the weather wasn't quite working with us and it was super cloudy. Nonetheless it was a fun excursion out of the city, and also the first time that there was a bit of snow.

As well as all of these things, we also enjoyed a nice (free) lunchtime concert at the Tromsø Domkirke and watched the seals being trained at Polaria. It was a really enjoyable few days, and I will never forget these special moments!