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.

An Arctic town with a very old church

Monday – 24 June 2013 – Harstad, Norway

We docked 9 am at our first stop above the Arctic Circle, 68d 48m north latitude Harstad, Norway. We were off the ship promptly as usual to check out the sights of this third largest town in northern Norway. Harstad's sights are kind of hidden from the functional downtown. So a modest hike out of town seemed appropriate.

We walked along the one of the main roads from the town center towards the historic settlement of Trondenes, passing well kept but mostly uninteresting homes. Little sight was made of the locals as usual. We finally came to a lovely lake after about 2½ miles of walking and shortly after finally got to our planned destination, the 1200s Tondenes Church. This is the oldest church in northern Europe and is built on the site of a 1100s church mentioned in a Norse saga. How cool is that! The thick walls and gun emplacement fenestrations spoke of both developing architecture and various uses of the building through its more than thousand year history.

We were most fortunate that one of the ship's tours had just arrived so that the church's doors (and the nearby Toileten building) were open. We wanted to see the church's priceless altarpieces which were imported from Germany in the 1400s. We walked around the extensive graveyard. A lot of folks died in Harstad since 1200 and seemed to all be buried at Tondenes. It was a bit surprising however to find a soviet monument just beyond the church along a coastal path. A nearby sign (in five languages) pointed out that this site had been a prisoner of war camp for captured Russian soldiers during the German occupation of Norway during WW II. Over 800 soviet prisoners had been buried here.

We returned to downtown Harstad to find that a major festival was in progress. As many as tens of well behaved Norwegian and a few bewildered passengers from Silver Cloud were being serenaded by a very well amplified group of Russian rock singers. We returned to the ship for a hardy lunch and a nap, feeling that we had "done" Harstad as much as could be done.

On to further north Tromso tomorrow. All I know from our research is that Tromso is, "the capital of the state of Troms, located on the island of Troms, and the headquarters for seal and walrus hunters." (I didn't know they were that organized.) In addition, the ship's brochure says that Tromso, "is known as the best place to observe the Aurora Borealis". We'll look forward to seeing the Northern Lights after the sun sets. Oh wait, it won't set here for more than a month longer. My GPS lists the sunrise and sunset times as "----" and "----". But the brochure goes on to state, "Movies are shown at the Science Center of Northern Norway, where one can lean back in comfortable chairs to watch a beautiful film shot in the region of the Aurora." But there is a cable car in Tromso, and perhaps we can get a nice meal of salt cod and after a bank loan, a nice beer.

Up two fjords with an umbrella

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 21^st. 

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. 

Yup, it's still raining in Bergen

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. 

Re: Why the name Louisiana?

Thanks, Marc, for the enlightenment. Cool story, even if not substantiated. I will forward this to my Danish friend.

Mike

On Thursday, June 20, 2013, Marc Raizman wrote:

Dear Michael:  You missed a piece of "dirt" following your visit to the above museum. The story, as I was told when we visited the place,was that

Alexander Brun, the museum founder, had three wives and they were all named Louise.

In Italian there is a saying, "Si non e' vero, e' bene trovatto."

If it isn't true, it is a good story.

Sorry to hear that you are about to lose your satellite connection because of your ship's northerly location.

Best,  Marc Raizman