It is possible to spend one weekend in Tromso and see the Northern Lights. Here is my weekend adventure.
I flew direct from Oslo, arriving at 5pm on a Friday. The airport is about 15 minutes taxi ride from the city center. There is also an airport express bus that runs about every 20-30 minutes, but if there is more than one person in your party, it makes the most sense to share a taxi. You can buy tickets for this bus on the bus.
I stayed at the Scandic Ishavshotel which is very convenient because many tours depart from there, and the airport express bus stops there as well. My first impressions of Tromso is that it was very cute and felt very safe. The thing to be careful of in the winter is the ice - if it rains and freezes over, there is a lot of ice everywhere so it’s super easy to slip.
I found the food in Norway in general to be expensive and not very good. My favorite restaurant in Tromso was the Art Cafe Bistro; all the food was homemade from the bread, to the butter, entrees and dessert. The reviews will mention the homemade cheesecake and it really was delicious. I ate here a couple times.
I found that once you hit the $300/night range with the Tromso hotels, all of them serve very good breakfast buffets. I was also happy that my hotel had soy and oat milk for the morning coffee, along with an espresso bar.
The next morning I had a reindeer excursion with Tromso Arctic Reindeer. I highly recommend this excursion. There are about 300 reindeer that you get to feed, take a short sleigh ride, have lunch and learn about Sami culture. The lunch is reindeer stew (or tomato soup) which I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance about after petting the reindeer. “First we pet the reindeer and then we eat the reindeer". But it is a traditional Sami dish, and they stressed during their talk that they have been raised to use and honor every part of the reindeer. For the curious, reindeer tastes like gamey beef.
feeding a reindeer
sleigh ride
That evening I had my Northern Lights tour. I realize there are a ton of companies running these tours and prices vary. I really do not believe there is one company that knows of secret locations over other companies. The one I went with Tromso Friuftsenter was excellent. We were 16 total, and the tour leader Trine’s family has been in Tromso tourism for a long time. I would recommend a good camera for the Northern Lights though, as sometimes you just don’t have the sky clarity to be able to see well with a smartphone. This is a photo I took with my camera (Fujifilm XT5). I would recommend knowing your camera well enough so that you can operate it in the dark. It was really cold out (-13C / 5F) and my camera was not happy towards the end of the shoot, having been outside in subfreezing temperatures for a few hours.
Northern Lights outside of Tromso
I got back to the hotel around 2am and I was happy not to have a tour for the following day. Instead I had booked a couple hours on Vulkana spa, a converted whaling vessel. It had a sauna, hot tub, Turkish hamman, and a ladder you could climb down to swim in the Arctic ocean. It was really nice.
After the spa I had just enough time for lunch and then back to the airport for the quick flight to Oslo!