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Published: January 9th 2015
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Linde has arrived in Tromsø! She wanted snow when she would arrive in Tromsø, and snow she has found. In the first few days since she arrived, it has been snowing the whole time. Whole villages were shut off from the outside world because the roads couldn’t be kept clear of snow. From now on we have a car that we can borrow for our remaining time here. It is an old car, both the front doors can’t be opened, the rear suspension is pretty much gone and some of the lights don’t work. But the important parts are still ok, and the car starts every time without any problems. I had to replace all four wheels to winter tyres (with spykes), but after that it was good to go. In the Netherlands people often complain about having to scrape the ice of the windows of the car in the morning, here that is not so much a problem. First you have to find the car. at the end of the road, near our cottage, there are 6 or 7 big piles of snow, one of which contains our car. You have to choose which one. Than you have to dig
Pink northern lights
These are the actual colors... for your car, until it is clear enough to open one of the doors, which are usually frozen shut. After you have found the car, opened it, and started it, the most difficult part starts; driving away. You have to remove as much snow in front of the car as you can, and make the rest as compact as possible with your feet. Try to drive the car forward in second gear. If that doesn’t work, rock the car forward and backward for some time until you manage to get some grip with the front tyres, at which point you must never stop (unless you want to start all over again). At some point all of this didn’t work and I had to get a bunch of branches and twigs to put under the front tyres. They would give the car just enough grip (after a while) to move a little bit. After some time the car had moved about a metre, but the twigs had formed big balls of ice which became trapped in front of the rear tyres, so the car was stuck again. One thing people try here is to move the car backward and forward onto
the parking space just before they finally park the car. This should create some dense under layer on which it is easier to take off the next day.
On the first evening when Linde was here, we heard the whales quite close to the cabin. I might have mentioned before what a spectacular experience that is, by now I really can’t say what is more exciting, seeing whales during the day, or listening to them in the night. Somehow I am leaning toward the second option. We have also seen both the humpback whales and the killer whales from the cabin, so Linde has been quite lucky in that. She has not been so lucky with the northern lights. In the evenings there are mostly clouds, so it is quite impossible to see any northern lights. It has been like that now for more than a week, so Linde has not been able to see here desired northern lights, until tonight. Today is the 2
nd of January, and there has been an opening in the clouds, so that we could finaly see the northern lights! The whales came in our direction as well, I guess they wanted to see
the northern lights as well.
The snow also makes everything very beautiful, but the hike toward the cabin is all but impossible now. Snow reached our hips sometimes, and that means that crawling through the snow was the only way forward. A 15 minute hike has become a 30 or 40 minutes hike. For two days it has been next to impossible to get to and from the cabin, so we had to climb down to the beach to walk on the rocks there. That would still leave an almost impossible crawl up the hill from the beach to the cabin… I had snow shoes, but as I never needed them before, I left them in the car of my colleague, who is now in Portugal for the holidays… By now most of the snow has melted again, and everything is more icy than you could imagine. I know some people here whose drive way to the house is going up a hill. They have not been able to make it, because even with spiked tires, the car does not have enough grip. There are roads here where you could literally use ice-skates.
New years eve was quite
nice, we celebrated it with some friends from the whale watching company I have worked for. The fireworks started 10 minutes before midnight and more importantly, they were finished 10 minutes after midnight. Perfect, more than enough for our taste.
I wrote this part of the blog more than a week ago, but I have been lagging behind with selecting which photo’s to add to it. A lot has happened since, so I will have to write again in a few days to catch up with the events here.
To be continued…
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mama
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nieuwjaar
Tjonge, wat een spectaculaire ervaringen beleven jullie daar zeg. Ik word er wel een beetje jaloers van hoor, maar geniet maar zoveel jullie kunnen hoor.liefs en bedankt voor de leuke verhalen