Sunday - 23 June 2013 - At sea, crossing the Arctic Circle
As we are out to sea today but within sight, so to speak, of the now very low in the sky satellite, I will try to post yesterday's report on our full day's visit to the head of two fjords. The ship's schedule for today lists sunrise at 3:20am and no sunset as we will be crossing the Arctic circle before evening. The sun will not set roughly for the next week of the voyage. So much for determining when the sun is below the yardarm. Of course, we don't have a yardarm as well as a sunset. Oh well. We'll make do.
Saturday – 22 June 2013 – Hellesylt and Geiranger, Norway
The sail out yesterday evening from Bergen was more beautiful than the sail in, mostly because it was at 6pm instead of 5am. We sat outdoors behind the Panorama Lounge on high up 8 deck enjoying a number of included in the price of the cruise beverages. Besides a major tourist destination, Bergen is a working city where the former blood thirsty profit at any cost Hanseatic traders have been replaced by the current blood thirsty profit at any cost oil production industry. We sailed past a number of additional helipad and submersible equipped off-shore oil drilling platform tenders like the one we saw yesterday (see, I really knew what that ship was for) and a curious looking emergency evacuation training facility where platform and tanker crews can practice their E-ticket ride to launch the lifeboats when necessary.
We sailed along and within the Norwegian coast overnight and entered the Storfjord (Really Big Fjord, I believe) at 4:30am. I missed that part but woke up to see thousand foot waterfalls left and right coming down share rock walls with tops too high to see. That was mostly because it was raining raindeer and mountain goats and the top of the fjord was in clouds. Of course, the unbelievable abundance of spectacular waterfalls was due to the abundant rain. The view of these falls more than compensated to having to dress more appropriately for winter than, say, at home in Boulder on June 21st.
The first stop was at a purpose built "Cruise Ship Pier" in the heart of Hellesylt, a town of 650 hardy Norwegians who remained quite hidden for all of our two hour stay in port. The short stop was for the ship's passengers who chose to book the all day $249 per person "Overland from Hellesylt to Geiranger" eight hour excursion to board their buses. (We later found out that these now poor folks saw fantastic views of the inside of clouds for the entire eight hours.) Not taking this tour, Barbara and I took one of the oversize ship's umbrellas and did our own walking tour of this actually very lovely (as well as very wet) back water—so to speak—at the end of the Sunnylvsfkprd (sic) Fjord, a few mile branch off the Storfjord.
The rain turned to drizzle, so we were able to do a nice circular hike around the outlet waterfalls from the Briksdal Glaacier which runs nearly 4,000 feet down the mountainside (as the tourist brochure says). Briksdal means something in Norwegian, we were told.
We left this peaceful hamlet after Barbara dropped a sizable donation to the Norwegian fleece jacket and sweater industry. The shop clerk was a very pretty Lithuanian Ph.D student who spends summers in Hellesylt earning, as she said, "Norwegian salary." She also said that she heard that it rained 46 days straight a couple of summers ago. This fact was not from the town's residents who apparently also hide from her as well. She said, "I almost never see the townsfolk."
The 10 mile cruise to the more well know tourist town of Geiranger at the end of the Geiranger Fjord—a town so nice they named the fjord for it--was breathtaking as well as wet. The ship anchored as we were having our lunch on board. We hopped on our first tender ride of the cruise to check out Geiranger as the drizzle changed to a heavy rain. We walked through the tourist trap main street, taking in the sights as best we could, and hurried back to the tender pier only to find that the rain had stopped as we were about to take the next tender back to Silver Cloud.
Taking advantage of the change in the weather, we headed up the road out of town for a bit of a hike. Any road out of town goes up, now that I think of it. As it happened, we took a most pleasant walk to an overlook of the end of the fjord with its array of ferries and other passenger ships. One of these is the floating condo, "The World", where something like a $20,000,000 net worth is required for a prospect to be sent a brochure. I can show you mine, if you'd like. But I don't have a brochure for "The World". We also checked out the lovely 1840s church built in the style of the early Christian stave churches and returned to the tender pier as the sun came out, albeit very briefly.
