Friday – 21 June 2013 – Bergen, Norway
Yesterday we enjoyed a welcome sea day after leaving Copenhagen Wednesday evening. I enjoyed the sight out our suite window of the nice calm North Sea, as well as the view from our suite's door of the long queue in front of our deck's laundry room consisting of less than 100 day Silversea guests who do not get free laundry service.
I visited Bergen from Oslo with a Scandinavian rail pass in the early 1990s. It was the rainiest place I visited during that late summer trip. This being the summer solstice, I imagined that it might be quite a bit warmer and dryer. I was wrong on both counts.
No matter it was again a rainy low 50s temperature day. I love Bergen anyway. As the sun rise was at 4:10am (sunset tonight here is at 11:11pm), I ran up on deck early to see the sail-in among the many islands only to be startled by an awful sound coming from the top deck. Why a bagpiper was performing on the aft deck of the Silver Cloud as we sailed into our first Norwegian port is one of the many mysteries of this land of gnomes and trolls as well as of life at sea. But there would be more today.
After a relatively solo last segment cruise, we were startled to see at least five other cruise ships docking around the small port of Bergen. As Silver Cloud is much smaller than most cruise ships we eased by the various ships named, Voyager, and berthed right downtown abeam the old fort. Along the same pier was the curious looking very modern Skandi Bergen, perhaps a whaler as Norway is one of the few countries that still allow the harvesting for food of creatures that are sentient and probably more intelligent than humans. (Also, raw whale meat is very yucky looking. Picture not included. You're welcome.)
We ran down the gangway as usual as soon as the local authorities cleared the ship to see the traditional carrying of the unicorn as well as the row of hanseatic houses. As mentioned earlier in the blog, the German merchants settled here in the Middle Ages to do their extensive trading. As Corey, our ship's destination lecturer put it, these guys were, "like the EU but with a lot more guns". But they built cool looking houses including apparently a very nice Scottish restaurant with a familiar name.
We fought off the various huge cruise ship tour groups—the one in front of us had narration in French, so I was warned to, "Prenez votre billette a la main gauche"--and ascended the funicular to the 1000 foot high summit of Mt. Floien. The view was as fantastic as I remembered it, and Barbara and I were able to enjoy a somewhat damp but scenic hike on one of the many well maintained (i.e. not too deep mud) trails along the top. I even convinced a local resident to allow me to take a picture with him.
We returned to the ship and after a rest checked out the nearby Bergenhus Festining fort and a "closed until late 2015" church, returning to Silver Cloud as the rain got heavier and to hang up our umbrellas and jackets to dry. A nice visit for the longest day of the year, not that we could notice it was.
We sail at 6 pm for the small town of Geiranger at the end of a wilderness fjord. We are told that there will be six other cruise ships there also enjoying the wilderness.
