Although we’d already had several sightings of snow on distant mountains on this cruise, it wasn’t until we opened our curtains in our cabin aboard Ambience in the port of Tromsø that we really saw the stuff close up. We could tell immediately that there was a lot of it, too, and for us, living not just in the south of England during a climate collapse, but also in an island city surrounded by water, another island to the south, and hills to the north, snow is such a rarity that this brought us stupid amounts of joy.
“We are definitely going to throw snowballs when we’re ashore,” I told my wife, and we would indeed do that later in the day.
We’d decided beforehand not to book any excursions for Tromsø. We knew that the ship wouldn’t dock right by the city centre but that there would be a shuttle bus provided, and looking at a map we’d identified a few things of interest that we figured we could visit on our own.
One thing that had been a potential place to hit was actually directly opposite where Ambience was docked. This was the Arctic-Alpine Botanic Gardens. Our thought ahead of the cruise was that it would make for a decent place to explore at the end of the day after we’d returned from the city but seeing it completely covered in snow kicked that idea into touch. The building on the hill beyond the gardens below is a science centre. These are still potential future visit options but the weather will determine that.
Breakfast consumed and suitably layered up, we disembarked the ship and hopped aboard a bus for the drive into the city.
The roads were in good condition, as you’d expect, but the walking surfaces for pedestrians were far more hit-and-miss with some areas cleared while others had well-trodden paths through them that had then compacted into ice. We actually found it easier in places to tread new paths through snow that was at times knee-high. Very much like the rain in our previous port of Trondheim we discovered that Norwegian snow wasn’t really that wet so there wasn’t much soaking into our trousers going on.
One of the places we’d had it in mind to look at before coming to Tromsø was the Arctic Cathedral as its architecture looked interesting. Getting to it would have required crossing the bridge that connected the island of Tromsøya on which we and the city were to the mainland and we will likely do this on a future visit to this part of the world but on this day we ultimately decided to skip it.
We started off by hugging the waterfront area of the city as much as possible as we trudged our way carefully southwards towards the aquarium that was top of our list of places to visit in Tromsø. This took us past numerous sculptures and sights, including a statue of Roald Amundsen and occasional bits of street art.
We passed another spot that was on our list of places to visit – and indeed, we’d be visiting it later in the day – in the form of a microbrewery complete with bust of the brewery’s founder and former local politician, Ludwig Mack.
The Blai Statue looked absolutely adorable, and we’d get closer to it on our walk back.
We eventually reached Polaria, the world’s northernmost aquarium. We are fond of an aquarium so we had to visit anyway but it’s worth just mentioning the fabulous architecture of the building first, although the snow everywhere didn’t make it easy to find a good place to take pictures of it. The design is supposed to represent ice floes coming ashore and rising up one on top of the other, although it’s easy to see dominoes toppling over.
As you might expect from an aquarium in this part of the world and with this sort of name, Polaria specialises in arctic sea life so don’t expect tanks of tropical fish. If you like seals, though, then you won’t be disappointed. However, while Polaria is the northernmost aquarium in the world, and worth visiting just for that alone, it’s not particularly large so it won’t occupy an awful lot of your time in Tromsø. We enjoyed it, of course, but there’s not enough there to warrant a return visit on a future trip to the city.
In the next post we enjoy more snowy sights in Tromsø, stumble upon lots of lovely weird sculptures, and then make our way to the northernmost brewery in the world for a drink. Or four.