Arctic Plans

Coolcation: The New Vacation Trend For decades, the summer travel script was simple: when the weather at home turns grey, you fly south, toward the sun. In 2026, a growing number of travellers have quietly rewritten that script — and in some cases flipped it entirely. As Mediterranean summers increasingly mean 40°C heatwaves, wildfire smoke and overwhelmed infrastructure, a rising share of travellers are doing the opposite of what their parents did: heading north, on purpose, specifically because it's cooler there. The trend has a name now — the coolcation — and the data behind it suggests this is considerably more than a passing fashion. What a coolcation actually is The concept is exactly what it sounds like: a holiday planned around a comfortable climate rather than a hot one, typically swapping a southern European beach for somewhere considerably further north. It's the inverse of the sun-holiday instinct that's shaped European tourism for the better part of a century, ...

Arctic News: Weekly Roundup, October 15–21 It's been an eventful week up north — a major autumn storm hit the region hard, and the government has followed up on the tourism-crime warning we flagged last week with real action. Here's what matters if you're travelling in Finnmark or Troms right now. A major storm swept through the region on Monday An orange-level storm warning covered Finnmark on Monday, with gusts of 27–33 metres per second forecast along exposed coastal stretches — essentially full storm force. Nordkapp was among the hardest-hit areas. The practical fallout was significant: Widerøe cancelled multiple evening flights to Sørkjosen, Hasvik, Hammerfest, Honningsvåg, Mehamn and Vadsø, a SAS departure to Oslo was also cancelled, and Boreal cancelled several ferry sailings, including the Skjervøy–Tromsø express boat. In Troms, the storm brought 50–80mm of rain in 24 hours, flooding roads and basements in places like Sortland, triggering landslide warnings from NVE...

Skjervøy: The Fishing Village That Sent a Legend to Alaska Most places get famous for one thing. Skjervøy , a small island town in North Troms, has somehow collected three — a world-famous dog musher born on its shores, some of the best whale watching anywhere in Norway, and a church old enough to have watched all of it happen. It's still, at heart, a working harbour full of fishing boats rather than a place built for visitors, which is exactly what makes it worth the detour. The boy who became a legend in Alaska In 1877, a fisherman's son was born here named Leonhard Seppala. He emigrated to Alaska chasing gold, and ended up finding something else entirely: a reputation as one of the greatest sled-dog mushers in history. Seppala led the longest and most dangerous leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome — the relay that raced diphtheria antitoxin across Alaska by dog sled to stop an epidemic, later immortalised in the story of Balto and the Iditarod that commemorates it today. His ch...

Arctic News: Weekly Roundup, October 5–11 Trying something new here: a weekly roundup of news from Finnmark and Troms, translated and filtered down to what's actually relevant if you're visiting or planning a trip north. This is a first test edition — let me know what you think. Important: be careful who you book a Northern Lights tour with in Tromsø This is the story we'd most want any visitor to see before booking anything. Norway's financial crime authority (Økokrim) published a national threat assessment this week flagging that criminal networks are establishing themselves in Norwegian tourism, with aurora tourism in Tromsø specifically named as an area of concern. The head of the Tromsø Guide Association says it's "obvious" the city has illegal operators working the Northern Lights trade, and local police confirm they're seeing foreign-run tour operations without proper paperwork. This builds on a pattern authorities have been tracking for over a ...

Svolvær: The Capital of Lofoten Sail toward Svolvær from the open sea, and long before you can make out the harbour or the brightly painted buildings along the quay, you'll spot two narrow rock pillars jutting straight up from the mountain behind the town, split by a gap barely wide enough to see daylight through. This is the Svolværgeita — "the Goat of Svolvær" — and it's as good a way as any to start understanding this place: a working fishing town, un-precious about its own drama, where a genuinely strange natural landmark doubles as a local superstition. Fishermen once climbed the horns to offer up the season's first cod, hoping it would buy them a good catch. These days it's climbers who make the ascent, for the view and for the local tradition of jumping the gap between the two horns — not something to attempt without the right experience and a guide. Svolvær itself, home to around 5,000 people on the island of Austvågøya, is generally considered the un...

Havila Voyages: Sailing the Norwegian Coast from Bergen to Kirkenes and Back There's a particular moment on this journey — somewhere between the third and fourth day, when the towns start getting smaller and the mountains start getting bigger — where it stops feeling like a cruise and starts feeling like something closer to a privilege. You're not on a route built for tourists. You're on a 130-year-old postal and passenger line, still doing the job it was built for, and you just happen to be allowed on board. That distinction is the entire reason a voyage with Havila is worth taking seriously, and having just sailed the Kirkenes–Bergen leg myself, it's worth saying plainly: it was genuinely fantastic — the food, the service and the excursions all delivered well beyond what the price suggests. What this actually is Havila Voyages operates four modern ships — Havila Capella, Castor, Polaris and Pollux — on the classic Norwegian coastal route between Bergen and Kirkenes , ...