Ausflug 38

June 24th: Tromso, Norway

The weather improved dramatically for our visit to Tromso. Although the day dawned with the typical gray Norwegian overcast, it turned into a clear blue sky and brilliant sunshine as we ambled around the city, which cheered us up immensely. The ship was at an industrial port about two miles from the town center, and we took the shuttle bus into town to save our energy for walking around.

We first meandered in the direction of the bridge across the fjord because our maps showed a Polar Museum there. Not to be confused with the very modern, hands-on, touchy-feely "Polaris Center", the Polar Museum was in the old Customs house and was an old fashioned "read and look" museum. Since I am an old fashioned "read and look" kind of guy, the Polar Museum was just the ticket.

A big plus was that the Polar Museum had specific exhibits on both Raold Amundsen, and Fridtjof Nansen, both remarkable explorers of the Arctic. Nansen commissioned and built the Fram in 1892, a wooden boat built specifically to withstand being crushed in the ice when frozen into the Arctic seas. He and his crew used the Fram to sail as far North as 86 degrees, where the Fram was frozen into the Arctic ice pack for a couple of years. Meanwhile, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen tried to forge to the North Pole with sledges and sled dogs. They managed to get somewhat closer to the pole, but then had to retreat back toward Franz Josef Land in a harrowing journey lasting more than a year.

The Fram also survived a couple of winters frozen in the Arctic ice pack, and in 1910 Raold Amundsen used it on his expedition to the South Pole. With exquisite planning, Amundsen used all the lessons he had learned from staying with the Innuit during his Northwest Passage in the Gjoa from 1903-1906, and the dogs sucessfully pulled the sleds while the men used their cross-country skis to get to the South Pole. Truly a feat of careful planning and undaunted courage in the execution.

Amundsen failed, however, to get to the North Pole by flying, first in 1923 from the Maud, and secondly in 1925-26 in the Dornier flying boats N-24 and N-25. He finally traversed the north pole in the airship Norge with Lincoln Ellsworth in 1926. But in the end, Amundsen was lost when he flew North to look for the wrecked airship Itallia in 1928. The Polar Museum had several other interesting exhibits, but after a couple hours we were done and returned to our perambulation around Tromso.

Just off the main street I found a store called "-nille", which seemed to be the Norwegian version of a U.S. "Dollar" store. Being Norway and expensive, the cheapest items were priced at 10 Kroner, or a little under $2, but that was similar to the British "1 Pound" stores where the pound would also translate to $1.50 or so. The store had the same unpredictable miscellany of cheap, tacky goods that I have come to associate with dollar stores, so wandering up and down the aisles gave full opportunity for serendipity to kick in.

We looked into many of the other shops up and down the main shopping street, called "Storgatn", and in a small, 3-story mall we found a cut-rate housewares store where we found two nautically-themed coffee mugs and a really nice polished metal cheese slicer. Reading the package, I found out that it was a reproduction of the very first cheese slicer in the world. The cheese slicer was invented in 1925 by a Norwegian and originally produced in Lillihammer, Norway. Given its manufacturing origin, I'm surprised that he did not call it "Lil' Cheese Hammer" rather than "Cheese Slicer", but maybe it would have never caught on if he had!

In a ladies' accessories shop in that mall Monika also found three pairs of earrings, and I re-stocked with pretzels (for 9.5 Kroner) at a Co-op store down the street. Since the weather was fine, we wanted to extend our day in Tromso but we were by that time quite hungry. Eschewing the over-priced restaurants (which means not chewing in them), we had lunch by purchasing a sub sandwich and Coke as take-away at the "Joker" convenience store for 37 Kroner (about $7). Then we strolled across the street into the park in front of the pretty little church in the center of town, and ate our lunch with a bunch of other folks out enjoying the sunny warm weather. After paying our respects to a statue of the late King that was in front of the old Rathus (City Hall), we worked our way back to the shuttle stop and returned to the ship for the evening.