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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!
Nem's visit to Tromsø

Nem's visit to Tromsø

I finally found some time to put those photos online. We had our first visitor (from the UK) last weekend – Nem came to visit! She arrived on a very sunny day, and as we already had our rented snowshoes we decided to go for a quick walk in the afternoon. We drove to a nearby lake (Finnvikvatnet) and we were hoping to catch the last bit of sun. It was really windy there, but we enjoyed great views!

Snowshoeing Snowshoeing

That evening the northern lights were very active, so Nem got to see a really good show! We watched from the balcony so we could escape to the warm fire inside when we got too cold. The next morning we woke up to a sky filled with amazing clouds:

Tromso

We took the cable car up, we were planning to go for a walk from there. I took this photo of the view, and another of the building up there – as you can see it was REALLY windy!!

Tromso Snowshoeing

We went for a walk which was quite a mission with the wind – especially for me as I have no hood on my jacket. I need a new one! Why are Norwegian jackets so pretty but so expensive… I saw a nice one for 500 pounds, hmm. Anyway… The wind was so strong you could easily lean into it, quite cool!

Snowshoeing Snowshoeing

Nem the Arctic explorer and both of us leaning into the wind.

Snowshoeing Snowshoeing

Soon afterwards we decided to give up, go for a hot chocolate in the restaurant and find a less windy place for a walk. We went back to the place where we went skiing a while ago, it always seems very calm there. We went for a fun walk and had some snow”ball” (the snow is so dry it won’t stick as balls) fights!

Snowshoeing Snowshoeing

The next day was Monday and we convinced Paul to take some time off work and come with us. Nem wanted to try skiing and as we have the same shoe size she could just use mine and I took the snowshoes. On the way there, we drove past some frozen fjords, very cool! Paul the oceanographer giving some explanations…

Skiing Skiing

And… we saw seals on the ice!! So cool! Unfortunately I didn’t have my SLR with zoom lens with me, so the best I could get was this cropped version below, in the big version you can see the seal 🙂

Skiing

We also stopped to admire the fish racks – quite spooky!! All this dead bodies hanging there haha. You could smell them too 😉

Skiing Skiing

Nem tried skiing for the very first time, but she picked it up really quickly. In these two photos you can still see the concentration on her face though, hehe.

Skiing Skiing

We skied through a valley that ended at the other side of the island on the water. This valley had no road, but we saw a snowmobile going there with supplies… there were actually some houses on the other side! Wow, they live quite isolated but such a beautiful spot…

Skiing Skiing

We enjoyed a little tea break before heading back… what a nice place!

Skiing Skiing

Nem and I both flew back to London the next day. We did spend some time in Tromsø before our flight left – we had some amazing cakes at my favourite spot (O.L. Aune) and we visited Polaria (which I thought was quite disappointing, but we had fun there with the Antarctic suit and some big puzzle that took us ages to solve 😉 )

Right now I am in the Netherlands after a very short visit to the UK… More soon!

Another sunny weekend

Another sunny weekend

We’ve been very lucky again with the weather last weekend! The forecast for Saturday was so good that we decided to have a go at getting up Tromsdalstinden, the 1200m high mountain we can see from our flat (see this photo). Paul has been fascinated with getting up there ever since we’ve been here, and I kept saying there was NO way I would or could go up there on ski’s… I agreed to give it a try but never really believed it was possible. The cable car opened for the very first time last Saturday, and we were on the first ride up 🙂 The weather was really sunny and so clear, you could see very far – so beautiful! We steadily climbed up and the views just got better and better…

Tromsdalstinden Tromsdalstinden

Finally we reached our first top, at about 800m. Hardly anyone around, making your own tracks in the snow that was glistening like a blanket of diamonds… incredible! I really enjoyed it.

Tromsdalstinden

But from there you have to get down to 500m (fun descent!) and then up again. We had already been skiing for more than 3 hours and I was getting tired. And I just couldn’t get up the next bit, I tried very hard but it was a real struggle. We realized we weren’t going to make it to the top of Tromsdalstinden, but we wanted at least to get to the next top – Rødryggen at 776m. Finally I told Paul (who had to wait for me all the time) to go to the top alone so at least he could show me the pictures afterwards 😉 I’ve never had to actually give up on getting up a mountain (not that that’s very impressive – I never climb any challenging ones anyway) and it was quite difficult to “admit defeat” So Paul took this panorama from there, quite amazing! Tromsdalstinden is the one on the left. I have renamed it to “the Beast” now… I will conquer it one day, but I think it’ll have to wait till Summer!

Tromsdalstinden

Our way back was not so much fun, we were quite tired (not used to skiing so much yet), the descents very steep (and we still can’t make turns), it was getting dark, we didn’t know the way back very well… We finally got back at the car at 20:30, completely exhausted.

So we took it easy the next day and just drove to Lyfjorden, a tiny village from where we went for a nice walk on the beach. Below you can see the village and a cooker we found abandoned at the beach…

Lyfjorden Lyfjorden

The beach was really cool, there were lots of interesting ice formations. Especially those “ice grapes” were beautiful!

Lyfjorden Lyfjorden

Many of the rocks on the beach had “ice hats” and Paul had fun with those…

Lyfjorden Lyfjorden

We walked around a point and we thought there would be some kind of path, but at times we had to climb over big rocks. Later we walked through a forest, with beautiful lichen growing on the trees!

Lyfjorden Lyfjorden

Lyfjorden Lyfjorden

Very nice day! The weather is still good, and I’m hoping that it stays like that for a bit longer, cause Nem is coming on Saturday! She will stay for 4 days, I’m really looking forward to her visit! I’ll probably take lots of photos, but I am also going back to the UK with her next week. I’m meeting my supervisors, then taking a ferry to the Netherlands and finally fly back to Tromsø from Amsterdam – just in time for Easter! But hopefully I’ll be able to update my blog before that 🙂

Aurora

Aurora

Tonight we decided to go for a drive to find dark places to watch the northern lights from. It was clear but the aurora forecast was not very good, so we didn’t actually expect to see any. What a surprise when we stepped out of the flat and saw an amazing show overhead! We knew it would probably die out while we were driving, but we went anyway. We drove to a very dark place, after chasing a family of moose (4 of them!) along the road for a few kilometers. Silly animals, they can go left or right but prefer to jog along right in front of the car…

Anyway, this is what we saw when we found a nice place to watch the lights… It was incredible! So many stars out there too! Click for bigger versions:

Aurora Borealis Aurora Borealis

Aurora Borealis Aurora Borealis