Tuesday - 25 June 2013 - Tromso, Norway
It was easier than we thought getting up early this morning after staying up past midnight. Hey, it was already light out. Of course, here in the Arctic in late June it is always light out. Really light this morning as there was a clear sky. We watched the scenery go by out of our window after opening the black-out curtains and screaming in pain from the kind of low morning sun shinning in our eyes.
No matter, Tromso is a gem. It's a university town in a rich country. Norway is very well off nowadays with its oil exploration and fishing industries despite the $5 bottles of beer in the state liquor stores ($15 to $20 for a glass of beer in a bar) and universal health, education, and everything else making the cost of living commensurate with the standard of living. There are big highway bridges everywhere, long traffic tunnels, rail lines, and even at 200 miles above the Arctic Circle the streets are all paved. Public buses (at $5 a ride) travel over many local routes. Take that, muddy street wild west Fairbanks with your cinder block hotels and bars full of drunks. Take that, I say. Or rather the Norwegians say, I think.
We passed a number of very overpriced (but not for Norwegians apparently) restaurants. We were reminded of the history of this strategic WW II area by the memorial to all the town's Jews who died from 1942 to 1945 despite the efforts of many Norwegians to resist the Nazis. For us today, we found the Norwegians in Tromso to be friendly and helpful. They went as far to shuffle their feet and looking at the ground in response when greeted, and drivers even made full stops (while looking down and not making eye contact) as we crossed the street at the crosswalks. Hey, these Norwegian folks up here in the Arctic are downright ebullient compared to those we didn't see earlier in other ports during the cruise since they just hid from us in their darkened houses.
Barbara and I got on the first shuttle bus at 8:30 am after we docked. We wandered the lovely downtown business district and waterfront and then hiked about 2.5 miles across one of the expensive looking bridges to the cable car for the scenic ride up a 1500 foot high nearby hill. The top looked more like 13,000 plus feet in Colorado with tundra and snow puddles, but we could breathe and the view down was quite unlike that of the high Rockies. You know, that water thing. As it started to rain, we returned down via the cable car and took side streets into some of the residential neighborhoods to see odd combinations of modern and traditional architecture. I guess you don't worry if you house blends in or not when it's dark most of the year.
After some time dodging the now intermittent passing late morning rain showers in the free Internet equipped Visitor Center downtown, we caught the 12:30 pm shuttle bus and headed back to the ship for a nice lunch. This afternoon we toured Silversea's Silver Explorer, the renamed Prince Albert II, which we sailed on in Central America about four years ago. We had watched it sail past us as we were having lunch. It has just come from an expedition cruise above 81 degrees north latitude in the Svalbard Islands (formerly Spitsbergen) and at least to me it looked like Explorer had snow on its smoke stack. The passengers were disembarking with their new parkas still on. It was fun to be reminded of that miniature version of the Silver Cloud with just over 100 passenger and not so much fun to be reminded of the kind of cruises it takes by the chained down chairs in the dining room.
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