Thomas Hunger is an average German fellow but with a touch of quirkiness—his obsession with the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis). He beams with childish enthusiasm and his eyes light up with wonder every time he talks about this natural phenomenon.
But Thomas is not a visitor seeing it for the first time nor is he just a regular tour guide—Thomas “chases” Aurora like a stormchaser would chase tornados. He is in the business of selling the experience of seeing the Northern Lights even though he can never guarantee his guests that he and his team will succeed in "catching" one. Still, his trips are filled with excitement and frenzy as he constantly consults weather apps to find it, communicates with his team on possible sightings, and crosses open borders into Sweden and Finland with his head fixed skywards, waiting for Aurora to poke out from behind the clouds at night.
When the van they travel in stops his enthusiastic guests get off and plant a thicket of tripods in the snow—cameras pointed up and ISOs boosted high to vividly capture the magical and undulating green waves in the sky.
Thomas runs one of the most successful companies in Tromsø, Norway incidentally called, Chasing Lights. Guests from as far as Malaysia, China, and India make the journey just to be mesmerized by this wash of green that fills the skies of Arctic nights. It’s an experience to cross off the bucket list, his guests often say.
After some time you start to realize that you do miss the sun a lot. You start to appreciate the sun
and again that is something that you don't have in many other places in the world. In most other
places you see the sun daily as long as the sky is clear. Here in Tromso we have to get used to
six weeks where it's very very dark. It's not like living in Berlin or in Paris or in London.
You're living in the arctic. You're living 340 kilometers. It's the northernmost big town in the world.
Perfect. Okay. Then we can get going. So one more time. Welcome everybody. My name is Thomas.
I will be having hopefully the pleasure of showing you the northern lights. Well if you want to be a
tour guide you certainly have to be able to infect people with your passion because people travel
15 000 kilometers just to see the northern lights and they want to be brought out by somebody
showing them the northern lights who loves what he or she is doing. So I think passion
and being able to you know being passionate being able to share that passion that's like the number
one thing. So the boots basically help you to keep your feet dry. You can walk through deep snow.
We need stuff to keep people warm. So we have suits in these bags. We also have firewoods.
We have hot chocolate, hot water. We have a shovel in case we need to shovel a bit. A place for a
campfire or the car gets stuck. If you drive far away yeah. Big chance or
Well how strong it will be it depends on the northern lighting itself. But the sky is going
to be clear where we are going. Yeah. We're expecting 100% clear sky in Finland tonight.
It's no guarantee but if we go there it's it looks fine. You know the weather in Tromsø is
completely independent from the weather that we have around here.
You know if you have like a really good show and people are really really happy
it happens that three years later you still remember the names because you remember the
experience the night with them. It's not customers. It's not clients or something. It's people that
you want to take out and you want to give them a good experience. Conditions look pretty promising.
Can see a lot of stars. It's not 100% clear in the north. We still have quite a bit of clouds
but overall I can see the Big Dipper, Little Dipper. I can see Orion's Belt.
I would say easily 100-200 stars. Clean enough to see the northern lights.
Minus 20 degrees when I stopped spinning my toes. First of all I was I couldn't feel anything so I
put very close so I burned myself. It's interesting that you that you live and work in a place
and other people travel to this place sometimes from around the world
to you know for you to show them what it's like to live here. I think that's
that's what makes this life and this this job so special.
We were sitting down on a frozen lake and it was really overcast. It was completely
dark. You couldn't see anything but then suddenly just before midnight a small gap
opened up in the clouds and you could see a few stars and suddenly it was like somebody
was switching on the light switch. The northern lights appeared and they were so strong that
they were shining glowing through that through that small opening in the clouds. It lasted
for exactly 60 seconds because I have a video of it dancing and it was absolutely fantastic.
It's amazing!
That's a christmas gift!
