Day 1 - Tromso
We landed in the capital of the Arctic circle (Tromso), where straight away I realised how built up and busy the city was which I was not expecting! There was light snow and the ground was covered, so we got into a taxi to check in to our apartment. Suddenly, we drove into an advanced underground tunnel system underneath the city of Tromso which had roundabouts, crossroads it was crazy. After dropping our bags off, we went for a nice wonder to see the sites of tromso. Pretty quickly, I realised how important spikes are on shoes after nearly falling over many times :). It was lovely to start getting to know everyone in the group as we visited some pubs and 7/11 in preparation for the big drive tomorrow to Skervoy!
Day 2 - Arctic Exploration
Bravely Jack volunteered to do all the driving throughout our holiday and unfortunately for him, he was thrown in right into the deep end, with the van hire saying this is horrible conditions to drive in with snow and Ice everywhere and big hills. The plan was to drive for 4 hours and take some scenic and wildlife stops to skervoy which is the island we were whale watching from. Whilst driving we started to notice many moose signs which built up excitement as it is one of the best ways to see moose just driving and bumping into moose on the roads. Firstly, we stopped off at a stunning fjord with 100s of red breasted mergansers, and 2 black guillemots which was great to see them in winter plumage as I have never seen them before like that. Jack gallantly carried on driving through blizzards in the dark and we made it to our stunning house, which was the best place I have ever seen never mind stayed in. It did not take long for us to find the jacuzzi and this is where we spotted the northern lights on the very first night ;).
Day 3 - A day around Skervoy
This morning, it finally hit me that I was in Norway, as we went to explore the harbor there was golden and white-tailed eagles also a great bunch of eiders. This was the moment jack revealed he had a fishing rod, and this changed the trip … After a few casts of the harbor, we started to catch some (cuddies) that were tiny but still great to see the abundance of fish down there and it began our quest to catch some Artic cod.
An hour went by, and we finished our fishing and returned to our mansion as I worded it. This is when Katie was sat in our living room and said she could see some blows in the fjord in front of our house. How ridiculous is that statement so luckily, I was with an amazing group of people who have many of them have jobs spotting wildlife some especially spotting whales. I saw my first HUMPBACK and KILLER whale a pinch me moment , Ewan then found reports of a hawk owl just behind a football pitch so we went for a group wonder , which treated us to some sublime views of Skervoy but not a lot of wildlife at all and I really started to appreciate how hard it was for animals and plants to live in this environment as the snow was above my shin for most of the walk and at some points waist height . When we arrived home, I then cooked my specialty Spaghetti Bolognese for me and Ewan and settled down for the night in excitement for our boat trip tomorrow!
Day 4 - Boat trip
Where do I even start, this has gone down as one of the best moments of my life, I still cannot get over it :)! Right so we arrived as early as possible for our boat trip, and it started off with a bang, as a white-tailed eagle was in the sky being harassed by everything. Then we went into the shop to put on our huge life warmer coats” suit up time!” and it was going time and we set off. The scenery was just remarkable with huge fjords and rocky outcrops towering over us! The sky was orange to the north and purple to the south and it was simply perfect in every way. Then it just kept getting better and better as we saw a pod of orcas and more just kept coming. It was overwhelming at first, as it has been a dream of mine to see either of these whales never mind seeing 100s in a couple of hours! They were huge especially the bulls (male orca) with dorsal fins up to 6ft tall. The Orcas were the most abundant out of the two whales and not shy of our boat coming up to a few metres away from us and even swimming underneath our boat. It was fascinating to see the killer whale's intelligent behavior, as they spy hopped multiple times out the water hopping to see what is above the surface and was great to see how highly social the orcas, I never saw one independent one.
Amazingly, we managed to be involved with a start of a feeding frenzy as all the gulls started to fly over as large numbers of killer whales seem to be surrounding herring Infront of our boat, we knew something good was about to happen and wow it did! Everything just seemed to erupt to the surface at once humpbacks, killer whales all enjoying the herring that was plentiful. I remember a tear of happiness rolled down my face at this moment as it was just more than I could ever ask for. To put the icing on the cake, a white-tailed eagle, while this huge feeding frenzy was going on swooped in and caught a fish.
Turning our attention to my favorite humpback whale, these colossal creatures are 14-17 metres and were just sublime! You would see huge blow in the distance and see what direction they were heading, and then the humpbacks wouldn't appear again for a couple of minutes then out of nowhere they appeared right next to us, and it was the best moment seeing their huge blows as we were all amazed on the boat. While on the boat I tried to take a couple of minutes, to reflect on this moment so I put my phone and my camera down and just stood there smiling taking it all in knowing this was going to be a core memory for my life and it was made even more special by the amazing people , I was experiencing this moment with !
When we finished our unbelievable boat trip, we went to the cafe for a debrief and met up with English sailor called Steve , who gave us some local knowledge on where to find some of the wildlife we wanted to see and it was brilliant listening to in to how big the tourism industry for whales and the positives and negatives.
Day 5 – Terrestrial day
After an unbelievable day and a couple of beers to celebrate it was a slow start to the next morning, with everyone rolling into the van at 11 o'clock. Today was forecasted to be the worst weather for our holiday and we had one mindset it was to find a moose! Yesterday, Steve told us about a spot where he sees moose. We did not have many daylight hours left as because we were so high up on the earths latitude the sun never rose, it was at a 5 degrees angle so we would have 4 hours 10-2 o'clock of Twighlight hours. So, we stopped off and wandered round seeing evidence of moose pushing through trees. Unfortunately, after searching for a while we could not find any Mooses and again this made me realise how hard of an environment it is for any organism to live in as the temperature were always fluctuating in the minuses and there was always snow 2 foot deep and only daylight for 4 hours of the day. We did stumble across three black grouses just before it got too dark, which was brilliant to see in the middle of a forest.
When we finished our enjoyable walk looking for moose, we headed back to Skervoy to go fishing in the harbor and visit the Christmas market! Let me tell you the fishing did not disappoint, where me and jack honestly caught 4 fish in 15 mins and the fish were 3-pound Atlantic cod. Furthermore, we were shining a torch down beneath us in the ocean and it was brilliant to see the large variety of biodiversity which I have been learning about in class, for example seeing 5- and 3-legged starfish which are in the echinoderm's family. To end the day, we did some sledging and watched a movie in our house.
Day 6 – Last day at skervoy
Wow this had come around so fast our last day on skervoy and we were still desperate to see some moose before we left Norway. So as most of our days started, we all hopped in the van and went to another location we were told about, it was a small town outside of skervoy and at first, we were looking at bird feeders to find pine grosbeaks. I was surprised to see so many bullfinches. They were the most common garden bird, and they were stunning in the snow with their bright red and pink breasts. After looking at a few garden feeders we spotted a nice woodland walk and went for a wonder , this somehow quickly became a huge and epic I must add ,snowball fight gloves vs no gloves with some roman attack strategies were being used of fortress and shields and stupidly I decided to be on the no gloves team and let me tell you when I couldn't feel my hands that was I understatement , I would not recommend. As you can properly guess the moose or pine grosbeak decided to not join in 😉.
Then I was big into my running this year and wanted to hit my goal of 1000km (about 621.37 mi) ran in a year so me and Indy suited up snoods, studs on the shoes and it was strangely easy to run on snow and ice we did 5k , none of us where close to falling and this was definitely a highlight of my trip !
Day 7- THE LAST DAY
We got up early and we were ready for a 4-hour drive ahead saying goodbye to the biggest help of the trip the legend Shoehorn, I still miss him to this day, ohh and our mansion.
After leaving the shoehorn behind, we started the van one more time and set off back to the capital of the Arctic, Tromso ! And what happened next nobody could have predicted after crossing the bridge back to mainland Norway, Ivy spotted something in the corner of her eye next to the road and it was TWO MOOOOOOOSEEEE! We finally saw them :) I could not believe it after all of them hours trying to find moose and we got rewarded it felt so sweet. What an animal, the largest wild animal I have ever seen! So, this really brought our spirits up on the journey home and you would not believe it as we were enjoying the picturesque mountain ranges and fjords. Katie spotted another moose cross the road just before we got there. And if this was not enough, we stopped to chance our luck at a beautiful Fjord and an otter swan by right in front of us there was two common scoters in the middle of the water with 1000s of mallards for some reason. And the one of the rarest cetaceans for Norway a porpoise, it was just all going our way and was the perfect way to end our trip seeing Christmas songs as it was the 1st in December with snow all around us.
Finally. I just want to say a huge thank you for Ewan for messaging me last minute to see if I wanted to come to Norway, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I will be forever grateful for that! Also, I want to thank all my amazing lecturers who gave me the green light to go and experience the Arctic circle and a big thank you to work for letting me have the week off!
Ben
Comments