On the last day of my first visit to Tromsø in 2019, I saw cable cars as distant dots moving between the city and the plateau, travelling up a groove cut through the dark pine forests of the valley flank. Thinking that the gondolas and the elevated observation point would both offer a different vantage on local topography, I made a mental note to return when I had more time, which I did, twice: once without my wallet and once with.
In the waiting room – two microphones clipped to the collar of my coat, the recorder secreted in my pocket and switch on – all was tourist accents: the British pair talking of a previous trip, the young Italians conducting an argument through whispers, the British lad trying to re-organise a dog sled experience, the French family comparing images on the screens of their cameras and mobile phones. In the ascending gondala, these conversations continued, amplified as the passengers squeezed in closer to each other. At the summit, the plateau stretched into a distance that was occluded by fog and clouds, the temperature much reduced, with fierce gusts whipping loose snow into miniature tornadoes.
I loitered outside the cable car cafe, trying to join an empty descending gondola. As it was, I had set the gain way too high on the recorder and a potentially compelling combination of murmured voices, sniffing, whistling winds, sliding and slithering of winter fabrics, cable car machinery, buzzing electricity and quiet FM radio, was chopped and distorted beyond use (just as I remember ruining a similar recording on a Pyrenean cable car in 2003). An edit, relying on the slightly less garbled left channel but otherwise unprocessed, is below.
ersfjordbotn 