Kirkenes; Saturday, 20 May, 2023

Another relatively relaxed morning as the flight we had booked had slowly crept later into the afternoon with multiple small reschedules over the preceding months.

After checking out we caught a taxi round to the airport and checked in for our hoppa-plane service up to Kirkenes via Vadso with Widerøe on one of their small turboprop planes.

All loaded and ready to go the pilot started up the engines and then about 90 seconds later powered them down as he then accounted there was a technical issue. We sat on the tarmac for about 15 minutes whilst the captain was on the phone to tech support before both he and the first officer got out of the plane. A couple of minutes later they got back on, closed everything up and started the engines up again, only to power them down again about 2 minutes later.

A second very quick trip out of the plane by the first officer and third time lucky the engines fired up and this time the propellers were going noticeably faster, or more accurately so fast that they were no long noticeable as anything other than a blur, and so 30 minutes late we took off from Tromsø on a plane that appeared a few minutes earlier to have faulty engines.

As the plane was unpressurised we flew relatively low, and consequently had quite the bumpy journey up through the northern parts of Norway, not helped by wondering if every bump and thud would be accompanied by further engine trouble, but eventually we made it down onto the ground in Vadso for our quick stop there and for about three quarters of the plane to disembark and one person to board.

Thankfully the engines started up fine on the first attempt here and a short hop over the fjord later we touched down in our final destination Kirkenes, where we grabbed our luggage, called a cab and headed into town.

After dropping off our luggage we headed down to the hotel restaurant for dinner as the cab ride through town round to the hotel had shown that not much was open on a Saturday evening.

Dinner completed we headed out for a quick wander round the town before heading back to the hotel for a nightcap, after which I went out for a longer explore round the town taking some photos before heading back to the hotel and turning in for the night.