Arrival at Tromsø

We walked out of the pristine Tromsø (pronounced Trom-sah) bus terminal through beautiful, light snow to the Hotel Amalie, four blocks away. (We always try to find hotels near bus and train stations. Keeps life simpler, and we can use all the simple we can get.)

The hotel was a lovely boutique affair and a welcome sight. Comfortable room, hot chocolate, cakes and cookies available 24/7 in the lobby and a first class breakfast included each morning. We had hardly eaten all day so found the excellent Cipresa restaurant just four blocks away and discussed the ongoing question of how to get to Svalbard. It had now become an obsession, at least for me. I wanted to get from the most southern point on earth (Antarctica) to the world’s northernmost human habitation in the worst way. Since rolling through the rough seas of the Drake Passage in February, we had bussed, ferried, sailed and trained close to 20,000 miles to find Tromsø. And back before we departed two years earlier I had marked it as a goal in one of my earliest Dispatches. (Visit: Dispatch II- A World Sized Curveball) But finding a ship that would get us to this frigid island, in October, was proving to be, how can I put it? Maddeningly elusive!

Tromsø Harbor - Trying to Arrange Passage to Svalbard

Oct 19, 2023 - Constantly Changing Weather. Sunny, then cloudy, windy, wet, cold, sunny again.

The next morning, the Svalbard search became the top priority. Quickly devolved into a Marx Brothers comedy. I looked up the address for what I thought was the Tromsø Harbormaster’s Office. Location in hand we tramped two miles to a place that didn’t exist. No harbormaster offices anywhere, despite what the GPS said. Everything was closed.

Back to Central Tomsø. There we tried another address I dug up online; this one at the Tromsø Bus Terminal. There was, in fact, a harbor office there. We tramped through gusts and sporadic sleet back the same two miles. At the terminal, three security officers in uniform were standing around an office that read Harbor Administration. I asked if there was someone we could talk to.

“They’re all at a conference in Oslo,” said one.

“Everyone?” I asked, astounded.

They all nodded in unison.

I explained our plight.

“Oh,” said the same officer, “you want to go upstairs and talk with Cameron in the tourist office.”

We dutifully walked upstairs and found Cameron. He was in his mid-20s, thin, short cropped, brown hair and very British. When I explained what we attempting I half expected him to answer, “I say! Ripping, old fellow!”

But he didn’t. He simply said our best shot was to talk with Hurtigruten which was no help at all. We already knew Hurtigruten cruises went to Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s largest city (a whopping 2000 souls) and several other cities on a two week cruise itinerary, but I knew the last of those had been completed, and besides that ship would eventually take us far south back back to Bergen, where we did not want to go (already been there).

It was becoming increasingly clear that ships to Svalbard were as rare as an Alabama democrat, and finding one that would happen to be departing within the next couple of days was a near mathematical possibility.

I was running out of options. I had already tried getting on a refitted DC-10 prop that scientists at the Alfréd Wegener Institut in Germany sometimes flew to Svalbard. If we could manage that, at least we wouldn’t be flying by jet.

“Sorry,” wrote Esther Horvath at the Institut, “Unfortunately we cannot offer you a ride on our aircraft, as only scientists with a scientific mission can join our aircraft, in addition to a sea survival training for safety. We cannot take on passengers.”

The final nail in the coffin came when I tracked down the one cargo shipping company in Tromsø that was traveling between the city and the arctic island in the next couple of days. Hallelujah!

I emailed them, and got this response from Knut Knudsen: “Bring (the name of the cargo company) have a container vessel going in route between the mainland and Svalbard. As this is a container vessel, it is not suitable for passenger transport. We get this question many times every year, and we have a strict policy not to accept passengers for recreational trips. We can recommend you check with commercial offers suitable for passenger transport. We can suggest …” Guess who? “Hurtigruten.”

This last missive came the morning of October 20. I was done. There was no ship that would take us to Svalbard. I let it go and decided we may as well enjoy the town for a few days and then see what our next move was.

Exploring Tromsø and the Troll Museum

Tromsø is calm, restful town, which was just what we were looking for, but there was also plenty to explore. Excellent food, charming shops and several fascinating museums, including Norges arktiske universitets museum⁩ (covering the history of the Sami (Lapland) people and Norwegian-Finnish History), the Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art and Tromsø Public Library and Archives, whose interior stairs looked remarkably like one of those mind bending Escher drawings. [Check out more on restaurants, our hotel and other things to do on our Tromsø recommendations page. Coming Soon. For now, you can find all of our Norway recommendations here.]

We saw that the great Nordic explorer Roald Amundsen was closely connected with Tromsø. In fact there is a statue of him in the main square because he sailed more than once from that harbor on famous expeditions that included being the first to reach the South Pole (on foot and by sled), the North Pole (by dirigible) and the first to navigate the Northwest Passage (by ship from Tromsø.)

But of all the city’s features, the one that tickled us most was the delightful Tromsø Troll Museum. Trolls play a central role in Scandinavian mythology. The Museum was small, but dense and deliciously humorous. In one section, if you look into a “mirror,” it transformed your face into a troll. There are photos of mountains from around Norway that have become famous because they look remarkably like trolls, one way or another. Each has a story associated with it.

There are libraries of books on Nordic explorers, history and Scandinavian mythology (and I'll write about that in my book about our journey), but for now I’ll simply leave you with these pictures (and one famous troll story) until the next post.