Running to the Sea

Day 21-23: Tromsø, Norway

It was 3pm and already dark again by the time we’d all settled in to a small hotel just outside the centre of town. Umz, Niklas, Jenny and Issy were only in for another night, while us crazy photographers would stay on and chase the lights for 2 more.

Some more disappointing weather conditions set in, as it rained steadily through the rest of the night. They say you should make hay while the sun shines. We say you should get pissed while it pisses down. And boy did we!

 The night started with Jon joining us for a classic game of fuck the dealer, as we went from zero to blotto in good speed.

That pose..

We headed into town and met at a student bar with Jacob, a redditor celebrating his birthday who had contacted us earlier from our popular post. 

It wasn’t long until some other redditors smelled our presence, and we felt like minor celebrities being referred to as the “Australian hot tub guys”. This chance meeting turned out to be a glorious coincidence as one of the girls (yes, a girl on the internet) offered us a discount rate at the classy Radisson hotel where she works on reception.

We drank and snussed until the wee hours when we were finally dropped home by Jacob’s girlfriend, eating some birthday cake on the way.

Coppo had the unenviable job of taking the rest of the crowd down to the airport at 5am while Tal looked after proceedings back at the hotel (aka sleeping). We made it for checkout and headed across the bridge to shoot some photos of the fjord and head up to the gondola lookout.

Unfortunately the gondola is closed in winter, but we enjoyed a flurry of snow on the way back to our new room at the Radisson.

The weather had been patchy all day, with non-stop snow storms rolling in, each followed by an hour or two of clear skies.  

Plans to meet with Jacob again had fallen through, so we took advantage of a break in the clouds around 6pm and headed back to the glorious landscapes on the way to Tromvik.

We spent 3 hours waiting and scoping out spots, catching some decent shots but missing out on the auroras again.

We headed back to town slightly disappointed, but after a beer we had another look at the graphs online and the activity started to heat up again. Webcam forecasts and a quick look out the window confirmed it, so we headed into town to catch some lights over the city.

lol, boring

It was epic to see them again, but amongst the light pollution of the city the effect was muted. It was a brave decision to risk more patchy weather and another frustrating wait, but we had no choice. It’s what we came to see, and we couldn’t take any chances.

What a decision! On the drive out, the lights were up, but we somehow managed to time the strongest show of the night to perfection, as the auroras came out even brighter, faster, bigger and more colourful than we’d seen on our first night.

The lights filled the entire sky for around 15 minutes, bright enough to shoot a live video.

We headed back to some other spots we’d scoped out earlier, including a lookout over the tiny coastal village of Grøtfjord and some cottages in a mountainous valley.

The clouds came in as the clock struck close to 3am, and we made a dreary yet triumphant return to the hotel in the wee hours.

The next day brought some more stable weather as the wind died down – a sheet of fluffy clouds reaching across the entire sky. Given the position of the sun at such northern latitudes, we were treated to 3 hours of glorious red and gold, a never ending sunset that we shot from a few spots on the calm water.

The sun finally disappeared and we made it back to the airport to return the trusty Golf. We can only assume it was proud of its efforts in getting 5 Australians and a Dane across hundreds of kilometres of icy roads without a hitch!

Some thicker cloud cover came in, with weather reports suggesting it was here to stay, so we went in to watch a glorious Tottenham v Man United match (Coppo actually watched the whole thing) before one final night out in town with Anna, Jacob and some friends.

With what we thought was our last night in Norway, we had to make it a big one. We knitted our alcohol blankets with copious amounts of beers, a bit of snus and shots of the explosive Norwegian spirit Akvavit.

It’s hard to say what caused us to stand in the middle of the road in the middle of the pouring snow.

It’s even harder to say what caused us to then take off our tops and remain in the same spot, garnering a small crowd of stunned locals with their cameras and iphones. 

At the risk of being cliché, it was just one of those moments we had to cherish and never forget. We’d found ourselves in the middle of the empty main street of a small Norwegian town, nearly 15 thousand kilometres from home, in the arctic circle for the last time in who knows how long, under a blanket of fresh falling snow.

The rest of the night went by in a blur and without a single wink of sleep we were furiously packing our bags, just making the bus for our flights to Prague via Oslo.

After such a fitting farewell, it was hard to leave Norway, but we can’t think of a better way to end our time there. Amongst pink twilights, red sunsets, orange beers, blue seas and the vivid green auroras, we’d experienced a truly unique and beautiful part of the world, and were able to move on more fulfilled with our stay than we’d ever dared to hope for.