Norway Day 2 - Tromsø
One of the minor frustrations I’ve had on my travels so far is that my actual traveling days, either by plane or train, have not yielded good sightseeing or photographs. I’ve either been traveling too late in the afternoon (anything after 4pm is pitch black), or flying over a thick sheet of clouds. As I flew ~715 miles north from Oslo to Tromsø, I finally broke the bad luck streak, and took some pretty epic photos. I’m going to use this opportunity to just dump a bunch of them below. It was one of the coolest flights I’ve ever taken - flying over the arctic land fractured by fjords was breathtaking, and the sunlight being in perpetual ‘dawn’ created some stunning colors.
Tromsø is such a unique city, by the time I landed at the airport at about 2:15PM, the sun had fully set behind the peaks that surround the city. This time of year in Tromsø, which is north of the arctic circle, the sun actually never rises (which begs the question, does it actually ever set then?), instead due to the sun coming close to the horizon and light refraction through the atmosphere we get about 3 hours of what is officially considered “civil twilight”. As I’m sure you can imagine, this really messes with your internal clocks, as when you wake up in bed, you’re not sure if you woke up in the middle of the night and its 3:30AM or if you overslept and its 10AM. Correspondingly, most shops and restaurants have more limited hours, not much moves in the city before 9AM, and other than restaurants, not much is open beyond 6PM.
The city of Tromsø is located on an island in the middle of a fjord, and the surrounding coast line is also heavily populated, but is mostly homes and apartments, and the majority of the economic activity happens on Tromsø. The island has a mountain range running through the middle of the island, with the city center on the opposite side of the island from the Airport (and there is a mall on this side as well). The way you get from one side to another is a massive tunnel that has roundabouts and several branching directions in which you can go to different corners of the island. I’m no stranger to tunnels through mountains living in Colorado, however the complexity of this tunnel was pretty fascinating.
Seeing as it was my first night in Tromsø, I spent some time exploring the city, which turns in to residential areas pretty quickly once you get a couple blocks outside of the city center. The small mall in the town had a really excellent take-away sushi spot, so I grabbed some sushi and headed back to the hotel to decompress and journal a bit - walking on the edge of the fjord the whole way back to the hotel, which overlooks the very picturesque harbor.
