Tuesday – Alta and THE LIGHTS

All of these Northern Norwegian ports are starting to look the same. The days are short, with the sun rising at something just gone 8am and setting at around 2:30pm, which has a subtle effect on the brain (namely – it just makes me want to sleep all the time – no change there then…)

We didn’t have a tour today, so we took the free shuttle bus into Alta, then caught a local bus to Alta Museum a few miles out on the other side of the town (not walkable). One of the main attractions of the museum is that it houses a collection of prehistoric rock carvings, some of which are outside, in situ, whilst others are indoors. The deep snow made viewing the outdoor ones impossible, so we spent just short of an hour wandering through the musem and then took the bus back to Alta.

Alta itself isn’t much to look at; its main shopping precinct could be one anywhere in the world, except with just a bit more snow). A modern cathedral, called The Northern Lights Cathedral, was its highlight, which featured a lass playing the organ (how lucky are we? Great to hear the acoustics). We also took a short walk to look at one of Alta’s older buildings; another small church on the outskirts of town, which wasn’t open, unfortunately, but with the snow falling quite heavily, provided us with a lovely photo opportunity.

The highlight of the day happened much later. After lunch we watched the Marco Polo Orchestra play some cool jazz in the Showroom (excellent), and I was asked to take part in Blankety Blank again. Tracey went downstairs and came back armed with our coats so that we could go straight outside to see if there were any lights visible, since the sky had been steadily clearing all afternoon, and guess what… we saw ’em! In all their flickering, pulsating, full-colour glory…. we actually saw the Aurora Borealis, at first hand. To say it was awesome would be an understatement; Richard bing-bonged the ship to alert them of the activiity, and folks streamed out onto the open decks to see the spectacle. The thing about the aurora is that it seems to come in fits and starts. We’d been extremely lucky catching it when we did, because as more and more people came out onto deck, so they started to diminish. I dashed downstairs to get the cameras, but we didn’t see anything quite so brillliant for the whole of the rest of the night (we spent an hour or more out on deck, in the freezing cold, until almost midnight, with cameras and flask mugs, trying to keep warm and hoping for a repeat of the earlier activity, that didn’t come. The photos I did manage to get were pretty awful (Simon, the assistant cruise director managed to capture some amazing ones); sadly, my camera skills are rather lacking, and this was stretching my understanding of a camera that I mostly take for granted.

I think what amazed me most of all was the movement. I’ve seen tons of video of the Northern Lights and always assumed that the movement you see in them is because they’ve been speeded up. Not so, apparently; these were dancing across the sky like demented sound waves… absolutely brilliant!