The flight from Shetland to Bergen takes around 45 minutes. So by the time you’ve had your cup of coffee and finger of over-sugared Scottish shortbread, the islands that protect Bergen from the blast of the North Sea are directly beneath you. An oil worker on the flight went so far as to tell me (in Norwegian mind you) that he could see his house below. Fortunately the Norwegian for ‘house’ is ‘huset’ and that sounds similar to ‘hoose’ in Scots; so, what with his downward finger-pointing, his babe-in-arms miming, his rather obvious happy smiles and the rapid fire ‘huset, huset, huset’ I pretty much got the meaning. You can tell I’m a man who’s good with language!
Bergen is a beautiful city; a beautiful, green city. Tourists gravitate towards an area next to the fish market called Bryggen, a 900-year old Hanseatic wharf. The leaning, off-centre buildings (now mainly gift shops and cafes) are constantly being photographed, painted or sketched by a flock of creative recorders. The addition of myself scrawling with coloured pencils and crawling around the buildings with a wide angle lens did not seem to disturb the scene.
Apart from Bryggen, the restrained colours of the steeply slanted roofs of other buildings, the unambiguous brilliance of the ubiquitous clusters of rhododendrons, the outstanding sense of design in almost every object and the sizzling energy of the young people all contrive to make Bergen a lively, attractive and fulfilling place to visit. Being a major sea port there’s an unspoken tension between the permanence of the locals and the coming and going of the visitors. If the extortionate prices are anything to go by I think the locals are winning hands down, and the visitors tend to have their hands up. Bergen is all about arriving and departing – and in a way that quite suits me on this particular trip. Ports are romantic places; if you are in a port, there’s always a sense of imminent escape.
The city thrives under the protection of seven mountains and the panoramic views from the top of Floyen courtesy of the Floibanen are truly magnificent. This highly modern mountain funicular railway whisks you 320 metres above sea level within six minutes offering a stunning vista of the busy sea port and the Lego-like cityscapes. Up here the whistling of the endless wind is matched only by the whirring of countless digital cameras.
I was lucky indeed to spend three days in the city accompanied by the warmth of a summer sun chastened by the chill of an evening wind blowing in from the Arctic. As you will have spotted in the photograph, even the Bergen Symphony Orchestra members had to dress accordingly.
It is from Bergen that the Hurtigruten ships leave for the long journey up the west coast of Norway. At precisely 8pm on the 4th June the ship hooted gruffly,
edged away from the quay and set sail northward. The 4th of June was my wife’s birthday…this is her birthday poem.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are retarded.”
On the MS Midnatsol’s tannoy that’s Norwegian for “We’re running late.” I heard it only the once. For the rest of the six-day, six-night journey to the most northerly tip of Europe this superbly-appointed ferry was never behind schedule. I say ‘ferry’ but in truth she is more of a cruise ship than any cross-Channel or Caledonian MacBrayne ferry you may have travelled on. Certainly 90% of her passengers see this as a cruise. The other 10% are local people hopping on and off and simply catching the most convenient method of transport that will take them to the towns and villages along Norway’s raggedy-craggedy western coast.
Hurtigruten, the cruise company, markets the journey as ‘The Most Beautiful Voyage in the World’. From Bergen every evening at 8pm one of their ships issues three great blasts of its horn to announce that it is setting sail for Kirkenes, a journey of 2,465 kilometres that takes in Maloy, Alesund, Kristiansund, Trondheim, Rorvik, Bodo, Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands, Harstad, Tromso, Hammerfest, Kjollefjord, and Nordkapp, Europe’s most northerly point overlooking the Barents Sea. At this point you are at precisely 71 degrees 10’ 21”N. Well beyond the Arctic Circle and on the same latitude as Amundsen Gulf and Barnes Icecap in the Innuit north of Canada and also at the same latitude as the East Siberian Sea in the extreme north of the Russian Federation. Nordkapp is a place you’d expect to be very cold: and I dared to go running at Nordkaap…and would you believe I ran in the same shorts and running vest I use here in Sedbergh. No leggings, no layers of Helly Hansens, no windproof jacket. It was warm and the hat and gloves and full winter weather gear stashed in my backpack stayed there. Even at Kirkenes, the ship’s final port of call before turning around and heading back to Bergen, and only six kilometres from the Russian border, the daytime temperature was around 18/20 degrees. I think I was rather lucky.
Geirangerfjord is a visual symphony: if there might be such a thing. It’s a work of landscape art created by that demon of sculpture Ms Mother Nature. This area of Norway is probably the most scenically outstanding in the entire country. The fjord’s crystalline rock walls rise to a height of 1,400 metres and dive 500 metres below sea level. The free flowing waterfalls cut through surrounding deciduous and coniferous forests whilst below the surface of the fjord lie submarine moraines and a host of marine mammals. At 9 miles long the fjord combines the fear and terror of sheer cliffs with the grace and serenity of still waters. Today the fjord is as flat as a runway, and is disturbed only by the cut of ship through giving waters. Geirangerfjord’s beauty, like its waters, is fairy-like and unfathomable. It is no wonder that in 2005 UNESCO added Geirangerfjord and its sister Naeroyfjord to its list of World Heritage Sites.
The bus left the village of Geirangerfjord and crawled gingerly up the twisty, zigzagging road to traverse the hefty shoulders of a great mountain. Some people snoozed, some people snapped, some people snuffled. For several miles we climbed steadily until we came to Trollstigen – the Troll Ladder road. On either side of the pass great pads of snow began to edge onto the road making it narrow and difficult to nudge past the seemingly endless caravan of oncoming tour buses. Within minutes the driver switched on the wipers as the snow began to land on the windscreen where it immediately started to huddle in silvery grey squadrons. The sky too became grey and the sun lost its strength to the impenetrable mountain mist. Trollstigen had become another of Norway’s several worlds; a cold, inhospitable place that was frequently made impassable by the weather and was therefore closed to tourists and locals. A place one would readily recognise as being occupied by the Huldufolk, the hidden people – more about those ghostly guys later!
A dozen chilled minutes and a dozen frozen photographs later we were back on board the bus chittering as we wiped the melting snow from camera lenses and dried misted-up spectacles with soggy tissues.
At the other end of the Trollstigen the road descended in much the same coiling way it had ascended…crawling in low gear from a great height down the twisting, zigzagging, now snowless, narrow road. This time, some people snoozed, some people snapped, some people screamed!
Something told me it was going to be a frightening descent: perhaps it was in the way the driver reached nervously into his jacket pocket and in an act of benign resignation hung from his rear-view mirror a set of purple rosary beads.
Now, for those of you who like an ordered life, here is an account of an average day in my life aboard the Midnatsol cruise ship:
- 7am: Get up, tidy cabin, open hatches on the portholes taking care not to open the actual portholes as my cabin is only 3 feet above the waterline! Go to the on-board gym, run 4 miles on the treadmill. Bid ‘Guten Morgen’ to the German guy who’s also a keen runner. We are the only two regulars in the gym.
- 7.30am: 20 minutes in the sauna, alone in the sauna. Watch the snowed-capped Norwegian mountains drift by.
- 8am: Scandinavian breakfast: muesli with yoghurt; fill a side plate with crispbread and slices of Jarlsberg cheese, add cucumber, slices of boiled egg, herring, more hard cheese, fruit juice, coffee and some more hard cheese for the extra crispbreads.
- 9am: About one-and-a-half to two hours working on the daily diary, running log, building a poem, unfortunately no email on board.
- 11am: Fill up coffee mug and go to top deck – weather has been fabulous, bright sunshine every day but tempered with a chilly north wind. Talk to some of the people I’ve met, read about our next port of call (Trondheim was Norway’s first capital when the country was unified and is a town of wooden buildings blah blah very musical blah blah two theatres and an opera house blah blah invaded by mercenaries blah blah devasted by the plague blah blah don’t even think about buying whisky here, it costs a fortune blah blah) – Trondheim turns out to be, let’s be gracious and say ‘unremarkable’.
- 12.30pm: Lunch: all kinds of soups, meats, seafood, salads, veggie stuff and a choice of dessert…mainly consisting of about 800 different cakes!
- 2pm: Excursions to watch sea eagles, or to enjoy a Viking Feast, explore Tromso’s art galleries and museums, walk on a glacier or slip on a glacier more likely, visit Europe’s most northerly point at Nordkapp or simply experience Finnmark’s pristine environment and multi-ethnic past and present – all from the comfort of a tour bus with a guide who’s been on a stand-up comedy course…a very short stand-up comedy course. “Ladies and gentlemen, they say that Japan is the most expensive tourist destination in the world, followed by Norway. Well, this year we are trying to be No.1!!!” Most folk choose to stay on board to sleep off lunch.
- 4pm: Coffee time on the top deck where there’s some soft rock music being played and a few people are wallowing in the Jacuzzi. On this part of the trip I have given up drinking beer. I drink just coffee. A small glass of lager costs £5.60, so can you imagine the price of a dram. Stick to coffee. When you board the ship you can buy a Hurtigruten mug and throughout the cruise you can fill it for free with tea or coffee at anytime, 24-hours a day. There’s a catch though: the mug costs £20. I bought one believing it would cost a fiver or so. I drank 47 cups of coffee in 6 days.
- 6pm: First sitting for dinner: waiter service at your designated table. I was at Table 35 with Sid and Heather who did some voluntary work at a school in West Sussex. Sid had just retired from a career in selling agricultural machinery. Also at our table were Nina and Heine from Denmark who spoke no English. Dinner was, shall I say, a rather one-sided, one voiced affair…they now all know more Scottish poems, stories and jokes than any other living Danes or English people. I must be honest and tell you that the food was extremely good, and there was plenty of it. Our evenings were spent mainly on deck in the bar (the rich Germans drinking wine and beers, the poor British with their mugs of free coffee). There was live music every evening from your very own Johnny Schandy, all the way here from over there! Johnny sang rather garbled singalong Abba songs (Can you hear the drums Fernando), Everly Brothers songs (Walk right back to me this minute), Elton John hits (I’m a Rochette Man) and a selection of Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch pop songs…every night was Eurovision Night.
- 11.45pm Passengers begin to gather on the top deck…the mountains are sentries to this watery kingdom. The thankful air has become more chilled as we sail ever further north. A few people are beginning to wear fleeces, hats and even gloves. Some are stamping their feet to keep warm; others have their complimentary tartan blanket draped over their shoulders. A tangible silence falls across the entire ship, prow to stern, port to starboard. It is midnight. Midnight and in the washed-out west the weakened sun is a ball of pale gold. We stare at it, giving thanks, giving praise. Through the troughs of a long day it has traversed the vibrant blueness of a cloudless sky and now, without rest, without sleep, without a breather, it has fallen as far as our tilting planet will allow. From this moment of midnight, our life-giver now commences its slow climb back to the high point of noon. We are in the area of the world that the sea possesses. We stand as statues in the celebrated light of the Midnight Sun: we Earthlings are being introduced to one of the universe’s great realm of natural wonders.
Nordkapp is Europe’s most northerly point. During the short summer season the local reindeer graze on the tundra’s thin grass for 2 – 3 hours then take short walks to digest the food. Then they feed for another few hours and take another stroll to aid the digestion. It’s a life not dissimilar to being on board a cruise ship!
That’s why I kept my running going. I even ran at Nordkapp. The tour buses spill their cargo of sheep into the tourist centre. But I do not follow them…I head with my small backpack back along the lonely cliff top road to a secluded spot well beyond the car parks and snack bars. I change into my running gear and stash my clothes behind a rock – hoping that the Huldufolk are not partial to a Bill Oddie jacket or a pair of Regatta cargo trousers! It’s a good run, not far because I don’t want to miss the bus but far enough to disappear behind a hill and feel free of human contact. It is a good feeling that: that loneliness of the long distance runner. I hate the loneliness. I love the loneliness. It’s a sporting conundrum, a tickler, a proper pancake.
The sea salt tingles in my nostrils, I breathe deep and rounded gulps of pure air, the cloud free sky, cobalt and clear, forces me to shield my eyes with my hand. There’s no one else around, my pace is good, I feel strong. In this silent, empty landscape my senses sharpen. A keen awareness comes over me. I see, smell, hear and feel the hugeness of being human. Skilfully I am eating the sky.
The Sami people have always worshiped the sun as a god and the earth as a mother. Today they worship the quad bike as passionately. Norway has 25,000 Sami. The men wear four cornered hats representing north and south, east and west. They say if you wear a four-cornered hat you will never be lost; you simply follow one of the four corners and you’re bound to end up somewhere!
It had taken six days and six nights to sail the length of Norway’s torn west coast. Today it took only two hours to fly from Kirkenes in the far north of Norway to the country’s capital Oslo in the deep south. The entire length of the country was under flattened cloud cover so there was nothing to see. Nearing Oslo, the aircraft descended below the clouds and we could then observe just how dramatic was the change in the landscape. Gone were the wild, bare mountains with their secret pockets of snow and the great gashes in the yielding landmass made by the incessant vigour of soft water on hard rock. Here, below us, was the comfort of pasture and soft-waved lakes.
Now so far on this trek I had not been in the position of having to physically carry the backpacks too far. The itinerary I had planned was proving to be a successful cunning plan. It collapsed in Oslo. I had not pre-booked an hotel in the city: this proved to be a serious mistake and a costly one at that! Lugging two backpacks and the camera bag around a bustling city centre you are not familiar with, searching for a hotel was not the best introduction to Oslo. My general annoyance at not having thought of this in advance and the general stress of aimlessly trudging through the city was beginning to take its toll. In something resembling a foul temper I marched into the SAS Radisson Hotel…a 37-floor skyscraper that dominates the city skyline. I had an inkling that it might be pricey, judging from the Mercs, Ferraris and BMWs pulling up and the drivers handing over their keys so that someone else can park their cars. Another sign that this was an expensive hotel was the number of vagrants, hanging around the entrance begging.
Now Oslo has more than its fair share of beggars, arsonists, law-breakers, beer-brewers, slaves, swan-killers, thugs, vagabonds, underhanded gangs of traitors, hen-thieves, bandits, heavies, gangster-rappers, knock-kneed chicken kissers, down-and-outs, arm-wrestlers, disgraced supreme court judges, pirates, wigmakers, skulkers, eider duck lovers, desperadoes and archpriests (sorry I got carried away there, thought I was describing Glasgow for a moment); some of the individual cases looked shamefully sad. But even though my stay in the city was short, I spotted what were very obvious drug deals and drug stashes being made. One of these was at 4.30am (my sleep patterns during this trip were erratic due to the light nights) when from my window on the sixth floor I could see two youths picking up packets from under a rubbish bin. Oslo is a fine city, it takes pride in itself as a community and it treats its guests exceptionally well. Its underbelly though, is as scarred and scratched as that of New York or London.
Almost as if to compete with Sydney, Oslo has recently constructed a fabulous building in which to present opera and ballet of an international standard. The Operahuset, opened in 2008, was designed by the Norwegian firm of Snohetta and it resembles the agreeable geometry of Arctic Terns with slopes, inclines, slants, angles and diagonals that are so gratifying to photographers. The building won the 2009 Mies van der Rohe Award, the highly prestigious European Prize for contemporary architecture. I overdosed on photographs of this standoffish, impersonal yet visually satisfying building. Yet it was not as snooty as it appeared to be, local people and visitors adore its dual attitude of superiority and friendliness: indeed at one point I found myself edging into a sharp edged right angle to photograph a most personal episode when I spotted a gentleman proposing, in time honoured fashion, on bended knee, to his sweetheart. So the operahuset appears to be fulfilling its role of international culture house and local community attraction.
Click here for Part III: Iceland.
Awesome images! I love the post so much!