Tromsų Museums: Polar Museum, Polaria, Tromsų Museum - Norway
A walk south of Tromsø, with visits to three museums
Route summary - 1 km from city centre to Polaria, another 2 km through suburbs to Tromsø Museum and 3 km back over the island to the city centre again.
Miserable weather - head for the museums!
Contrasting stories - Vikings and the Sami people
Miserable weather - head for the museums!
On the second morning - Friday - the weather wasn't looking any better. I went back along to the town centre, and found the street market in full swing. There were stalls selling shrimps alongside others selling craft items and one with products of the Sami people. Several of the people browsing around were obviously there for the marathon (or one of the shorter races), and I chatted to a couple of them. The market square was overlooked by a fine statue of a fisherman standing in a boat, wrestling with his catch. Beyond it, the square ended at the quayside, where shrimp boats were unloading their catches, watched by a line of seagulls. From here there was a fine view across to the Arctic Cathedral and the bridge, which I had crossed the previous day.
At the end of that walk, I had made the first of my three museum visits, the Polar Museum. As in Scotland, museums are a great asset for tourism when the weather is unpredictable. If the weather's not good enough for walking in the hills, at least you can get an impression of the cultural heritage of the area.
The Polar Museum is in an old warehouse building dating back to 1830, beside one section of the harbour. On the ground floor, it tells the story of trapping in the Arctic, with a replica of a hut which trappers might have used on the island of Svalbard (Spitzbergen). Walruses, reindeer, seals and foxes were hunted during the 19th century. After the walrus and reindeer populations were decimated, polar bear and fox became the main targets during the 20th century. Other rooms deal with whaling and sealing.
Upstairs there's a less disturbing exhibition devoted to Raold Amundsen, who used Tromsø as the base for his polar expeditions, culminating in the first visit to the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Captain Scott's expedition arrived 5 weeks later, and the team died before they could return to safety. This provided a strong link with my home in Dundee, where Scott's ship the Discovery is preserved, and Scott's expeditions are recognised in the displays at Discovery Point. Amundsen carried out further expeditions, including a flight over the North Pole by airship, and disappeared on a rescue flight to the North Pole in 1928.
Then other displays provide further detail of the individuals and techniques involved in hunting polar bears, musk ox and walrus - there's no getting away from the fact that part of Tromsø's prosperity was based on hunting furry Arctic creatures, just as Dundee profited enormously from whaling.
There was plenty more choice of museums to fill another wet day. I could have gone on a guided tour of the world's most northerly brewery, close to the hotel, on a Tuesday or Thursday, but this was a Friday. Also near the hotel, heading south from Grønnegata, was the Contemporary Arts Centre in a fine old building looking down towards the more modern design of Polaria. Not being a great fan of modern art, and since I was in the Arctic, I decided to stick with the polar theme. Polaria looks like a collapsed stack of ice slabs, or the crevasses in a glacier, and stands beside the sound on the south side of the city. Next to it is the much larger Polar Institute, where research is carried out into the polar environment.
By then the rain was coming down more heavily, and although I had brought an umbrella I was grateful to get inside the museum reception area, where I was surrounded by display shelves piled high with fluffy toy polar animals, warm clothes and coffee table books of arctic photography. I sat and watched an impressive audio-visual presentation of Svalbard. I watched bearded seals swimming in a giant tank from below, through the side, and from above. Then I walked around various tanks with fish and other creatures in them. Finally I read a series of panels explaining the ecological conditions of the arctic and the impact of global warming, and learnt about the work of recent arctic expeditions. The techniques were very different from those in the Polar Museum, and the overall message was much more contemporary and challenging.
Having already picked up some presents from the market earlier in the day, I managed to leave without any toy seals, and set off again. I intended to visit the third museum - the Tromsø Museum - at the southern end of the island, but wasn't sure if the weather would allow it as the rain fell steadily. I was grateful for the umbrella once again, but it wasn't as cold as it had been the day before. On a fine day I would have had great views ahead towards the snow-capped mountains, but instead there was just greyness in the distance. Looking across to the hill I'd climbed, I was surprised to see colourful shapes gliding above the sound. Evidently the chairlift was used by hang-gliding folk to get up to a hilltop launchpad, and the weather didn't deter them.
The main road skirts the island from Tromsø to the airport, but I turned off it to walk along quieter roads through the dispersed suburbs, where houses were interspersed with wide expanses of Giant Hogweed! Reaching the denser housing area of Bjerkaker I turned up to the right, and found a sign for the museum at the end of a road which led around to a complex of modern buildings set among trees.
Contrasting stories - Vikings and the Sami people
After two museums devoted to the Arctic environment and wildlife, I found quite a different series of exhibits. There was an explanation of the Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis - and a room filled with rocks quarried from the region, polished and presented in contrasting displays. Other rooms recreated early settlements and showed the way of life of the different peoples who had eked out a living in this harsh environment. We tend to think of Norway as the home of the Vikings, which it was, but they co-existed with the Sami people in the north. One room was devoted to the political history of the Sami people, whose nomadic lifestyle took them across the borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. There was an echo here of the story of the Celtic peoples in the west of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany and Spain, increasingly overwhelmed by other languages and lifestyles. The Sami, like the Celts, have sought to assert themselves politically and culturally in recent decades.
Fascinating stuff - I bought a couple of books in English about the Sami, "People of the Sun and Wind", and the Way of Life of Northern Norway - but as usual with such books brought back from a holiday I have only managed to skim through them.
It was late afternoon, and I had reached my limit of museum displays. Emerging from the building, I found the rain had stopped and walked along a path through the wooded parkland behind the museum, past what looked like a reconstruction of a Sami building of wood and turf. The path led down to the coast road, and on the other side a track led to a stone jetty. I walked onto the stony shore and took a couple of photos of the steely grey water, the mountains beyond and clouds above, all in contrasting shades of grey. But it seemed to be getting brighter.
I wasn't going to get caught out in the dark, since it wasn't going to get dark, but I still had to get back to the east side of the island, to the hotel and then to the pasta party for runners. I followed the coast road a couple of hundred metres further north towards the airport, with the parkland on the right, and just before the next area of housing I found a track leading up through the woods. This linked with the end of one of the streets on the left. I turned onto this, and then turned right onto a road which bent left before climbing gently through attractive housing to meet another road which crossed over the spine of the island then descended towards the hotel. By then it certainly was clearing up, and I headed off to the Radisson hotel for the pasta party, optimistic that we would have a better day for the race.
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