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Author: Hanneke

I started my first blog when I left the Netherlands (my home country) for an internship in Alaska in 2004, to keep my friends and family updated on my adventures over there. Little did I know it would be more than 13 years before I'd move back to the Netherlands! I spent a year in Toulouse (France) before starting a PhD in meteorology at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK) in 2005. That's when I started this current blog, first in Dutch but I soon switched to English. I really enjoyed life in the UK, and was actually planning to stay there after my PhD, but "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" and I ended up moving to Tromsø in Northern Norway in 2009. Tromsø is a photographer's dream, surrounded by spectacular mountains, with the light ever changing from the midnight sun in summer to the dark days compensated by aurora-filled nights in winter. I learnt Norwegian and got a job as a weather forecaster - I got thrown in at the deep end, doing radio interviews and speaking with fishermen with way-too-strong dialects straight from the beginning, before I was anywhere near fluent in Norwegian :D I survived though, and slowly started to do some research on the side. I got more and more involved in research projects and in August 2015 I moved 2000 km south, to Oslo where I started working 100% as a researcher. A year after moving to Oslo, I met Michiel at a music festival in Brussels :) and we started to travel very frequently between Oslo and Rotterdam, where he lives. You can't do that forever though, and I soon realized I found the perfect "excuse" to finally move back home, something I had been considering many times before. So since July 2017, I'm living in Rotterdam! I'm actually taking some time off before finding a new job, and I'm looking forward to lots of adventures in the near future - so stay tuned!
More Aurora

More Aurora

We were hoping to go out to take more photos of the northern lights later this week, but just before 23:00 tonight we got a call from Sevim: active aurora! We looked out of the window and we saw a very bright display, even in the south. We quickly decided to drive somewhere, hoping the aurora wouldn’t disappear in the mean time 😉

We drove towards Store Blåmannen, a large mountain which I call the Matterhorn of Tromsø 😉 (it looks a bit similar). We found a place to take photos, but of course the lights were most active while I was still setting up my tripod and camera, there was hardly anything left by the time I was ready 😉 It was still very pretty though. The moon was nearly full and very bright.

After a while we started to get very cold (it was quite windy which made it feel cold) and the activity of the northern lights didn’t seem to increase, so we decided to go home. While we walked back to the car, suddenly the sky was filled with green beams, it was beautiful!! Of course it was decreasing again by the time I got my tripod and camera set up once more, but I still got some nice photos of the more active display:

Now it’s 2 in the morning, and I should really get some sleep! So this is all for now. I still hope we can go another time later in the week, if the weather stays good!

Northern Lights from Kvaløyvågen

Northern Lights from Kvaløyvågen

Last night the northern light forecast was really good, AND it was a perfectly clear night! So we decided to drive to Kvaløyvågen, a small village north of Tromsø from where we thought we’d have good views to the north without any city lights. It takes about 45 minutes to drive there, and we already saw the northern lights while driving. We drove to the end of the road, and continued on snowshoes. There were no lights there, but the moon was shining brightly – luckily to the south though! When we first got there, the northern lights were out, but very subtle.  Below you can see the moonlit landscape… it was beautiful!

After a while, the aurora became more active and much brighter. It was so beautiful! The views over the fjord were amazing, with the northern lights reflecting in the water. The circle in the second photo started out really big and quickly became smaller and smaller – a fantastic sight!

 

We finally made it back home at half past 1 in the morning… very tired! More active northern lights are expected next week, so I hope we get another chance to go out and take photos!

Sun, snow & skiing

Sun, snow & skiing

Last weekend was really sunny, and on Saturday we decided to go skiing on Kvaløya (the island just west of Tromsø), with Sevim and her boyfriend. There were lots of people out enjoying the day, especially since it was the first nice day since we got half a metre of snow. And the snow was fantastic! We had a short break at a wooden “lavo” that had some deck chairs…

The sun was so strong we could sit outside in the warmth and were in danger of getting mildly sunburnt. Now that we had a Norwegian with us, we had to dig a snow bench before we were allowed to eat our lunch. Now we are experts in the technique, and learnt that you can use your ski’s to sit on as well! After lunch we kept climbing, and the views kept getting better 🙂

We then enjoyed a very fun descent, we took our skins off (off the skis, we’re not reptiles!) and practiced Telemark turns in the soft snow. 

The following day was even sunnier, so we couldn’t resist going skiing again. We went to Kvaløya again, so we could maximise our sunshine intake – it has south facing slopes unobstructed by other tall mountains that might cause nasty shadows 😉 This time we went to a different area though. We found another wooden lavo here too… 

This panorama shows the mountains behind Tromsø (the largest is Tromsdalstinden). On the right you can see the island of Hakøya, connected by a bridge. The ship in the middle is the Lance, which spends every winter here in Eidkjosen. All the tracks you see in the foreground are snow scooter tracks, this area seemed to be a playground for them!

This area is quite windy and after all the fresh snow, we found some very nice snow formations, like the “wave” in the photo below. The photo on the right is taken on top of the “mountain”, it’s called Sjurfjellet and it’s 161 m high – I felt like a lazy Sunday so we didn’t climb any “real” mountains this time 😉 The views were really nice, but it was extremely windy there.

Here you can see Paul all wrapped up and protected from the wind, just before we started our descent. The clouds were beautiful, I wish I had brought my wide angle lens!

We ended our little trip at the church on the bottom of the slope. On both sides of the entrance, they had bouquets of roses frozen into blocks of ice – quite cool! I had never seen this before. They were melting and the roses were only half inside the ice block by the time we got there, but it still looked really nice.

Let’s hope for the same weather for next weekend 🙂 In the mean time we are giving our muscles a much needed rest!