Andersgrotta — Attraction in South Varanki

First of: This review isn't meant to hurt anyone's feelings that was involved in the guided tour. They tried their best and the short comings were made up for by the guide having lived during that time and being able to tell lots of interesting facts that were not written down anywhere.

Generally we were quite interested in the bunker after a recommendation from a local friend. The price of 300nok p.p. is a bit steep, but if done well might be worth it. The first problem arose while looking up how to access the tour. Apparently it's done by Kirkenes Snowhotel nowadays and the ticket sale is a bit confusing. We showed up at 12:30 and got in when the Guide showed up. The guide was a very nice, but hard hearing older man. He offered the tour in norwegian, Englisch and quite fluent German, but in any language spoke very fast and a bit sluggish. It sometimes was impossible to follow his explanations and we barely stopped anywhere for a true "guided tour" and instead watched a ~10min video inside that is also available on the webpage. For 300nok this would have been very disappointing if the guide himself wasn't from that time. While he was rambling a bit and repeating himself a couple of times, he was able to give unique information about how it was at that time and the experience of living at that time.

Overall, we feel like this bunker could be a great tour if it was more fleshed out. The guide was nice and unique, but for the price asked we basically just watched a 10min film inside a historic stone cave and got a bit of insight from a local. The surrounding museums offer almost the same information otherwise while 3 tickets there cost as much as one ticket here. If there truly isn't much more to this than what we had, then I'd even go so far as to say this tour is a bit of a...

A sobering example of what war does to a population. An underground bunker dug to shelter the whole population of Kirkenes during air raids in WW2, initially from the Nazis and then from the Russians / Allies. A set of displays inside explain many of the hardships at that time, and since. Even now Kirkenes is not free of world politics as the very nearby Russian border is effectively closed which has devastated local businesses, and destroyed the relationships of people who worked together despite their nationalities. A trip to see the nearby border is...

We weren’t sure if we should book this activity because 200NOK per person for visiting a Bunker for 30min didn’t seem much appealing but it turned out to be very interesting and totally worth the money! Actually, we went almost an hour and had lots of time to explore the bunker and also did a Q&A with our guide. If you’re booking through Snowhotel Kirkenes, be sure to ask for guide Milli from Croatia, he was more than helpful with our questions and did a very good job....