Days 1/2/3 Tromso
The flight to Tromso was uneventful but there were some pretty awesome views over the horizon out the window of the plane. By 3pm local time it was pitch black and I couldn't see the sun any longer. This lack of sun will be a consistent thing for the next week or two.
Tromso is the largest and one of the northernmost settlements in Norway. It was fairly beautiful from the sky ... a sea of lights surrounded by snowy darkness.
Checked into my hotel and went for my normal wander around town. I'm in an actual hotel for the next 3 days with a private bathroom and double bed! Swoon! It's not fancy but it's comfortable enough and will do the job. The view from my window is pretty nice as well.
The central business area is not big at all so it didn't take me long to cover it. It's a pretty town with mountains overlooking it and a nice harbour area. Lots of Christmas lights and decorations as well.
And LOTS of icy footpaths. I fell on my ass within the first hour of being in town so I started to pay a bit more attention to where I was stepping. There's an art to this walking around snowy/icy areas! You want to walk on the grittiest area possible so fresh snow or melting snow or gravel. You don't want to walk on the shiny bits and if you have to then you want to take tiny steps so your weight is fairly evenly distributed between your feet. I will get lazy a few times over the next few days and go arse up which is highly embarrassing and can be somewhat painful. Thankfully my phone survived all falls so far!
I ended up at a bar run by the local brewery (surprise surprise) which used to be the northernmost brewery in the world. I am suitably horrified at the price of beer in this country. They have 50 taps of all Norwegian beer ... the cheapest pint they had was about $18 AUD and the most expensive was about $60 AUD. FAAARK. I guess that will make up for the cheap beer in Poland!
I got chatting to one of the bartenders and had a couple of beers which were all pretty good. And because I was chatting to the guy I got a ton of tasters of all the expensive stuff. They had some really nice beers there and quite a variety. The $60 beer was damned tasty but I wasn't going to buy a pint of it.
The following morning it was "light" (I.e. not pitch black) from about 9am to midday so I took the opportunity to go for a big walk along the water and see some more of the town. There are some beautiful buildings in this town as well but I particularly liked the "Polaris" building which looked like either fallen books or ice shelves stacked against each other.
After a couple of hours I headed back to the hotel to change my socks And warm up a little. One of the problems I've been having since I've got my new hiking boots and warm woollen socks is that my feet just won't stop sweating. So after about half an hour my toes are a bit drenched but it seems to equalise after a while and settle down into a mild dampness. It's understandable given the waterproof hiking boots aren't that breathable and the wool socks are so warm but I'm a little worried about my toes freezing. I'm not sure how cold it needs to get for sweaty feet to become a problem so I'm just hoping I don't run into it. I've picked up some antiperspirant for my feet to try and slow down the sweating but the only thing I've really been able to do so far is to change socks fairly regularly.
It's definitely cooler here than it has been elsewhere. It's hovering around zero degrees and sometimes dipping below so it's not super cold but I am glad for the new jacket I got.
I left the hotel and a heavy snowstorm started and I couldn't really see much so I headed to the Polar Museum which was need my hotel. It's not a big museum but they did a pretty good job with what they had. It basically covers a bit about life in the Arctic and how people have lived in this area for the last couple hundred years.
A bit about trapping and hunting of seals and polar bears, some nautical stuff and a few sections about polar heroes. The polar heroes stuff was the most interesting as it put a personal spin on a lot of the stories. I was interested to see that they had a section about a female trapper from the 1940s or something when it was purely a man's game.
After the museum I decided to head over the bridge to check out the Arctic Cathedral. This is one of the top things to do in Tromso apparently so I couldn't miss it!
The walk across the bridge was a bit of a god damn challenge. The wind was HUGE and I had to do that thing where you lean into it to make any decent progress. One advantage of the wind is that the walking path on the bridge wasn't icy ... nothing sat on there long enough to form ice! I did however get a few small cuts on my face from small icicles or hail being thrown around. Not a problem I'd ever thought of!
And when I got down to the cathedral I had to cross an icy road and the damn wind nearly blew me off my feet into oncoming traffic. I had started sliding downhill with the wind before my boots got some grip on a piece of snow or something. I've seen a couple of things around with spikes that you strap onto your boots to give you some grip on the ice. Might have been worth investing in a set.
The cathedral was very beautiful. It's Nordic design applied to a church. It's stark white inside and out with very interesting architecture. The stained glass window on the back was nice ... Colourful from the outside but black and white inside. I was the only one in there for a while because you had to pay an entry fee but some dude came in and started practicing the organ which completely ruined the serenity.
The walk back across the bridge was WITH the wind so it was a lot easier.
Back to the hotel to change socks and then I headed off for dinner and another couple of beers at the same bar. I had run into a British couple at the Polar Museum who were sitting in front of me on the plane on the way up and they were at the bar so I joined them for a while which was nice.
Back at the hotel and they were playing Rocky 3 on the TV which was a great ending to the evening. #eyeofthetiger
The next day was pretty quiet. I went for a wander in the morning and found a street market set up so I had a look at the stalls and bought a couple of small food items. Then I saw that they were setting something up in the main square nearby but couldn't find any information on it so I continued on. Not a big town ... I'm sure I'll find out what's going on sooner or later.
I went to the Northern Norway Art Museum which was OK for a small facility. They only had half a dozen rooms of artworks from Norwegian artists with a variety of contemporary and more traditional pieces. They had a room dedicated to a Sami artist (the local indigenous people) who does all her work in embroidery. It was pretty shit.
Overall the gallery was OK. They had a few pieces I liked and many I didn't which is pretty consistent for galleries. Took less than an hour to walk through. I asked the guy at the front desk if he knew what was going on in the main square and he found out that it was the lighting of the Christmas tree which I'm sure would be a great party!
So I wandered back to the square and hung around for a while but nobody seemed to know when it was supposed to start. It certainly didn't start at the time the art gallery guy told me so I sort of wandered around town for a while ducking back to the square every 15 or 20 minutes to see if anything was happening.
Eventually they started a Christmas carol type event. A few kids and some young folks got up and sung carols or other songs in Norwegian ... who would know what they were? Half of them sounded like yodelling to me. Most of them weren't very good but it IS a small town so I'm not sure what I expected.
After the carols were done everything just sort of stopped for a while so I went to grab a coffee ($8 AUD!). I was starting to get bored so I went back to the hotel for a little while.
I came back out about an hour later and a crowd had gathered in the square and some local celebrities (I guess) were up on stage babbling away in Norwegian. They did a bit of singing and small talk, lit the tree then Santa came up. All in all I spent a lot of time hanging around for a nice enough but not very exciting event. Would have been nice if they'd had they schedule online somewhere like the tourist website or Facebook account or something.
I thought about heading down to the Polaris centre to check it out but I really didn't feel like it. It's apparently a combination aquarium and Arctic history centre and I just wasn't feeling it.
Had dinner at a pretty popular place with a good beer selection and a soup buffet! The buffet was only 2 soups (both seafood, one tomato based and one cream based) but they were both pretty good so I had a couple of beers and a couple of bowls of soup and watched the world go by.
Did a big repack with all my gear in the hotel then crashed pretty early for my flight in the morning.
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