| Yay!!! The Aurora Borealis!! We'd given up hope of seeing it as the clouds were low and thick every night. That didn't deter us from trying to stay awake until midnight every night and sneaking peeks outside just in case ... But, on the very last night, we drove back to the hotel in our hire car and as we were parking we noticed some vertical greenish coloured lights. Being a bit slow-witted it took us a couple of minutes until it clicked that this was the light show we'd been waiting for! We grabbed cameras and started taking photos in the forecourt of the hotel. Us, and a couple of dozen very excited Japanese tourists clicking away and trying not to freeze to death! We jumped into our hire car to get away from the lights and people. We drove to an isolated spot on the fjord opposite Tromso and had the wonderful experience of the lights passing right over top of us (radiation be damned!). The lights came in great big arcs that kind of had the sinuous movement of smoke, but the structure of a curtain or sheet of galvanised iron. Standing underneath the curtain stretching up and away into the night sky, you could see streams of light ripple along the corrugations, with stars still twinkling through and around the arcs. Magnificent. |
