Hammerfest; Sunday, 13 January, 2008

My alarm went off at 4:30, as I staggered out of my bed and into the shower I was thankful that I hadn’t had to get up at 3 to get a taxi! After a quick cup of tea and a biscuit (virtually the entire contents of the hospitality tray!) I checked out of the hotel and waited outside for the first hotel hopper of the morning. Normally I would have walked to the bus stop, but this being a Sunday the first bus was later and less frequent than the hotel hopper and I wanted to make sure I made it to the airport in time.

My booking had originally been quite straight forward, then Opodo had started with the minor changes to times, which then became major changes to times, and then changes to flight numbers and a request to send back the tickets to have them re-issued. I had done all this, but 10 days prior to leaving I still hadn’t had the replacement tickets and had had to contact Opodo to find out what was going on. They said that they had converted the tickets to eTickets rather than paper ones, but I wasn’t completely convinced that they hadn’t messed up, so I wanted to be at the Airport early to be able to sort out any issue. In the end Opodo had been true to their word. There was no queue at the check in desk, and 30 seconds after arriving my luggage was disappearing into the labyrinthine depths of Heathrow terminal 3 and I was in possession of three boarding cards.

After a quick breakfast in the departures lounge I wandered down to the gate, and shortly afterwards onto the plane, which promptly pushed back early and in a complete change of script to the normal events at Heathrow was airborne less than 10 minutes later, and most of that time was taken taxing to the runway. After arriving in Oslo, clearing customs, re-depositing my bag and re-clearing security, I found myself on board plane number two of the day. After another eventless flight I landed in the twilight of Tromsø at 13:30, transferred through the airport and at 2 o’clock started my third take-off roll of the day and lifted off into the darkness of a Polar winter.

By the time I arrived in Hammerfest it was just after half two, and it was dark. Seeing that it had been dark since November, and would remain dark for another month that was hardly surprising. What was surprising was how small the airport was and how lacking in services it was. Hammerfest is the most Northerly city in the world, and that is it’s main tourist credential, so you would have thought that taxi’s might have been waiting to meet the plane. Having said that, how may tourists visit the place in the middle of the polar winter, probably not many? Consequently I had to walk the 40 minutes or so into town and onto the hotel.

Having checked in I went out for a wander around town taking in some of the sights, or those that can be seen in perpetual darkness. I had wanted to go up to the restaurant and viewing platform on the cliff above the town, from where the views are supposedly spectacular. One way to reach this is by a 5KM walk along roads, the other is to climb the zigzag path up the side of the cliff. About three-quarters of the way up it became obvious that the slippery snow on the lower part of the climb was now turning into sheets of ice, so I took in the views from most of the way up, which were still pretty impressive, before descending back down to town and wandering back to the hotel to have some dinner (having at this point realised that all I had eaten all day was a sausage bap at Heathrow and a grilled sausage at Oslo) and then to participate in what makes a Hammerfest winter so special, in the words of a more literary traveller than myself – “I began to feel as if a doctor had told me to go away for a complete rest… Never have I slept so long and so well” (Bill Bryson, Neither here nor there)