Additional Comments from the Murmansk tour guide

1.       Regarding what is taught to Russians about the last 50 years; "It is very difficult to predict Russian History."

2.       On public art; "We love to put up monuments, but we never take any down." There was a huge statue of Lenin, only one of three left in all of Russia. The guide said; "Old people come and put flowers around the monument to this killer. Old people are set in their ways." I have seen the other two in Petrapolov and St. Petersburg.

3.       Her personal story; "My dad was from a collective farm which they were not allowed to leave except when he joined the Russian Navy. However, he was permitted to marry his childhood girlfriend from the farm and settle in Murmansk. My son just graduated from the university where I teach. He is 23 years old and lives at home with us. He is also a teacher."

4.       "The Soviets were atheists. That's how I grew up. Some old people follow the Orthodox religion, but we all have civil holidays near the religious ones. Easter is determined by the Orthodox priests who move the date to the next full moon when it falls on the Jewish Easter."

Not how nice it is but that it exists at all

Thursday – 27 June 2013 – Murmansk, Russia

Waking up after the two hour time change yesterday gave us a serious case of ship lag, but we were anxious to visit Arctic Russia. Murmansk is the home of the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy and the base for the atomic powered ice breakers. Of great historical significance during WWII was that the Allies supplied the USSR with essential supplies using convoys from North America to this most northern of ice-free ports, usually during the long dark winters to avoid detection by the German forces.

The Gulf Stream provides a quite mild climate for 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Temperatures usually don't drop below +10 F degrees in winter or exceed 75 F or so in summer. It rains a lot in summer, but of course it is light out for all of June and July. The population at just over 300,000 is essentially half of that during the cold war, and the extensive ship yard along the estuary was eerily quiet during our nine hour port call.

Without holding $500 per person Russian visas, we were obliged to venture off the ship only on organized tours. We chose "City Views and Oceanarium". The guide, a native born low paid instructor at the teachers' college, one of the two universities here, had good English for someone not taught by a native English speaker. (We did see the technical maritime university, the other college, as we left the port.) Fishing is now the big industry here, she explained. Just about everyone in Murmansk is involved in fishing, processing, packing, or repairing fishing vessels. She said that this is a male dominated, laboring city, where education is held in low esteem, and as a result even doctors as well as teachers are paid very poorly. This is not my kind of place.

The architecture reflects the different stages of modern Russian history as the Germans leveled the town during WWII, but they never succeeded in occupying it. The Stalinist Socialist style is reflected in the green gem of the railway station (note the faded red star above the roof), the terminus of the 26 hour journey south to St. Petersburg, but the Stalinist apartment buildings built after the war are in serious decay. Khrushchev and Brezhnev era apartment buildings, also in serious decay, are surrounded by thousands of square miles of tundra.

Our tour consisted of the best that Murmansk could offer the tourist.  We visited a bunch of monuments—the Soviets loved to build monuments including a gigantic WWII soldier with a little head but a really cool overcoat---and a little "Orthodox Cathedral". We discovered that the "Oceanarium" was not the research facility of Arctic wildlife we were led to believe but rather an endearing children's trained seal show. The creatures looked well fed and didn't appear abused, however, and the trainers seemed to really love their animals.  The room did smell awful from all the fish. Go figure.

We returned to the ship via the amazingly conventional downtown with its two department stores and the normal assortment of regional company headquarters, including that of one of the cell phone companies. We cast off at 6pm under the watchful eye of the, uh, "port agent". This gentleman appeared to be writing notes on every tourist that left the ship. This is Russia, after all.

My conclusion after this short (but long enough) visit to Murmansk was not how nice or not nice this place is, but rather that a full service functional city does exist in the Arctic. 

Passing by the real most northern point of the continent of Europe.

A long half day excursion on the shortest day of the cruise to not the actual place it says it is

Wednesday – 26 June 2013 – Honningsvag (North Cape), Norway

The most northern point of mainland Europe is near the town of Honningsvag, says the tour descripton. Unfortunately, Honningsvag is on an island, not the mainland. No matter, after a very windy and rainy arrival, so much so that our ever present piper had to take shelter on the lee side of the ship, we took our first ship's excursion since we boarded Silver Cloud in Southampton. This tour was a last minute substitution for the tour we had booked before we left  home. We were hoping for a much more adventurous tour consisting of a scenic drive to the fishing village of Gjesvaer and then a small boat amidst the off shore Stappan Islands to observe black-legged kittiwakes, puffins, razorbills, great cormorants , and of course common guillemots and European shags. I think these are birds.

Due to lack of interest by our ever adventurous fellow guests, the wildlife tour was cancelled and we had to settle for the excursion to the well know tourist trap of "North Cape". But we certainly wanted to get off the ship and see the North Cape Plateau scenery, plus we had been warned that the "best thing to do" if we stayed in Honningsvag was to visit the Shell gas station as it was smack on the 71st parallel. Truly an existential joy only.

So, off we went in one of the five tour buses (130 guests out of our total of 260 or so went on this tour and were awaiting the tour in the lobby even before the ship's gangway was up) to see "North Cape". The scenery was, let's say, extensive as well as stark. The spitting rain made viewing from the bus kind of difficult, and the tour guide felt it necessary to quiz each participant on their nationalities as she was quite fascinated with each mention of Britain, Canada, Australia, and the USA. She was even more excited that there were two couples from France. Of course, a tour guide who works year round in Honningsvag doesn't get out much.

A promised highlight of our featured tour was to stop at a "Sami Camp" on the way to the plateau. The camp consisted or four nice modern rectangular prefab houses, a guy dressed in native regalia, and an apparently hungry reindeer. The guide warned us that we could talk to the reindeer but not touch the man, or maybe it was the other way around.

After a half hour stop in the nearby gift shop hut (with a plastic Sami hat sculpture or maybe a wind blown garbage bag on top) full of fridge magnets and stuffed reindeer made in a factory in Finland, we headed out to the visitors' center at "North Cape". We watched a fifteen minute film that showed three seasons on the Plateau—the winter from mid November to mid January is pitch dark and therefore can not be filmed very well—and then we were served a hideous "sparkling wine to toast to the North Cape". 

It should be noted that "North Cape", the visitor's center one and not the actual most northern point of Europe, was established when an all weather road was built on the Plateau in the 1970s. So they located the tourist site in the same manner as one looks for lost keys under the street lamp. I ran to the men's room to mark, at 71d 10m 21s latitude, my so far most northern point visited, at least one of my goals for this cruise. (And an immediate need after the long bus ride as the Sami camp had no facilities other than the gift shop.) We were given two hours to visit the 100 foot away monument to the most northern point of the European mainland (which as mentioned earlier isn't there) and browse the supermarket sized gift shop where one could buy stuffed reindeer wearing raincoats or hug the every present gnome. Ever there, someone beat me to it and was already hugging the gnome.

After venturing out in the wind and rain for the obligatory tourist shots at the various misplaced monuments (there were a number of them as it doesn't matter much when you're not at the place they "mark"), we ran back to the bus with the others 20 minutes before the appointed time (except for the couple that is always late back to the bus) to make the half hour drive, now in serious rain, back to the ship while listening to the guide talk about all the Nazi atrocities during WWII inflicted on the people of the Finmark Province of northern Norway. I was both appalled and made very sleepy, for which I felt guilty.

We had a quick lunch and then advanced our watches one hour at 3pm, making for an immediate tea time. We will lose another hour this evening as Russia, the first of three stops in that country, is four hours ahead of GMT, two hours later than Europe. The time zones are very close together at this latitude. Today's half day stop in Honningsvag was one of the shortest and longest I've ever taken for a number of reasons.

This evening is the "Venetian Society" reception where I will be singled out for my 592 days on Silversea and Barbara for reaching 250 days.

Can a civilized city exist at 69 degrees north?

Tuesday - 25 June 2013 - Tromso, Norway

It was easier than we thought getting up early this morning after staying up past midnight. Hey, it was already light out. Of course, here in the Arctic in late June it is always light out. Really light this morning as there was a clear sky. We watched the scenery go by out of our window after opening the black-out curtains and screaming in pain from the kind of low morning sun shinning in our eyes.

No matter, Tromso is a gem. It's a university town in a rich country. Norway is very well off nowadays with its oil exploration and fishing industries despite the $5 bottles of beer in the state liquor stores ($15 to $20 for a glass of beer in a bar) and universal health, education, and everything else making the cost of living commensurate with the standard of living. There are big highway bridges everywhere, long traffic tunnels, rail lines, and even at 200 miles above the Arctic Circle the streets are all paved. Public buses (at $5 a ride) travel over many local routes. Take that, muddy street wild west Fairbanks with your cinder block hotels and bars full of drunks. Take that, I say. Or rather the Norwegians say, I think.

We passed a number of very overpriced (but not for Norwegians apparently) restaurants. We were reminded of the history of this strategic WW II area by the memorial to all the town's Jews who died from 1942 to 1945 despite the efforts of many Norwegians to resist the Nazis. For us today, we found the Norwegians in Tromso to be friendly and helpful. They went as far to shuffle their feet and looking at the ground in response when greeted, and drivers even made full stops (while looking down and not making eye contact) as we crossed the street at the crosswalks. Hey, these Norwegian folks up here in the Arctic are downright ebullient compared to those we didn't see earlier in other ports during the cruise since they just hid from us in their darkened houses.

Barbara and I got on the first shuttle bus at 8:30 am after we docked. We wandered the lovely downtown business district and waterfront and then hiked about 2.5 miles across one of the expensive looking bridges to the cable car for the scenic ride up a 1500 foot high nearby hill. The top looked more like 13,000 plus feet in Colorado with tundra and snow puddles, but we could breathe and the view down was quite unlike that of the high Rockies. You know, that water thing. As it started to rain, we returned down via the cable car and took side streets into some of the residential neighborhoods to see odd combinations of modern and traditional architecture. I guess you don't worry if you house blends in or not when it's dark most of the year.

After some time dodging the now intermittent passing late morning rain showers in the free Internet equipped Visitor Center downtown, we caught the 12:30 pm shuttle bus and headed back to the ship for a nice lunch. This afternoon we toured Silversea's Silver Explorer, the renamed Prince Albert II, which we sailed on in Central America about four years ago. We had watched it sail past us as we were having lunch. It has just come from an expedition cruise above 81 degrees north latitude in the Svalbard Islands (formerly Spitsbergen) and at least to me it looked like Explorer had snow on its smoke stack. The passengers were disembarking with their new parkas still on. It was fun to be reminded of that miniature version of the Silver Cloud with just over 100 passenger and not so much fun to be reminded of the kind of cruises it takes by the chained down chairs in the dining room.

Some more pictures from yesterday evening's midnight sun sail out of 69 degrees north Harstad, Norway. Pictures were taken at approximately 11:30pm and published to FB and blog.

10pm sailing from Harstad and some observations

Some thoughts on a midnight sun cruise:

1. Sailing at 10pm in all night sunlight is very nice.

2. We do fine with closing the very dark curtains in our suite and
turning day instantly to night. Some of the others tell us that they
are out on deck midnight or 4am. They would not be happy here 6 months
from now.

3. I met the wife of the bagpiper who is out on deck each morning. She
said, "It's tough living with a piper". I would not have guessed.