Svolvær - Senja

Today we have to get up early again, which is very hard after last night’s northern lights hunt. We have breakfast at our Airbnb and pack everything up to move on.

We drive to Svolvær, where we join the Silent Trollfjord Boat Cruise that Annina gave Nicolas for his birthday. It is a fairly large, fully electric boat, so it glides quietly through the water. The only sound comes from the water churned up by the propulsion system.

We speed across the sea, which makes for a strong headwind, while the tour guide keeps pointing out interesting places and helps us spot wildlife. Within just a few minutes we see the first white-tailed eagles circling over the sea. The entrance to Trollfjord is particularly narrow, barely 100 metres wide. The fjord is two kilometres long and can only be reached by boat. It is surrounded by very high mountains, between 600 and 1000 metres.

At the entrance to the Trollfjord, the crew lowers a small remote-controlled underwater drone into the water and streams the underwater world live to screens, so we can see what the seabed looks like. We see lots of fish, including some larger ones, and sea urchins that live down there.

The trip through the Trollfjord is spectacular, and on the way back we see a few more sea eagles. We also have extremely good weather: Not a cloud, only sun in the sky. The boat trip in this weather is a great way to wrap up our time in Lofoten.

After the boat trip, we visit a few shops in Svolvær before refuelling our car and starting our long drive. Today we drive 5.5 hours up to Senja. So we keep heading north, which is crazy, because temperatures there are supposed to drop below zero at times… The drive is quite tiring, as we are both pretty exhausted from the lack of sleep after the last few aurora nights. But we take turns at the wheel and arrive safely in Senja at 9 pm. The scenery along the way was fantastic, with panoramic views of the mountains and the sea almost the whole time.

Our Airbnb is a tiny house on a road that not even Google Maps knows, so we have to drive to the exact coordinates our host gave us. This is now the furthest we have been from our home in Switzerland: Over 3400 kilometres, or almost 40 hours by car. But the tiny house is very nice and sits right on the fjord. We are already pretty tired, so we make simple ready meals that only need hot water: Pasta with tomato sauce. Afterwards we start editing our northern lights photos from last night. Meanwhile it has got dark and the Kp index is high, which gives us a good chance of more northern lights tonight. Nicolas goes outside with the camera and does indeed see the first faint aurora. So off we go with camera, tripod and fast lenses: Tonight’s aurora hunt is on, and suddenly we are wide awake! We have our private beach on the fjord all to ourselves, where we photograph and enjoy the northern lights. As our road has no street lights, there is almost no light pollution either.

We don’t go to bed until around 2 am, because the northern lights keep us awake until they disappear behind the thickening cloud.