We crossed back over the Arctic Circle, 66’33″N, at 8.45, but I didn’t go on up on deck this time. An hour later we were invited to go up for the appropriate ceremony.
As we had been told in the previous day’s briefing, this time there was to be no ice down the back. Each would be invited – no compulsion of course – to take a spoonful of cod liver oil. And we could keep the spoon from which it was served. “If you want more spoons… [you can buy some more in the shop? Oh no] … you’ll have to drink more cod liver oil!”
Excursion Manager Heinz and hotel manager Sigmund played out a scenario of how this would make us all roaringly strong. No hardship, I thought, I’d had to drink masses of the stuff as a child.
It was Sigmund who served me. The spoon was/is of an excellent quality – but I didn’t need any more. Instead I availed myself of the excellent hot chocolate being served in the adjacent Polar Bar, in a metal mug also to keep, which got rid of the unpleasant taste left in my mouth
I didn’t go to a talk on ‘Norwegian fairytales, myths and legends’. And I stayed in my cabin during a brief stop at Sandnessjøen.
But I did go onto deck 6 to try to take photos and a video of the Seven Sisters, ‘female trolls turned to stone’, about which we had been told in the previous day’s briefing. But as the PA announcement said, today they were rather shy, scarcely visible here behind the low-lying hills, because of low cloud.
The English-language briefing was at 14.15. At 15.00 we would be stopping at Bronnøysund for a couple of hours where there was the chance to go on a flat walk with Heinz, or to ‘visit the salmon‘. While I don’t eat meat, I do eat fish, including farmed, but I had no desire to see the farming operation. The walk promised to be a gentle one, so I had booked on to it. It would be on the green (in summer) part of the town, which was comprised of several islands.
On the other hand it would be dark, and because the weather was unseasonably warm – it should have been below freezing at this time of year – underfoot it would be rather slushy at times.
Indeed, there was melted ice on top of solid ice at times. We were all obliged to wear what they called ‘spikes’. I had bought some Yaktrax with me, but I was not sure that they would serve for all the surfaces we were to walk on, so I accepted the team’s offer of a loan. I felt totally secure with what I later found were also Yaktrax, the Diamond Grip version. Mine were the Walk version. (The guy in front of me kept losing his, with me picking them up, as he didn’t even realise they had gone. He was OK once Heinz had shown him that he should make sure they came well up the sides of his boots!)
The walk was partly in the town and partly through forest. As the forest part was on a Nordic walking track, it was pretty well lit all the way. Heinz was full of anecdotes and information about Bronnøysund and life in Norway generally. He loves talking, and I should have loved to have asked many supplementary questions, but we had to get back to that boat!
It wasn’t as light as this – it was fully dark at 15.00.It was neither as light as this, nor as blue as this…It was a little darker than this but the main interest of this picture is that it is of the town’s sports hall and indoor football pitch. Every town in Norway has one, said Heinz. The town of Bronnøysund has only 5000 inhabitants, the municipality just 8000… Much of Bronnøysund is water…Brand new hospital, and beside it what I understood to be sheltered housing
The walk ended at this church, the agreed meeting point with the coach with the salmon visit people, which was to take us back to our temporary home.
At 19.30 I didn’t, for obvious reasons, go to watch King Harald V’s new year speech on one of the public television screens.
A five-course meal was served at the special New Years’ Eve dinner, and fortunately the portions ranged from tiny to medium, which meant one could really enjoy every one of them, right to the end.
At 22.00 we were invited to take a book we had bought from the shop to be signed by the main managers of the ship. I wondered whether my very modest purchase of this wonderful little paperback book was not a little too modest, but I saw that people were offering just postcards, or even leaflets, to be signed, so I hesitated no longer.
The book describes every town in detail, making you want to get off at every one of the 34 stops and spend at least a night there.
23.30. Heinz, Sigmund, and two others poured champagne in the Polar Bar. (There were about 450 passengers on board.)
At 21.00 we had arrived at a town called Rørvik, where normally the stop would have been for just 30 minutes. But it was celebrated for its New Year firework displays, from private houses that is, not a municipal show. So we were staying on until 00.30. The time would be caught up by a shorter stay at Trondheim.
The town’s display started gently, a few minutes before the turn of the year.
The redness is caused by flares set off by private individuals. They come down very slowly – as they’re meant to!
And then things went mad!
I understand that some didn’t retire to their cabins a for quite a while. I turned in around 00.30.
On Friday 30th December, three busfuls of passengers got off at 08.00 at Harstad to take a drive through the lovely Vesterålen islands, and to meet up again with MS Trollfjord two stops further on, at Sortland at 12.30. At that time, I was due to get off there for a bus ride to Stokmarknes in order to have a decent amount of time in the Hurtigruten Museum before reboarding the boat there at 15.00. I had a late breakfast as I didn’t know that I’d get any lunch, and took away with me the means to make a cheese sandwich and an apple.
The day before we had been told we would, hopefully, pass along the Risøyrenna, the 4.8 kilometre Risøy Channel.
It had been dredged and opened in 1922 to allow the Hurtigruten ships through, giving them access to its eponymous stop, and other places on the Lofoten Islands. It was narrow, and part of a beautiful passage. The channel was 7 metres deep, our boat having a draught of 5.5.
At 10.10 we were invited up to deck 9 to observe our passage through.
When I arrived:
I missed most of the opening English introduction, but did catch that we were hovering to see whether it was going to be safe to go through, given the very strong winds. Heinz then embarked on a long spiel in German.
After a minute or so I saw and felt that the boat was making an about-turn of 180 degrees. Heinz broke into English to explain that the captain had decided that the very strong winds meant that, especially with so little difference between the boat’s draught and the depth of the channel, it would not be safe to proceed. We would go straight to Svolvær, arriving at 12.55, via Harstad, missing out Risøyrenna, Sortland, and Stokmarknes. And this also meant we would not be seeing the entrance to the beautiful Trollfjord, after which the ship was named. But here’s an account (subject to permission) I’ve just found by, apparently, a North American, of their passage through the channel in 2014 at a different time of year.
A screen map showed us to be on our way back to Harstad.
We had to go there to pick up the turned-back passengers who had left for the Vesterålen excursions, and to deposit those ‘ordinary’ passengers who were due to leave the ship at one of the three ports now being missed. They would be bussed to their destinations. Later in the afternoon it was announced we would not be calling at Svolvær, but would go straight to Bodø, missing out Stamsund as well, arriving at 22.00.
All these changes meant that the trip to the Hurtigruten museum on which I was booked would not happen, nor for others, from Svolvær, three hours of horse-riding, nor another fishing village visit, nor an evening trek.
Back at Harstad, it was time for a twilight tour around the promenade deck, 6, before I returned to my cabin and had my picnic lunch. When going round deck 6, I always started on the starboard side and worked anticlockwise.
It would appear that Harstad is flourishing economically.
The English-language daily briefing was bought forward 45 minutes, to 14.15.
The team had clearly hastily remade the ‘slide’ to amend the time of arrival, normally 02.30 the following day.
We would be crossing back over the Arctic Circle tomorrow.
Hege sought to reassure those of us who had been on the northwards journey that there would be no ice down the backs the following day, instead we would be invited to take a dose of …
That’s Heinz grinning at the anticipated ‘pleasure’.
A short presentation about life on the ship followed. It’s a good job there was no space for questions – I would have had far too many.
A film taking us around the lower decks was fascinating.
I can’t remember why I went up to deck 8, but for the Nth time I saw progress on the two jigsaws. One had been completed. I saw two people on the very final morning desperately trying to get the last 50 or so pieces in position before disembarkation.
At 16.30 an additional talk was programmed, the history of Hurtigruten, a sort-of replacement for the visit to the museum. It has been interesting to learn that ‘hurtigruten’ was sort-of lower case, an idea, an integral and essential part of Norwegian culture, less the name of a company, more a description of the journey. It means ‘express route’. It has been exploited by many companies over the years, but at its heart is Richard With’s initiative. The Hurtigruten Group finally came together in 2006. (Additional information from Wikipedia, inter alia.)
The afternoon was scattered with exchanges of emails with my French friend, Christine, I knew she would be following the ship’s progress on an interactive map, MS Trollfjord being ‘TF’, which, at the time of writing, is at the northernmost tip of Norway, on her second full trip since the one being described here. At the least Christine would be puzzled when she saw it way off the appointed route, so I kept her up to date with the various tergervisations. (There was also a mystery of a missing ship which apparently was going to be waiting for us a Bodø, but wasn’t and disappeared from the map, but that was never solved.)
Some time in the evening, it was announced that because of the extremely strong winds, the ship was now travelling more slowly, and we would not arrive at Bodø until 23.00. That was still 3.5 hours earlier than the official schedule. I have to say, other than feeling the gales up on deck 9 in the morning, I was very little aware of the winds. Perhaps the occasional need to steady oneself when walking around the ship, but that was all.
Happily this was, in all respects, a quieter day than the previous one. Indeed, you would scarcely have known it was Christmas Day, except that the female members of staff were again in glitterised versions of national costume (which had slightly diminished the effect of bad cop’s reprimand the day before).
Around 07.35 we were invited to the top deck to observe the crossing of the Arctic Circle. Given that it was dark, and that we were on a moving boat, this was the best I could do for a picture of the monument, despite the fact that a bright beam from the ship was directed at it.
The vast self-service breakfast counter catered for all nationalities, and more I suspect. I had settled by now to a daily bowl of muesli with fresh fruit salad, and a boiled egg. Two tanks of eggs bubbled away in hot water, hard-boiled kept, according to its thermometer, at 54 degrees C, and soft-boiled at 48 degrees. As they say, you learn something every day. Egg cooking temperatures is not something I would have expected to learn on a Norwegian cruise.
I shared a table for that breakfast with a long-retired Norwegian. He told me, in his very broken English, that he owned 18 ships, that his two sons ran the business in Bergen, that he had lost his wife to dementia eight years previously, and that he did this cruise every Christmas. Why on a Hurtigruten boat, I asked, not on one of his own? Because his boats did not cater for passengers. I think I believe him on all details. He wasn’t the only person I met who who repeated the experience every year at this time. We talked a little about Norway being a rule-taker in the EU without being a rule-maker, but his English was not up to a deep conversation on the matter. I just got from him that the Norwegians had difficulty in forgetting the war. (And my goodness was I going to learn in the following days how much they had suffered.)
When the boat stopped at Ørnes for 10 minutes, I walked round deck 6.
And took a couple of short videos as we moved off.
At 10.30 it was time for the Arctic Circle ceremony, but only after a prize-giving. During the previous day’s briefing, Heinz had invited us to estimate the exact time we would cross the Arctic Circle, entries to be in by 22.00. (My guess was way out.) The winner was presented by the captain with a flag that had been flying on the boat. (There were too many people in the way for me to get a decent picture of it when it was unfurled.) He had been just 18 seconds off. When asked how he was able to be so accurate, he replied that he felt he was a bit of a cheat as he was an experienced mariner.
Heinz, the winner, the captain
There was no way I was going to take part in the Arctic Circle ceremony, despite the small glass of spirits which would be given to participants as a reward afterwards. Before I had set off, a Norwegian-English friend had told me what it was: an ice cube down the back. Here’s J’s instinctive reaction after he had undergone it.
I had another fascinating conversation at lunch, with H, the Indian doctor from ‘our’ table. He had a wonderful tale to tell of his ambition to learn English from a very young age, bribing his older brother to take him to a library in a town some was miles from his village so that he could go to a library, in due course refusing to follow his family’s business ambition for him, but training to be a doctor, making a wonderful marriage, arranged by his parents because he had been unable to find a wife for himself, (a condition of his family’s support to emigrate to the US), then practising all his life as a doctor in New York, where he still lived. His wife had not been well enough to accompany him on the cruise. His sole ambition was to see the Northern Lights and once that had happened he was happy.
At 14.00 the ship stopped at Bodø – minus 2° C. Because it was Christmas, there were only two excursions happening – normally there would have been perhaps half a dozen. These two were a hike with the expedition team, and a sightseeing tour of the town including the nearby Saltstrømmen Maelstrom . I had not booked for either, and I was even a little nervous, after the previous day, of stepping of the boat during the two-hour stay, so I contented myself with another stroll around deck 6 in the Arctic twilight.
Speedboat for use in emergencies
At 16.00 local time I was able to listen in my cabin to our new King’s Christmas message, live on BBC Radio 4.
The English-language briefing at 17.00 told us something about…
… where we would be the following day for four hours, and the single excursion which would be available this Boxing Day, a husky tour. There was then a presentation on the ‘Northern Lights, Myths and Legends’, plus some tips about seeing and photographing them. Apparently if you are not sure as to whether what you can see is just a cloud or the Lights, point your camera at it and they will show green if they are the latter. So all those wonderfully coloured pictures you see are only best photographically. The tip was to be useful the next day.
We had a stop for one hour at Svolvær at 21.15. I overcame my reluctance to leave the security of the ship, and was so glad I did. My short walk in the snow was magical.
(The whiteness in the background is snow-covered mountains.)
I have managed in the previous pictures to remove the most of the yellowness that my camera added to the snow, but have been unable to do so for this brief video.
It is with some dread, or perhaps I should say embarrassment, that I start this day’s blog. But it must be done, and then I can enjoy writing the remaining nine posts.
The day started absolutely fine, in more than one sense. At about 9.30 we were invited up to deck 9 to exchange Christmas greetings with a Hurtigruten sister ship, MS Nordlys, passing in in the other direction. I arrived (it takes time to put the necessary layers of clothing on!) just as the two ships sounded horns at each other, and took this picture once the other had gone well past.
I stayed up on the ‘sundeck’ for a few minutes more. (The snow was cleared in due course.)
Nearing Trondheim, we passed Munkholmen, once a mediaeval monastery.
Going down to deck 4 to meet up with J for our walk around the city, I noticed one of the many screens around the ship. This one is showing a webcam from the bridge, and through the window can be seen the approaching city.
It takes a while to disembark a couple of hundred passengers, not least because each must have his/her digital boarding card beeped – thank goodness. We set off for our walk at about 10.15. The ship was due to leave at 12.45, and we were asked always to be back on board 15 minutes beforehand. Initial briefing had warned that they would not wait for late passengers who would have to make their own way to the next port of call. I warned J that I was always worried about time and would be fretting if we dawdled too much.
We had a town plan with a suggested 5-kilometre walking route, which we decided to take. It would include the cathedral. The first kilometre or so was very slushy underfoot and I cursed the fact that I had not taken my walking pole from my cabin.
Trondheim, once known as Nidaros (it is situated at the mouth of the River Nid) was Norway’s first capital. (Bergen was its second.) It was the country’s ecclesiastical capital for centuries until 1533. Many Viking expeditions had left from here.
The streets were pretty deserted, and nearly all the shops were shut. In Norway, Christmas Eve is the main celebratory day, the Christmas meal being taken that evening.
Olav Trygvesøn, (spelling as on monument, more commonly Tryggveson) king of Norway from 995 to 1000, founder of Trondheim, and seen as an important factor in the conversion of the Norse to ChristianityThe spire of the Cathedral can be seen for miles around.Nidaros Cathedral, the world’s northernmost gothic cathedral
We didn’t have time to go in, and just continued on the route of the walk.
Town bridge over the Nid.View upstreamAnd in the other direction. We heard several times that fjords in Norway do not freeze, thanks to the Gulf Stream.
We did have time in hand at the over-halfway point, and stopped at a café for a special Christmas-flavoured coffee. (This was the only time I used cash on the whole trip.) Then we continued on the planned route.
Said by one or other of us in the course of the next hour:
“There are those steps we saw on the way out. We’re only about 15 minutes away now.”
“The front of the station is magnificent, but I don’t remember going past it before.”
“This is good, we should be going over a whole load of railway lines.”
“This crunchy snow is lovely, but it’s a bit worrying, there aren’t many footprints in it.”
“We shouldn’t be going parallel to railway lines, but at an angle to them.”
“Ah, there’s the boat!”
500 metres later:
“We can’t get through, there’s a great fence in the way!”
“Back to the last bridge across the fjord. Crikey, it’s miles away [actually a kilometre].”
1500 metres later:
“Let’s thumb a lift” (Unsuccessful)
500 metres later, I’m really flagging, me to J:
“There’s the boat again, you run on and get them to hold departure.”
J runs on but 300 metres on I think I see him come away and turn aside, he doesn’t hear me when I call, and I’m not sure it’s him. I get to the boat. It’s not ours! It’s Hurtigruten, but MS Richard With (pronounced Rickard Witt, we learned in due course; he was the founder of the line in 1893), and it’s not the setting we had left at 10.15, but a much more industrial area.
I catch up with J to see him on the phone and making marks in the snow. I learn that the boat has phoned him. They haven’t left – phew! He tells me to ring the number he’s written in the snow on my phone – a taxi firm. Fourth time, I manage to get through – recorded voices in Norwegian! The boat listens via his phone what mine is saying and I press the appropriate numbers they tell me and eventually get through to human being who understands English, tell them where we are: “By the Kornsilo building in Trondheim.”
Amazingly the taxi arrives within a very few minutes, and takes us, partly back the way we had come, and then in a completely different direction to what we expected! MS Trollfjord was still there, asking on J’s phone where we were, just as we approached the pedestrian gangway. Best 290 kroners, €28 euros, £25 ever spent on my euros debit card!
The boat left 25 minutes later than scheduled (so we were 40 minutes late). We got a dressing down, from it seems good cop and bad cop. The former said it was not the first time it had happened, and bad cop told us – from the captain! – that the only reason that they had waited for us was that it was Christmas Eve and there was no transport that day – we learned in any case that we would probably have had to fly to a further stop, perhaps after four days! – and that they wouldn’t wait for us should this happen again. There was no chance of their needing to, we assured them!
I was utterly exhausted. In all we had walked/run three kilometres more than we should and I was dropping. J, somewhat younger and in any case much fitter than I, was less so, but just as shaken.
It was lunchtime, 13.30 by now, but I had no appetite. I staggered up to the bistro on the deck 5 and got a coffee, but my hand was shaking so much I couldn’t get down the stairs to my cabin on deck 4 without surely spilling the contents of the mug. Fortunately a member of staff by the stairs took it from my hand so that I could get down safely. I stayed in my cabin until the English-language briefing at 15.00.
A few more times just before due departure times I heard people’s names being called over the intercom, with a request to report to reception. Were they on or off the ship I wonder. There was the occasional further delayed departure, but at the time I made no links, and now make no assumptions…
Excursions team leader Heinz opens the briefing. He did make one or two references to departure having been delayed by a couple of late passengers. Did he know we were present, had he said the same in the previous German-speakers briefing?
We would be crossing the Arctic Circle the following day, and we would be invited up on deck at some point to see this marker – though it would be dark of course.
Indeed, the sun would be ‘up’ for just over an hour at our substantive next port of call – and only this much because we were past the winter solstice. That said, further north, once the sun was always below the horizon, there was a always period of twilight for some time either side of midday. (At Trondheim’s latitude, the sun had been up between 10.03 and 14.33.)
A heavy swell in open sea could be expected that evening from 18.15 for a couple of hours.
The briefing over, Heinz then gave a us a fascinating talk about the age of the Vikings.
During this my whirring brain managed to work out where we had gone wrong. ‘Those steps we saw on the way out’ were not the same as we had passed in the morning, and we had taken a 180 degree wrong turn. Thus the additional 3 kilometres, because a canal obliged us to double back. Indeed when we went back to the bridge to get across it we were again only about 15 minutes from the boat.
There was no expectation of ‘dressing for dinner’ on the voyage, but some, not many, did choose to change. More made the effort for this evening’s celebratory meal, including me. But I had had no idea of what the temperature would be on the boat, and had only put a warm winter dress in my suitcase. Much too hot! (Indeed, until we were quite far north, I found the boat too warm for me, and was glad to be able to regulate my cabin’s temperature.)
We had just sat down at one of the three sittings that evening, when over the loudspeaker we learned that the aurora borealis was on show. Mad dash by many for deck 9, but I went via my room to put on warm outer clothing on over my warm dress, and long boots instead of my flimsy shoes. And then there was of course no question of waiting for the lift so I ran up the five flights of stairs as fast as I could. Once I got there I saw nothing of what I expected, just long wisp of cloud. (As with the wisp in the last photo in my previous post, I suspect that that was indeed the aurora – more in a later post.)
I rejoined my companions who were well into their first course. A non-meat eater, I chose (it was buffet service at this dinner, I’m not sure why) some seafood, and enjoyed it, then started to feel I might be bringing it up again. The combination of the day’s stressful adventure, the mad dash to deck 9, the swell… I excused myself from the table, as I was at clear risk of embarrassing myself (for a second time that day!) and ruining my companions’ meal, and went to lie on my bed, from which point I felt fine. I did not return to table.
I’m pleased to say that the swells did not trouble me in the least in later days, and I learned that I had even slept through a couple of storms!
By the way, I woke up at 01.40 that night, at a stop – and was able to see from the timetable that the ship had caught up with itself.
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