Tromsø

More aurora tours leave Tromsø on a January evening than leave any other town on earth. That is a mixed blessing. The competition has pushed a seat on a large coach below 100 EUR and produced a class of guide who reads three weather models before dinner and knows which valley clears first when the wind turns southwest. It has also produced pull-offs where six vehicles park together and forty people stand in each other's photographs.

And it sits on the least open sky in Norway. Eleven seasons of reanalysis give Tromsø a usable sky on 25.4% of season nights, against 32.9% at Bodø and 29.3% at Alta, both of which beat it in all seven months. This is the coast, the Gulf Stream keeps it warm and wet, and the cloud is the whole business.

Which is exactly why the tours here look the way they do. The 74 departures divide into four kinds of night, and the difference between them is not really the price. It is how far the vehicle can go and how quickly it can change its mind. Everything else, the thermal suit, the campfire, the reindeer sausage, the free portrait, is a variation on comfort while you wait.