There's a good chance of seeing the luminous green curtain of the northern lights in the night skies over Tromso.

As someone who prefers cold climates, I have been to the frozen wasteland of Antarctica, and I have spent many happy years skiing. So I leapt at the prospect of traveling to Oslo and Tromso, Norway, the latter a frigid little town known as the Gateway to the Arctic. I wouldn't be there during polar night, the period between mid-November and mid-January when there is virtually no sun, but being above the Arctic Circle would be exotic enough. And Tromso is right in the center of the northern lights zone, where that celestial green glow sometimes can be seen dancing above.

My excuse was a conference where I would hear contemporary polar adventurer Borge Ousland speak. Fact is, I have been fascinated for years by tales of exploration, of survival in extremes of ice and snow. In particular, I've always wondered why Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who won the race to be the first man at the South Pole and lived to tell about it, seemed to get short shrift from English-language books and movies compared with Robert Falcon Scott, the British naval officer who lost the race and died.

A visit to see the Fram, the ship that took Amundsen to Antarctica, wouldn't answer the question, but in Oslo one bright autumn day, my friend Evelyn and I made a beeline anyway for the Fram Museum, housed on the city's Bygdoy peninsula.

The "strongest wooden ship in the world" and one of the most famous sailing vessels in history, the Fram ventured farther north and farther south than any other ship. Under Amundsen's command, it traveled to the bottom of the world for his race to the South Pole in 1910. Before that, in 1893, it had conveyed Fridtjof Nansen on his journey to the Arctic Sea.

Outside the museum, Evelyn and I were confronted by a bust of Amundsen, his beak of a nose projecting from his face like a nautical sextant. Inside, the red, black and white stern of the Fram loomed over a larger-than-life statue of Nansen. As we circumnavigated the ship, we came across another outsize statue, this one of Amundsen. We were to discover that just as the Anglo-American world can't get enough of Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton and their harrowing voyages, Norway reveres its seafaring heroes from Viking times to the present.

The Fram was built to resist being crushed by pack ice at the pole, yet the builders had left room for amazingly civilized items on board, including an upright piano and a gramophone. A Christmas dinner menu showed that Nansen's men had feasted on oxtail soup, reindeer roast and cloudberry porridge. Among the museum displays were cases of Horlicks malted milk from Racine, Wis., and -- these were Scandinavians, after all -- a bottle of aquavit.

Visitors don't have to come here with much knowledge about Norwegian explorers; the museum explains a great deal. It tells how Amundsen had wanted to be the first to arrive at the North Pole but could not raise enough money to beat Americans Frederick Cook or Robert Peary there. Instead, he secretly headed south toward the Antarctic, aiming to plant the Norwegian flag at the South Pole before Scott reached it. Scholars have argued that Amundsen was able to win the race across the frigid expanse because he used dogs and skis to pull his men and sledges, while Scott and his crew relied on "man-hauling," dragging their sledges behind them.

"It was a tricky race," said Per Lyngaas, a naval architect and engineer who happened to be at the museum that day; Amundsen was smart to "put his bets on doggies."

From Oslo we flew to Tromso aboard a Norwegian Air Shuttle plane with a likeness of skater-turned-movie-star Sonja Henie on its tail. (Amundsen, Nansen and Thor Heyerdahl decorate other aircraft in the fleet.) Tromso was once dubbed the Paris of the North. Why? A hundred years ago, visiting Parisians were startled to see "well-dressed people" at such a distant outpost, Svein Ludvigsen, the jocular regional governor, explained later at our conference. "We are north of the CNN signal, but we have the Golf Network, cold weather and warm people," he said.

Tromso is a fishing village, fiord cruise ship port and university town situated on an island of rolling hills. Its port, piers and hotels cling to the water's edge, while the isosceles-triangle walls of its ice-white Arctic Cathedral, built in 1964, dominate the mainland shore across the water. Tromso bore no resemblance whatsoever to Paris on that cold, quiet Sunday as Evelyn and I strolled beyond the waterfront. Within two minutes, we landed in front of another statue of Amundsen. "He's everywhere!" I exclaimed. "Well, he was!" she replied.

There were more Amundsen statues, including two busts in Tromso's fine Polar Museum. Housed in a former warehouse on the waterfront, steps from fishing vessels that sell each day's catch to local shoppers, the museum offers an exhaustive variety of arctic-related equipment, clothing, dioramas and stuffed polar bears. There are also models of the blimp that flew Amundsen and others over the North Pole in 1926 and of the airship Norge, in which the polar hero was killed while on a rescue mission in 1928.

Initially I feared that Polaria, a second Tromso museum described as an "Arctic Experience Center," would be a Norwegian Disney World, only colder. Not entirely so. From the side, the building resembles a stack of ice floes tumbling like dominoes onto the shore. Inside, one main attraction is a chilled (but still indoor) pool where ruddy-cheeked high schoolers feed three bearded seals and play with them, to the delight of onlookers.

"Yum, yum!" laughed 18-year-old Ida Dalan as she tossed chunks of vitamin-laced herring and mackerel to Aurora, a rubbery, fat seal who obeyed commands by high-fiving the teenager with her flipper and doing vertical spins with her head above the water. Then Aurora obediently crawled onto the ice shore, waddled toward Ida, allowed her whiskers to be stroked and rolled over on her back for a tummy rub.

The Adventure Travel World Summit got underway with the speech by Ousland. The vivid, howling-winds video clips of his trips to both the Arctic and Antarctic put extreme polar journeys in perspective. In Ousland's opinion, Nansen's voyage on the Fram toward the North Pole in 1895 stood as "the greatest expedition in our time to the north." Indeed, Nansen's relative obscurity everywhere but Norway was a reason Ousland retraced his footsteps last year.

Ousland discovered the remains of Nansen's hut in Franz Josef Land, where the earlier adventurer had survived an entire winter eating polar bears and walruses. Comparing his photos with Nansen's, Ousland said it is clear that the ice in the region is melting: "I would be out of work if the polar ice cap melts, but it is much worse for the polar bears."

Afterward Ousland told me he hoped the publicity he gained would help raise the worldwide profiles of his predecessors. Nansen "needs to be lifted a bit out of Norway," he said. And how did he view Amundsen's lesser fame compared with Scott's?

Maybe Scott's is the more compelling tale, Ousland suggested. "The British are the ones who have the expression 'heroic failure.' Don't misunderstand me. I'm a great admirer of Scott. What those guys went through and managed to keep their dignity," as movingly recorded in diaries, was great drama.

Still, "no one can beat the fact that Amundsen was first to the South Pole," Ousland said with quiet Nordic pride. What's more, their race has spawned a sequel. A fish oil company, Amundsen Omega 3, is sponsoring a new race this month with six competing teams, the first since the original nearly 100 years ago.

The most memorable moments of my own expedition occurred not on land but on the sea. The skies were clearing as we boarded a ferry one evening in Tromso harbor. As we steamed north, we were told there was a good chance we would see the northern lights, and soon everyone was rushing to the upper deck. The show began as streaks of gray across the black sky. Then they disappeared and reappeared, changing to faintly green arrows, waves and pencil lines, braiding back upon themselves, an undulating celestial flow so lovely that I lay back on a bench and gazed at them for as long as I could -- before I could freeze in the arctic night.