Enough introductional blah blah, I kind of need to keep this short, because life continues, I'm doing other stuff as well - and I also have a bit of school, just saying...
So we went to Tromsø last weekend, hoping to see the northern lights there. They are also called polar lights or Aurora borealis, so don't be confused if I'm using these terms interchangeably. These bright and colourful lights in the sky can sometimes be seen in the winter months if you're far up north. (Or far down south, but then the phenomenon is called Aurora australis.) If you're interested in how the polar lights occur: I'm not gonna explain it in this blog post, as the article is gonna be too long due to a lot of pictures already, but feel free check out this website!
Northern lights
As the polar lights are the main reason to make a trip to Tromsø in winter, but it's always a gamble if you'll be able to see them - it's just always a gamble -, I'll start with them instead of artificially creating suspense by keeping them for the end. Plus, it also goes with the chronology of the events: we were able to see them on the very first night when we had basically just arrived in Tromsø! They were so strong that you didn't even have to go to a dark place outside of the city (which we still did afterwards), you could literally see them just outside our accommodation! And they were extremely bright and colourful, green and a bit of pink (the weak ones are just white streams in the sky), and they were actually "dancing". There's slow and fast northern lights, so I'd assume we witnessed the fast ones.Still wondering how visible they were? Well, I was able to take photos of them with my old compact camera, and the others managed to capture them with their iPhones, I guess that tells you everything you need to know!
Tromsø
Ok, having ticked off this highlight of the Tromsø trip, let's move to the "but where were you anyway?"-part. Let me start with the usual Google Maps screenshot:
If you're wondering: nope, we didn't drive all the way up, I just wanted to illustrate the location and distance in relation to Oslo. We went from Oslo to Tromsø by plane, and even that took two hours, which is more or less the same as going from southern Germany to Oslo. By the way, thanks, UNDER26 campaign code, for making travelling with Nordic airlines such as Norwegian more affordable!
I'm not going to stick to the chronological order of events now but just add a few photos of Tromsø which I collected during our weekend there.
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| View from our accommodation. |
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| Tromsø Cathedral |
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| Tromsø city library |
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| Probably the prettiest scenery for a gas station... |
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| Tourist information with a ticketing system... |
It was all quite nice, but if you wanted the really amazing view over Tromsø, you had to take the cable car!
Fjellheisen (cable car)
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| Going up...! |
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| Yup, we stayed a bit longer after sunset. |
Fjord cruise tour
We didn't stay in Tromsø for the whole weekend. For one day, we had booked tours. The others did a Sami experience tour. If you're not familiar with the word: the Sami people are the indigenous people in the north of Norway as well as Sweden, Finland and Russia.From a cultural point of view, I might have been interested in that tour. However, I felt this tour was mostly about reindeer sledging, not about Sami culture. And since "just leaving animals alone" (partly inspired by PETA Germany) is kind of my "job description" as a vegan, I opted out of this event and booked a 5 hour fjord cruise tour instead.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to evade the issue of humans not leaving the animals alone there either. At some point of the tour, the boat stopped on the water for fishing activities. But at least, that was not the main attraction of the tour - the main point was still the stunning nature! Before I'll present the photos of the amazing views to you though, I want to make one point here:
So people were encouraged to try out fishing during this tour, and the fish at least partially ended up in the soup that was prepared for us during the tour. (They managed provide a vegan option for me, by the way!) However, when one of the boat crew members filleted the fish just recently removed from the sea, nobody wanted to watch that. Everybody but me (I happened to take photos at that time) was on the other side of the boat or under deck, which I found quite ironic.
I mean, if you can't stand their glassy dead eyes staring at you, maybe you would like to consider just not killing and/or eating them?
Anyway, except for that, the fjord cruise was really nice! We travelled the fjords even further north than we were already. I'm not sure how Norway does it, but during the whole tour, I still had internet and GPS, so I can actually show you how far north we made it:
From there, you could even see the open sea!
I did my best to stay outside and enjoy the view as much as possible. Despite the cold, it was an extremely beautiful day, and I definitely took a 3-digit number of photos during the tour. Don't worry though, I'm not gonna post all of them in the following. Just almost. :P
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| When my bachelor exchange friends asked me for more selfies... |
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| Hi eagle! |
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| The Arctic Cathedral (which we didn't manage to visit) |
Senja
You might have figured it out already, but I should probably make it explicit at this point: we had rented a car for this weekend. Or rather two, as we were up to 9 people on this trip. However, we had rented one car under my name - mainly because I had turned 25 exactly five days before we went to northern Norway. For some reason, 25 is the magic age for car rentals. They don't check for how long you've had your driving license or how much driving experience you possess - they just check IF you have a license and what your age is. As it's only the age doing the trick of pretending you're a "mature driver", I ended up renting the car, but somebody else (who felt more comfortable driving on snow & ice) was the driver. However, may I present the very first car I ever rented:
Well, and as we were already somewhere in the north of Norway and had a car, we decided to make a road trip to Senja, Norway's second biggest island. Just for the record, that's here:
Nope, that's not exactly next to Tromsø. It was something like a 2.5-hour drive, plus some more time until we had figured out where exactly on Senja we wanted to go. But well, for Norwegian standards, that's probably kind of around the corner...
So we actually spent most of the time on the car, but that was great, as we got to see a lot of gorgeous landscape!
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| Hi reindeer?! |
The final destination of our trip to Senja was this, by the way. And we made it there before it got dark! :)
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| Another selfie of proof. :P |
Oh, and if you're interested in everybody's earworm or, if you will, the soundtrack of our trip (as in: the whole weekend, not only Senja!), that would be this one:
Do. Not. Ask.
The day after the Senja road trip, we had to go back to Oslo already. Most of us with the 8 a.m. flight - after 3 hours of sleep. I still don't know how I managed to go to school on the very same day and not fall asleep during class.
Anyway, I'm gonna end this post with the view at the airport at 7 a.m. or something...
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| Goodbye, Tromsø! |
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