Tromsø; Friday, 20 July, 2007

I came back down and wandered through the streets of the city until nearly 1am taking in the mind-bending sight of constant daylight. I’d only been in it for a few hours and already I could feel it doing strange things to my mind.

Tired from a day of walking I headed back to the hotel for some sleep, something that proved to be nearly impossible. The curtains in the hotel were not that thick, and trying to sleep in that much light was next to impossible, but just the sheer process of lying down for a couple of hours, even if I didn’t sleep got rid of the tiredness.

I got up at about 8, had a shower and wandered down for breakfast then headed out to take in some of Tromsø’s museums. The first stop was the Polarium, a museum to the arctic and how man has adapted (or not) to live in its inhospitable climate. After looking around the museum I wandered back across town to the Polar museum. This is a slightly different museum. In my mind I re-titled it “The Norwegian museum of why most of the rest of the world has an issue with us” dedicated as it was to seal and whale hunting, and justifications for this!

After stopping for a brief, very late lunch, I wandered over to the bus station in time to catch the 4pm bus. The local bus company in co-operation with the Hurtigrunten run a round trip which takes you out North-East from Tromsø across the mainland, crossing several Fjords on the way to the town of Skjervøy, just above the 70° North and then back on the Hrtigrunten to Tromsø, arriving back around midnight.

The first hour of the journey the bus ran along the coastline of the main land, parallel and then past the end of the island that Tromsø is on, before turning inland and heading across to a fjord at Svensby. Here the coach pulls onto a ferry and we all got off for the 25 minute crossing. Then it’s all back on the coach for the next leg of the journey through across to another ferry at Lyngseidet and a longer crossing of another fjord. Along the whole route the scenery is breathtaking and my camera should really have been white hot from use by the time the bus dived down into a tunnel, under another fjord, round a bit of an island, across a fjord on a narrow bridge and finaly around a hill and down into the port at Skjervøy, taking the crown as the most Northerly place I had ever been.

The bus pulled up right in front of the gangway onto the ship and we all marched up the ramp and onto the ferry, a couple of minutes late it slipped its morrings and started on it’s 4 ½ hour journey back south (the journey up had taken a little over 3 ½ hours). The ferry is the cheap way to cruise the fjords. Yes you can pay to go on an all inclusive cruise from it’s start in Bergen up to Hammerfest and Kirkeness on the border with Russia and back from around £1500, but you can also use it to go from port to port as a ferry service as a non-cabin passenger, and you still get all the glorious sights, but at a fraction of the cost.

I spent quite a bit of time out on the deck watching the fjords slip past, before realising that it was not that much above freezing, with a strong wind and it might be wise to move inside for a while before hypothermia set in! I went back out on the deck as the ship came around an island an into sight of Tromsø, although it was still a good 30 minutes before we finally moored up and disembarked, just a few moments before midnight.