The Midnight Sun in Arctic Norway

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Maria Chiara agreed to marry me last time we visited Norway, so the country is very close to both of our hearts. Now three years on we came back as husband and wife. Appropriately it was to attend a wedding... we're still at that age where most travel plans are based around a wedding - ours or someones else's!

The groom was an old friend of Maria Chiara's from her year attending university in Trondheim many years ago: "Magnus" by name, and by nature. She used to massage this particular viking by walking across his back. That was a very formative year for my wife: most people at university are relatively short of money, but if you choose to study in one of the world's most expensive countries it makes for a lot of nights in. And given Trondheim is covered in snow from October till April, Magnus, Maria Chiara and the rest of that particular flat whiled away the long darkness of winter mastering the rules of numerous board games and fully embracing the charms of supermarket-bought lager.

Fast forward a decade and a half later to 2019, Magnus (the only actual Norwegian of MC's university gang) and his wife-to-be Nanna, had mercifully chosen to get married in the middle of summer. Trondheim is almost half way up Norway, not quite far north enough for the full experience of the midnight sun ... so we decided to start this Norwegian saga much further up the map: in Tromso, almost 400km north of the Arctic circle.

Tromso is on an island surrounded by fjords and other islands, with snow capped mountains even in the middle of summer. The day we flew in we relaxed into our Air B & B which was a century-old large wooden villa which which seemed to be literally the closest house to the centre of the town... the equivalent of staying in Times Square or Piccadilly just A LOT quieter.

We were in the actual arctic. "Was it cold?" Yes, dear reader, it was. But I found having to dress in full winter gear in the middle of summer an idea too weird to resist. We were at the same latitude as Northern Alaska, Northern Siberia, somewhere in the middle of Greenland. Thanks to the gulf stream it was far less brutally cold then those places, and although it was usually pretty chilly, the landscape was beautifully fertile with greenery and flowers bursting from every crevice. Tromso has a slightly wild and windswept look to it, but the houses and restaurants all manged that perfect blend of coziness ("hygge") and Nordic minimalist cool.

The main drawback to Norway from my previous visit had been that it's eye-wateringly expensive. This time we decided not to be hideously over-charged for bad food which happened on the previous visit. Instead we were hideously over-charged for good food. Our Air B&B host said that he would never eat fish in Southern Norway, so given we were next to one of the richest seas for aquatic life in the world, we ate incredible white fish and salmon to the extent that MC actually OD'ed slightly. We were very happy to skip the whale though. Pints of beer for £10 of $20(NZ) were unavoidable. I ended up paying exactly what I normally would on drinks whilst on a holiday, and simply drank half as much - which can't be a bad thing.

The Arctic (and Antarctic) regions are defined by the area in which the sun doesn't set on the longest day. By the time you get up to Tromso, this long day lasts almost exactly two months. I was fascinated by the idea of experiencing a world without nighttime. We found it strange but only slightly so... by the time 11pm rolls around the sun is quite low, so it's an extremely long evening and the mind can kid itself that it's just about to get dark. The art is to go to bed in a room that can be made pitch black, and so with the darkness, the silence, and the "hygge" vibes it was actually very easy to get to sleep.

We experienced our first genuine Midnight Sun (as opposed to "overcast at midnight" or simply "already asleep by midnight") in the most spectacular setting imaginable. Across Tromso's iconic bridge on the mainland we took a cable car to near the top of a mountain that looms over the city and surrounding fjords. Beyond the treeline MC and I tried to walk the extra little bit to the actual summit, which the closer we got to it the further away it seemed. MC gave up and left me scrambling up rocks and bits of snow until it occurred to me that despite what my countryman Sir Edmund Hillary thought, climbing mountains is fairly pointless, and so I gave up and was reunited with my beloved. We scrambled back to the edge of a cliff which serves as a perfect spot to admire Tromso on its island, the huge fjords stretching north and south with the sun hanging low above craggy mountain peaks at midnight.

We hired a car for a day (at a cost about equivalent to a month's rental in Spain, I'm not joking) and drove in the opposite direction from the mainland, towards Sommaroy, a tiny set of islands that jut outwards at the coast into the Arctic Ocean. What had been described to us by our Air B&B host as a "small hill" that he would often climb with his seven year old son turned out to be challenging to say the least. Climbing this hill involved clambering on hands and knees, dodging slippery bits, and was just generally a Heath & Safety headache. MC gave up on this one too but I finally harnessed my inward mountaineer and got to the top. Not before being overtaken by Nordic pensioners bounding upwards like gazelles.

After four days (and no nights!) in Tromso we hopped on a huge ship, the Kong Harald, to head southwards towards Trondheim and Magnus and Nanna's wedding. Kong Harald is one of a large fleet of ships in the Hurtigruten which for many decades have been the lifeline of the Norwegian Coast form Bergen in the South to Kirkenes which is way beyond Northcape right next to the border with Russia. A Hurtigruten ship will pull into a harbour at the same time of day every day of the year, rain or shine, in winter dodging ice floes in the perpetual night. We were only on the boat for two days, but many of those on the ship were going all the way up and all the way down again, a 13 day round trip. Norway's beautiful coastline is so meandering that if you stretched Norway's coastline flat it's longer than Australia's.

This was both of our first taste of what life would be on a cruise ship, and it's fair to say we were a lot younger than the average guest on the boat. Our room was a cross between a womb (gentle rocking motion/white noise) and a prison cell (small, single beds, no windows). We still had a great time though, sailing into some epic fjords and usually surrounded on both sides with forested islands and craggy mountains. We were looked after well with huge buffet meals and friendly staff, and every day had the chance to visit dry land as we disembarked in villages down the coast.

600km later we finally reached terra firma at Trondheim, MC's first visit there in more than a decade. This far south in Norway it can actually get rather warm in Summer. Although not when we were there! In any case, it's a lovely town with cafes, pubs, a pretty old bridge and beautiful old houses. We took a trip down memory lane visiting MC's campus and halls of residence, her home for almost a year. Someone in the intervening years has removed the wooden phallus that MC's flatmates had installed in the window. There's no accounting for taste!

Our last night at Magnus and Nanna's wedding party was a great experience, in the countryside near Trondheim in a cute hall. Most people could speak English and we had many great conversations. The speeches on the other hand we couldn't understand - that is hardly surprising considering we don't speak Norwegian. What was surprising was that many Norwegians were struggling to understand too. Apparently this country of 5.5 million people is filled with extreme accents and odd dialects, and these speeches were an uncannily varied mix of some of the more obscure ones. But hey, even if some subtleties of language were missed by many, the love and happiness was shared by all.

By the time we got home at 1am were finally experiencing nighttime, also not till not particularly dark. The next day another morning enjoying the charms of Trondheim it was back to the UK, after seven long and enjoyable days... and one short night!

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Photos

Tromso from above
At about 11:30pm!

Bronnoysund
At the halfway point in Norway

Our Air B&B
Not the whole thing

Pretty flowers
In Tromso's botanical gardens