Norway Day 5: Tundra Exploration

It snowed overnight. Real snow, none of this wintery mix stuff you get in the States. So there was a layer of a couple of inches on top of all the ice that had formed over the last few days, which made for 100% better traction. We had been slip sliding away to downtown, but today was a day for walking, one tentative step at a time! It's the little things that make a day wonderful here in the Arctic. It also helps that they put down loads of gravel over the roads and sidewalks for the people who have to walk to school/work, which is quite a few. The island is large, but most people sort of squeeze right into the middle of it and are in walking or biking distance of everything. It's not so bad a way to live. We have even seen people sledding to work, all bundled up over their work suits, having a grand old time. Hey, you have to adapt, right?

We wake up at our usual time to go down to breakfast (Jonmikel is having a new-found love affair with Muesli), and we putz around until opening time of the city at noon. Then we hasten over to the Polar Museum, which is more of a historical overview of Tromso and the Arctic. What we didn't know at the time was that Lonely Planet has hailed it as one of the 10 worst museums in the world. That's quite an achievement; while I haven't decided yet whether it is truly worthy of such a title, it was.... er, interesting. It's in one of the oldest buildings in Tromso right on the harbor. Looks very Fishermen Village, and I fall in love with the area. I can't help it, it has the best of both worlds: ocean (well, salt water, anyway) and mountains. Immediately, Jonmikel goes for the giant harpoon set off to the side. That should have given something away about the Museum. Granted, the place did have interesting facts on Roald Amundsen, the first (only?) guy to fly over the North Pole in a blimpy-thing, the first person to reach both the North and South Poles, one of the first to lead a South Pole expedition, and, most importantly, the first guy to sail through the entire Northwest Passage. He did all sorts of fun stuff and eventually disappeared on a rescue mission where the friend he was rescuing was found and he never was. The rest of the horrors of the museum were totally worth it for this extensive display on this dude.

Let's talk about those horrors. First of all, the put the very nice display of polar bear hunting rifles next to the children's play area. Because children like to think of killing seals when drawing pictures. Luckily, the pictures were all benign ones of boats and happy bears not being killed and such. Second, on a description of what to do if you meet a polar bear (in the days before bear spray, perhaps), it says to hold your gun at the ready, and if you are FORCED to shoot it, aim for the chest so as not to damage the head or the good part of the coat, and if you kill it, be sure to do the normal stuff in order to preserve the fur. Well, yeah, when I come across polar bears who want to eat me, the first thing I think of is how it would look under my dining room table. Then I shoot accordingly. Third, the entire rest of the museum was dedicated to the wonders of clubbing baby seals and trapping foxes. The trapping foxes would not have been so bad if not for the life-sized and life-like models of foxes dying in giant claw and wooden traps strewn strategically throughout the displays. But the baby seal thing was a little overdone. The descriptions continuously spouted information like, "Native people have been killing [baby] seals in the Arctic for almost 10,000 years, so this is a legacy we like to appreciate and continue" and "[Unfortunately] International agreements have [stupidly] banned the killing of baby seals for any purposes [the fools] and Norway was one of the first countries to sign such treaties [which is awful because now the baby seals have overrun our waters and threaten the safety of our fishermen!!!]." You could just hear the contempt for such treaties drip from the pages of English descriptions, and you could tell that the designers and supporters of the museum would really love to go out and club baby seals, in order to preserve history, of course (nevermind the fact that hunters who rely on such animals for real purposes-other than fancy fur coats sold in London-rarely kill babies because of the understanding that if you have no babies, you have no adults and well.... no adults no food). There were detailed instructions on how to skin seals, too, as well as details photographs of what seals look like when you club them, and detailed dioramas. I mean, really, do people want to see that? I can see where Lonely Planet is coming from.

And of course, what museum would be complete without a nice display in the gift shop on the wonders of penis warmers made of seal? Not the Polar Museum, that's for sure! Right next to the exit door, no less, just in case you thought about slipping by without contemplating who on your Christmas list may need a penis warmer. Doesn't everybody? Made from a [baby] seal! Seriously. But I have to remind myself that I would have never know about "The Other Guy" in the race for the South Pole with Robert Scott had it not been for the Polar Museum.

Now that I have spent extensive time on the wonders of one of the 10 Worst Museums in the World, I feel I can continue. After a quick beer at Olhallon's (of course), we headed back to our hotel to layer ourselves silly. Tonight was dogsledding! After making sure we were bundled up (without snow pants, though, which we would get at our destination, Villmarkssenter, or the Tromso Wilderness Center), we headed (slid) down to our meeting point. We had a short drive out of town, and I could just see the City Funk slipping away into clear night. It was yet too early to really see the famed Northern Lights, but the weather looked promising. When we arrived, we got situated (Jonmikel deciding to go all out and put on an entire snow suit) and took a brief tour of the dogs. There are about 240 dogs at this site, split between the two owners who in 2006 took their best ones to the Iditarod in Alaska and came in 27 and 28 places, which is excellent for rookies. They hope to qualify again for the 2009 Iditarod. The dog yard was great; it was like 240 Koanis yodeling at me all at once. Then we got down to the meat of the trip: the dogsledding (which they call "sledging" in Norway, and I can't help but wonder if it's a translation issue, and who's got it wrong). Jonmikel and I piled on a sled as our musher prepared for departure. And we were off. You can tell these dogs love to run. Just like my own husky, Koani, who loved to run when she was younger (she still does, but she's getting old and her desire to run is limited to short distances, like between her and the pigeons). They also go to the bathroom on the run, which is amazing because Koani does the same thing though she was never trained to be a sled dog. It's wonderful what can been genetically isolated and bred into dogs. When we got up over the rise, we saw it: green haze oozing up from the incoming clouds. It was just fuzz for a long time, but eventually evened out into a light ribbon of lights stretching across the entire sky. The dogs seems to know when the lights come, and their barks and whines and yodels get louder as the lights grow stronger. And that's all you can hear out there. The sleds are surprisingly silent, and when the dogs, too, quiet down to appreciate the run, all you can hear is the cold. It sounds like snow, "snow quiet" as Jonmikel called it. And what's better, it's actually snowing on us from off to the south while the lights glitter to the north. The stars are not phenomenal-too close to the city for that-but that doesn't stop us from catching the beginnings of the Geminide meteor shower, pebbles of stardust poking through the ripples of light. We don't take pictures, as the sled, while quiet, is much like a jetski on the open ocean, so we just settle in to appreciate among the "Yep, Yeps" of our musher. The ride is cold and easy-going, and soon we can hear the howls of the dogs back at the base-camp drifting up from the valley, and soon we are back, just in time for the clouds to part again and open up a new ribbon of green. The sky glows for a few minutes before settling back into silent blackness and very quickly heavy snowfall, and we head into a Sami tent, called a laavo and looking suspiciously like a tipi, for dinner. The meal is perfect and hearty and hot, broth with bread, followed by thick stew (we were hoping for Rudolph but got Lambchop instead), and then chocolate cake with coffee. Just what we needed to recoup from the chill, and just in time for a musher to come bursting in with a, "Lights! They've come back!" We all rush to put cold-weather gear back on and pile out into the night, where indeed they had come back, this time with fury.

I have seen videos of the lights, seen them in documentaries, and just assumed that the movements were exaggerated, sped up for time purposes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was wrong. The sparkling and the rippling effects can shudder across the sky like the wakes of a speedboat, changing from green to white to red to pink in a matter of milliseconds. It rains down streams of light, mimicking waterfalls and falling stars, and disappears only to spring up in another corner of the sky. Sometimes a band will appear, dancing from side to side, rippling in an unseen and unfelt solar wind. Sometimes the entire sky will shimmer as if neon-green paint dripped from a divine paint can over Tromso. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it flashes out and leaves us in the darkness of the tundra. We were told not to expect much, and we had been happy with our glimpses through the clouds from previous days, and with our haze from earlier this night. We never expected to see film-quality Auroras, the kinds they put on postcards and in National Geographic specials. Our pictures don't even begin to portray how beautiful, jaw-dropping and just plain phenomenal these visions are. Not even my sunrises over the Taj Mahal or the Khmer temples of Cambodia, my sunsets over the Rocky Mountains or the open Pacific Ocean, nor any other solar miracle of which I have ever conceived can compare to what you can see in the middle of the night here within the harsh confines of the Arctic Circle.