Winter Norway — Tromsø and around
Chasing holes in the cloud above the Arctic Circle.
People fly to Tromsø for one thing — the northern lights. The town sits almost four hundred kilometres above the Arctic Circle, right under the belt where the aurora appears most often, and from late September to March the darkness lasts long enough to wait out a whole night.
Better odds are not the same as a promise. Tromsø is clouded over far more often than you would expect — a warm current off the ocean carries damp air in, and the cloud comes with it. Up here the aurora is not something you watch for. It is something you hunt.
That means reading the cloud forecast as closely as the geomagnetic one, getting in the car after dark and driving towards a hole in the sky. Sometimes a few kilometres out of town is enough. Sometimes it is two hours — as far as the Finnish border, where the weather behaves nothing like it does on the coast.
And when it comes out, you forget every kilometre of the drive.
