Hammerfest. What a name. It sounds like a DIY expo or a celebration of horror movies. It's neither. Instead it's the world's northernmost town (and yes, I know that this is contested and potentially controversial but it's my blog so my rules). We had snow in Hammerfest which made it all the more Arctic and since then this nature stuff seems to have kept on coming. Hashtag smug.
After last week I was slightly worried that my expectations of the Northern Lights were unfairly high as they were based on photos and, as anyone with an SLR camera in the Arctic will tell you at length, cameras make the Northern Lights look way better as they pick out colours the human eye can't see. Was my perception of what they should look like skewed? Was last week's spectral smudge as good as it gets? They turned up last night and put on the full display - green shapes all over the place. The sky looked like a hifi from the early nineties.
Why have one phenomenon when you can have two. The moon did its eclipsing thing over a snowcapped peak. The impending clouds held off until peak eclipse, rolled in and hailed all over anyobe watching. All told more spectacular than my last eclipse experience where I missed it completely and had to make do with Matt and PJ re-enacting it on the side of a swimming pool.
And on top of all that nature, I saw me a wildlife. The man next to me stated with some certainty that it was a whale. I don't have any experience of whale spotting so who am I to argue? Turns out whales look more like seals than I expected.
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