memories of the arctic circle
Earlier this month I went to Tromsø in Northern Norway, to run a rather shorter version of the Midnight Sun Marathon in the polar night. Here are some snippets from my camera roll and my notes app.
We spend £20 each on half a beer and a hot dog in Oslo airport, the light still bright on the runways at 10pm. It’s a breathtakingly clear flight northwards, snow-capped mountains unfolding below us, melting into fjords and islets under rose-gold evening sun. Everyone is drawn magnetically outwards toward the view the closer we get to Tromsø - everyone except unimpressed Norwegians with window blinds jammed down and headphones in, oblivious to the silent distress of tourists craning next to them. Our descent is flanked by sheer mountain face that feels close enough to touch, water that races up to meet the belly of the plane with metres of runway to spare. We fall into bed in pinkish 1am sunlight and won’t see night again til we’re back in the UK.
In town everyone is wearing warm and practical sports gear. We bashfully rotate what we could stuff into hand luggage in a climate where anything less than 20 degrees was impossible to conceptualise. We eat soft cardamom buns and milky coffee in a cafe with leather stools and library-style lamps; a para glider drifts gently over over the mountainside toward the harbour, a splash of orange against green and blue.
In an ancient brewery full of wood and a stuffed polar bear brewery a Norwegian pretends he’s going to drink one of our flight of tiny beers, and at £9 each I fail to find the joke. The troll museum has “augmented reality” iPads for selfies, but it’s hard to enter your email address when the CGI troll won’t stop roaring at you.
Our drive across the island in search of calmer seas for kayaking is halted by a herd of reindeer plodding alongside the road, domesticated by local Sami and scruffily shedding their winter coats. Arctic terns wheel over waves that calm as we round the island. On the water we are dwarfed by the landscape, toy houses nestled into cloud-wreathed mountains stretching beyond our sightline. We do see a lot of birds, but have to be satisfied with our guide’s stories of wales and orcas congregating in the fjord, and the distant hullabaloos from the husky sledding centre. After instant hot chocolate on the shore the wind dies down enough to navigate under a bridge into a basin of views, mountains and cloud and water merging into one.
The city sauna is a rickety wooden structure perched on the end of a pontoon. There’s a view out over the harbour where the endearingly ugly brutalist bridge and embrace of the mountains rise behind steam and condensation as we collectively bob up and down. The water beyond the steam is bracingly freezing, shooting pain up the extremities against the soaring backdrop of ship and rockface. Slipping below its surface is easier the second time; much harder the third. I manage one journey from ladder to ladder, painfully aware of my clenched jaw visible through sweaty glass.
The Polar Musem is full of tourists posing for pictures with horrible waxworks of dead polar explorers, and photos of seals being skinned. In the guest book someone calling themselves TERF UK has written “protect single sex spaces”, which we furiously scribble out. The UK and its citizens find more ways to spend all time abroad in a constant state of humiliation and embarassment; on our flight home I find myself staring suspiciously at everyone else on the plane as if I can read bigotry from their sunburn.
We edge up the funicular under leaden clouds to see the mountains laid out around us like a painting, tiny toy planes gliding in to land below us. Later we eat mussels and scallops in an old boat house served by a waiter from Doncaster via Benidorm. In the milky light of 10pm polar day we spot the silken body of an otter slide below the surface of the harbour. It pops up twice more, water slicked head glinting. The harbour sea is flat as a pancake; mountain, cathedral, ship and bridge blurrily doubled.
On Saturday the sun comes out in full, a cruise ship has docked and the town is full of old people and Americans. We experience a jealous posessiveness, an invasion of territory - I hate to think how the locals feel.
We spend race day at the beach, before children’s entertainers warm us up at the start line of our mini marathon composed of at least a third under 10s. The atmosphere is of party, of school fun run, ruddy middle aged Norwegians taking pictures of their grandchildren in their serious sports gear, locals lining the route to encouragingly ring bells and/or blast Beyonce. We’re met by fizzy drinks and punnets of blueberries at the finish line; at the end of the the big races at 1am it’s a sea of silver and a cacophony of crinkling hypothermic blankets and groans of pain.
It is a 12 hour journey back to London. There are storms and staff shortages and the heat on landing is suffocating. A colleague shows me her Instagrams from a conference in Tromsø in January, and I look up the dates of the Polar Night races on my lunchbreak.
