Kirkenes sits at the top of the world, a former iron-mining town 400 km north of the Arctic Circle and just a few kilometres from the Russian border. It is the end of the line for the Hurtigruten coastal ferry from Bergen — a six-day voyage up the fjords of the Norwegian coast — and for most travellers it is either the reward at the end of that trip or the jumping-off point for winter adventures in Finnmark.
There is not much of a town. A single main street, a handful of hotels, a supermarket, a few restaurants. What brings people here is the country around it: the taiga of Øvre Pasvik National Park, where the Russian, Finnish and Norwegian borders meet at a stone cairn; the Barents Sea, where winter king-crab safaris pull enormous crustaceans through holes in the ice; the nightly possibility of aurora borealis from September to April; and the famous Snow Hotel, rebuilt each winter out of ice cut from a nearby lake.
Visit in winter for the snow and the northern lights, or in high summer for the midnight sun — the sky never quite goes dark between mid-May and late July. The rest of the year is less interesting.