UP AND BEYOND THE ARCTIC
NORWAY CRUISE
And before you ask, we did see the Northern Lights. Or rather, the iPhone saw them. The first time these swirling green lights appeared, it was 9pm at night but we were sailing into a small village. Their lights were on, the harbour lights were on, the ship’s lights were on. So although there was a tiny hint of colour in the sky, the phone saw much better than the naked eye.
And as for the second question I know you’re going to ask, we only needed our gloves and puffer jackets once - in an Ice Hotel in Kirkenes. Although the average autumn temperature north of the Arctic Circle is supposedly 8 or 9 degrees Celsius, we wandered through the northern Norwegian towns coatless in 18 degrees.
The Hurtigruten Coastal Express was established in 1983 as a ferry service for the coast towns and villages of northern Norway. Over time it morphed into a tourist experience as well. People join the ship up and down the coast, some like us staying for the whole experience, some heading to a favourite hiking or skiing point.
We were on the MS Richard With (pronounced Rikard Wit) named after the Hurtigruten founder, a ship with 291 cabins, potentially hosting 490 travellers plus staff (and cars). It’s slightly worn but very comfortable. We had a “suite” with a double bed and a sofa bed so more space than on our river cruise. There are a range of areas to hang out in from the top deck to the Panorama Lounge. There we, discovered the perfect chairs to lounge in, watch islands and birds float past, and read. So perfect, that I decided to check the brand and guess what? They are the very Norwegian chairs that Susan and I chose in May for our reading room in Willagee. They haven’t arrived in Perth yet but we could have picked them up at the factory. Doing a walking tour of the Art Nouveau town Alesund, our guide explained that the main industries in the area were fishing and furniture making. Had any one, she asked, heard of the company Stressless? And there we were, all the way from Australia, and we not only had we heard of them, we’d bought some of their chairs! It’s wonderful to know that after a couple of minutes of sitting in them in Perth and now hours of sitting in them in Norway, we made the right choice.
There are differences between sailing on a large(ish) ocean ship and a small(ish) river boat but not the most obvious one. After my previous ocean experiences, I expected sailing in the Atlantic Ocean to be rough but the Coastal Express for the most past winds its way in and out of islands and fjords and tries for the most part to avoid open ocean sailing. Sometimes the water we’re on feels just as calm and tranquil as on the Danube. The most obvious difference, apart from simply the number of people, is the nationality of the travellers. On the river cruise, it was mainly Americans with a few members of the British Commonwealth thrown in. On the Hurtigruten ship, the majority are European (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, French, German) with a British contingent a few Australians and only on the last few days have some Americans appeared. All the ship’s announcements are done in Norwegian, English, German and French.
Whereas there were lots of excursions built into the Avalon river experience, with Hurtigruten, you can usually get off the ship at least once a day but if you want a walking tour or a hike or a boat ride or a bus trip, you have to pay for it. And nothing in Norway is cheap. We were spoilt on Avalon where good quality wine was built into each evening’s experience. Here, a glass of wine will cost about A$27. However, after some googling we worked out that we could bring a couple of bottles of wine on board as long as we consumed it in our room and I got quite good at locating the Vinmonopolet, the government monopoly alcohol seller, in the larger towns. Susan did quite well because Norway produces a range of gins but as you can imagine, it’s not a place where sugar is grown. However, the Norwegians do make one rum, using sugar and spices from Mauritius topped up with herbs from Norway.
Hurtigruten take a positive approach to dinning cuisine. Whilst breakfast and lunch are standard buffets, most dinners are sit down at specific times with a 3 course meal where 95% of the ingredients are sourced from local fisheries and farms. The quality of the food from pickled halibut to gin and juniper cured reindeer has been excellent.
Most of the stops up and down the coast are short - 10 minutes to dock, take on/off passengers, goods and cars - and often in the middle of the night. However, on most days there’s a chance to explore a town or a village for a couple of hours. Each one has had its own charm.
Ulke was our first stop, population 38. We drove in a bus up the side of the Hjorundfjorden stopping to look at the view at various points along the way, from a drowned farm that you can still see clearly in a lake to summer huts where young girls used to stay to milk the cows and goats. It’s an area of regular and dangerous winter avalanches and the huts have to be placed tightly together in very specific places to survive through to the next season. It’s also a place where people come to hike and at one point in a tiny town called Ole, there used to be four hotels. There’s only one left but the Queen of Norway had visited just the day before us and there’s a room named after Arthur Conan Doyle who stayed and wrote and walked.
Between Aselund and Bodo, we got off the ship in Trondheim for a few hours. As it’s a town we’re coming back to I’ve saving that up for the Towns of Norway newsletter, with a focus on places we stayed in for more than an hour or two.
As we continued past the Arctic Circle, the next town to visit was Tromso. It’s a charming place which has retained many of its original wooden buildings and has more sweater shops than I’ve ever seen. Not that one could even think of buying one on a sunny 18 degree day. As well as having a Polar Museum with stories of hunting, fishing, exploring and living in the north, this was the first place where one started to see evidence of Sami people and culture from their flag flying on a ship to a shop selling all sorts of reindeer products from skins to carved antlers.
Day 6 was the most interesting day for me. We started off in Honningsvag, the main town on the island of Mageroya, and were driven on a bus to two fishing villages. The landscape is arctic with no trees to be seen and the villages can often be cut off by snow. When I say “villages”, I mean settlements of between 40 and 60 people. In the first town, the school is now closed and there are no children left. However the slightly larger town still had youngsters. After catastrophic fish failures in the late 1980s, quotas were introduced for fish to manage the cod stock and there are also quotas for king crabs which can grow up to 1.5 metres. Their existence in this part of the world is a curious one. Stalin introduced them into Murmansk to provide more protein for the people but surprise, surprise, they didn’t hang around. When they first arrived, the Norwegian fisherfolk were furious but then realised they could make money out of them too. There are just a dozen or so boats in each village and often are sailed out into the Barents Sea by just one person. With a quota, we were told, a decent living can be made although most fishermen will have another job. It’s still a very gendered industry so the women in this tiny communities spend a lot of time on craft work, mainly knitting. However, we did meet one German artist who sketches during the summer months and then creates collages of her drawings in the winter months. Who knows whether she makes a living, but apart from looking at reindeer wandering down the main street, seeing minks swimming in the bay, and exploring fishing boats, her gallery is the only place for people like us to visit.
Sailing further east, that afternoon we docked at Kjollefjord and went to visit a Sami community. I confess I was surprised at how few of us took up that opportunity. I remember learning about what was called “Lapland” in an educational magazine called Look and Learn but Sami is the chosen name for these small communities, some nomadic still and some sedentary, scattered across the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The man we met is a reindeer herder as are two of his children. He talked about the language challenges (9 different languages amongst a total Sami population of 80-100,000 people), the removal of children who, like him, were placed into boarding schools to make them “Norwegian”, the negative impact of the Christian church on their so-called “pagan” beliefs about souls in nature, the banning of drumming and song, and other cultural expressions. Sound a familiar story? The key difference between the Sami and other oppressed indigenous populations is that they don’t look particularly different to their neighbours.
As mentioned earlier, we did have to put on our gloves in Kirkenes but only because we were visiting an Ice Hotel. I appreciate the imagination that lead to their creation but who in their right mind would want to sleep in one? It was more fun to play with the sleigh dogs at the hotel and feed the reindeer, on loan from a local Sami family. The reindeer wander free and drive the timing of the Samis’ life, moving from the coast inland season to season. The Sami don’t own the land, the various governments do, and they have little control over what happens to reindeer pastures. For example, the Norwegian government is planning to build 50 wind turbines in a Sami area and doesn’t need their permission. However, since the 1989, the Sami have their own parliament in Norway and are working to reverse the negative impacts of past government policy. For example, instead of kids being sent off to boarding schools, teachers now travel with the Sami as they go herding.
Another short stop was at Vardo, the eastern most part of Norway. It’s even further east than St Petersburg and Istanbul. There were two possible places to visit - an 18th century fortress and a memorial for the Sami and Norwegians killed in witch trials in 1661/2. I would have preferred to see the later but the ship was late docking with with only 30 minutes to race around, the fortress was doable given my tottering walking speed these days. However, there was a connection because the trials themselves took place in the fortress. There was a belief that evil came from the north and the men in charge of these northern communities, disapproved of both Sami culture and the lives of women left to themselves for months at time while their husbands were out at sea.
Our next stop was Hammerfest which has an impressive museum about the impact of German occupation of the north during World War 2. They used the area as a launching point to attack Murmansk in Russia and when pushed back had a scorched earth policy. People were forcibly evacuated and entire villages and towns destroyed. When the war was over, the Government was determined to create not just homes for people to return to but healthy homes - simple designs with none of that old dusty furniture. Was this the beginning of Scandi-design?
By this stage in our travels, we had turned around and were heading south. This meant calling into some of the places we’d already visited but at different times. Our return to Tromso was, for example, at midnight. There was a chance to get off the ship and attend a concert at the Tromso Cathedral. In order to help their guests stay awake until then, a documentary set in on of the fishing towns we’re called it to was shown. Called “Cool and Crazy”, it’s about the men’s choir in Berlevag. Made in 2001, if you can find it on line anywhere, it’s worth watching: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/feb/08/culture.peterbradshaw1?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
After that magical musical moment, we had an even better one in the cathedral. It’s a wooden building and the acoustics for the three musicians were brilliant. A soprano with an exquisitely rich voice for both traditional folk and classical music, a keyboard player for the church organ and a Steinway grand and a tenor saxophone player who also used a taragota, a Hungarian wind instrument.
On our second last day on the trip, we got off the ship a number of times. To explore the Vesteralen archipelago with its green farming lands and fjords, a town where Hurtigruten has turned elements of some of its old ships into a museum, and finally Svolvaer simply to sit and watch the pink sunset sky frame the Lofoten mountains. And in between, we sat amongst the bubbles of one of the ship’s whirlpools watching the world go by.
Stressless is not only the name of the very comfortable chairs we’ve spend hours in over the last 10 days but also the nature of this type of travel. You only have to unpack once. You might have to decide on what food to have but you don’t have to go looking for a restaurant every night. You can do as much or as little as you like from energetic mountain hikes to gentle meanders around tiny towns. By choosing to travel in September, we missed the highlights of snowy mountain tops and days of midnight sun but we’ve also avoided rough Atlantic weather and the days when the sun never rises. The Norwegian government offers all sorts of tax breaks to encourage people to live north of the Arctic Circle but from all accounts it’s a tough life. But not on the Coastal Express….
Photos:
1. Northern Lights, Berlevag
2. Hjorunfjorden
3. Skarsgard, Mageroya
4. Sami reindeer herder with Sami flag
5. Vesteralen
6. On board the MS Richard With
7. Travelling through the Trollfjorden
8. Sunset in Svolvaer
9. MS Richard With sailing into Sortland
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