Our last day in Tromso.
I needed to get to the library to get a stable internet connection in order to pay our landlord. So we headed off to the city centre.
You get to see a lot of the real life in any city when you go to the library. Tromso's library offers free internet connection, so I was very happy to just quietly sit there, do what I needed to do, and watch Tromso life pass by at the same time. It seems like the library is where many people also come for their daily newspaper read, and as I sat there, a friendly old man chatted away merrily, convinced that I understood everything he said. He seemed satisfied with my smile as reply to everything he was telling me.
We decided to drive to the Polar Zoo, about 170km from Tromso. We realised that it might take longer than expected, and that we might get there too late, but we figured that the drive would be fun anyway. And we hoped to see some snow perhaps.
No matter where you drive in Troms county, it just remains beautiful. When you take a lot of mountains, and scatter them along the coast, you end up with these beautiful fjords. Most of the roads run along the water edge, but occasionally you have to cut across land, which invariably means driving across some mountain, which means altitude, which means...... Snow!
Our trip to the zoo took about two and a half hours. We got there before closing time, but because it was already dark, the lady at the zoo did not feel that it was worth going in. Besides, it was now snowing rather heavily, and it was, apparently, wet snow.
It took another three hours to get back to Tromso. It involved driving through some heavy snow and rain. For four novice tourists from sunny South Africa, this was a huge adventure. I would have to confess, though, that, at times, it was somewhat hairraising. A quick stop at the Arctic Cathedral for some photo's of the beautiful stained glass windows calmed us down a little.
Back in Tromso we decided that we needed some good food, so stopped in the city centre for some pizzas. Everybody always says that Scandinavia is expensive. It really is. We may not have picked the cheapest restaurant, but we did blink a bit at the prices on the menu. A normal Marguerita pizza was NOK135. You can multiply that with about 1.4 to get to our rands. The food was excellent, though. And after our roadtrip, we felt that we deserved it!
It was with somewhat heavy hearts that we headed back home. It meant that we had to go pack. For some strange reason, Tertius decided to take a slight detour. And there they were. The Northern Lights again. We were not even away from the city lights, it had been raining and snowing, so there was a lot of clouds around, and still, in the one bit of clear sky, that beautiful dance of green light in the sky. As if it Knew just how much we so loved the beauty of it all. As if it just wanted to show off one more time, before we leave the beautiful Arctic region.
We stopped a few times on our way home, jumping out of the car, taking more photos of the Aurora, or just standing quietly, watching the performance, wishing that we could share it with everyone dear to us. It was snowing, and we were looking at the Aurora Borealis. It cannot possibly get any better than this!
After day one in Tromso, after seeing the Aurora, knowing that it would be overcast for the balance of our time here, I had moments where I wondered whether it was not maybe a mistake to stay here for four days. I now know that it wasn't. We hoped to do so much here. Dogsledding, snow mobiles, ice fishing. We did none of that, mostly because there has not been enough snow. But we saw so much. We experienced so much. And we loved every minute of it!
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