Go north, for a different kind of break (Tromso)

Member Name: Immlang

Product:	Tromso
Date:	13/11/08 (77 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing scenery, so civilised and best of all - the northern lights

Disadvantages: Expensive

Tromso is a small town in Norway, way up north on the cold side of the Arctic Circle. My wife and I spent a few days there recently just for the crack, to sample life in the land of the midnight sun.

Getting there

Amazingly, there are budget flights from Stansted to Tromso using the Norwegian shuttle airline (www.norwegian.no) and if you buy far enough in advance tickets can be about £50 each way including taxes. There is a service bus from the airport to the town centre. Typical of Norwegian prices, it cost £5 per person for a 10 minute bus ride.

Accommodation

Norway has a high standard of living, with prices to match. The corollary of this is that hotels tend to be clean, well run, serving tasty food. The one we stayed in, The Clarion Collection With Hotel, was no exception. It did not have anything special in terms of facilities, but it did have free cook-them-yourself waffles on offer every afternoon.
Expect to pay about £25-30 per person for a meal in a restaurant without wine. Equally, expect it to be composed of quality ingredients and exquisitely prepared. There is a lot of meat and fish in Norwegian restaurant food, but also plenty of fresh veg and salads.

Features of the Town

The town has a working port with a mix of fishing boats, ferries, pleasure craft and even a tall ship while we were there. There are some pleasant walks to be had in the port area. In addition, it is a university town so the students add liveliness. The main street (there are not many streets!) is pedestrianised and lined with small shops and plenty of bars and restaurants. The atmosphere is lovely. We did see one drunk, but he was treated in a kindly way by everyone else. We felt safe walking around.

Attractions

The town art gallery contained some, for us at least, brilliant abstract pieces and many representative paintings. Best of all it, like the photographic gallery, was free entry. There is a polar research centre in town with a museum, Polaria, attached. We liked this, for its way of presenting a lot of information about the polar area in an accessible but not patronising way. Norway, for practical purposes, appears to be an English speaking country and the labels in the museum were all bilingual Norwegian and English. One of the highlights was the aquarium, which contained a whole range of northern water fish. A separate aquarium housed 4 bearded seals, which are a lot bigger than the grey seals common in English waters. We had originally been attracted to Tromso by a report on its botanical garden but our timing was so awful that we visited when the plants that make the garden so attractive had died back for the Autumn - so we ended up not visiting the garden after all. We visited the so-called Arctic cathedral, which looks elegant and icy from the outside but very plain and not very interesting from the inside. We were lucky to catch a group of singers rehearsing; we could not understand the words and did not recognise the music but it was enough for us to sit, wait and enjoy for half an hour.

Northern Lights

The Northern Lights were the high spot of our visit. They are a well documented phenomenon in the night sky and I freely admit I do not understand the science behind them, but I can describe what they look like. They are like a shimmering and ever-shifting display of green-tinged iridescent curtains that come and go, seeming to go left to right, up and down towards you and away from you, filling the sky. They produce a genuine sense of awe. They do not always appear, and for us we caught a tiny, teasing glimpse on our penultimate night. This led us to go on a round trip by bus away from Tromso on our last night, just so we could catch the coastal steamer back, taking us away from land and its associated light pollution. We were lucky and treated to the display described above, filling us with the feelings of wonder I've tried to put into words, though I do not have the words to go anywhere near the experience. It was fantastic.

Activities

The traditional ones are winter ones, like dog sledging, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling. We went at the end of October and there was no snow, so that's enough said on that front. There are also summer activities, like walking in the beautiful hills and mountains that surround the town or kayaking in the lakes or fjords.

Summary

For a short break in the Autumn Tromso really fitted the bill.

Summary: Well worth a visit, but very quiet