On Norway’s Coast, a Voyage to the Top of the Continent By Paul Schneider
New York Times News Service
My ship, the Vesteraalen, was bound up the North Atlantic coast of Norway, with 34 stops to the tiptop of Europe on the Arctic Sea — a voyage that promised snowy fjords, towering mountains, northern lights and tiny fishing villages.
From the final village, I had heard, a person can even see Russia, but I didn’t feel like a vice president in the making; I felt like Zhivago embarking on one final glorious escape.
There’s more than one cheap way to go on a cruise, particularly in these darkening economic days. Some check in daily with travel agents, or bottom fish at CruiseCheap.com. But I, currently living in Florida and therefore in no need of sun, chose to sail north just as the days were growing noticeably short.
Every winter Hurtigruten, a Norwegian cruise fleet that is jammed to the gills with fjord frolickers in the summer, finds its ships undersubscribed. Since the line is under contract with the Norwegian government to deliver mail and cargo year-round with its fleet — most of its ships follow the same route as the Vesteraalen — it cannot follow the other cruise lines to warmer waters and must cut its fares roughly by half. Periodically, it further offers a two-for-one ticket, promising room and board for two passengers for seven days (six nights) for about $1,500. And so it was that I found myself, with my sister, Bethany, in tow, stumbling through a snowstorm barely in time to make our 10:30 p.m. departure on the Vesteraalen.
We had skipped dinner aboard the ship to explore Bergen, a cheerful little city that wraps around both sides of a pair of fjords, in our last hours before sailing. We had feasted there at Beyer’en, a warm and elegant restaurant that specializes in delicious local ingredients. It had given me inordinate pleasure to be able to look up from my menu and say to the waitress, “She’ll start with the lamb from Hardinglam, and I’ll have the lamb from Flaam." At Beyer’en (Rosenkrantzgaten 8; 47-53-05-15-00), the Flaam lamb entree is 285 kroner and the Hardinglam appetizer is 130 kroner. (7 kroner to the U.S. dollar.)
Bethany and I were still repeating this silly rhyme a couple of hours later as we stood out on the high aft deck of the Vesteraalen watching Bergen drop away, flakes swirling around us, and the twinkling lights of the city intermittently disappearing and reappearing behind gusts of snow. It was magical and epic to be sailing away in all that swirl. And really, really cold.
Back inside it was warm, but we soon discovered that the Vesteraalen was no floating pleasure palace. “What I would like to say very politely is that this is not a cruise ship,” Egbert Pijfers, the extremely tall officer in charge of keeping the passengers informed in Norwegian, English and German, told me. “We have no casino, and there is no shuffleboard. So very politely I’d like to say it is a sea voyage on a working vessel with cargo and local passengers.”
That’s just the way most of the people on the Vesteraalen seemed to like it. “We had been on a cruise with Hurtigruten once before,” explained a gentleman from Hamburg, who was one of several repeat passengers on the ship, “and we liked the no-nonsense atmosphere.” His wife nodded in affirmation.
As the only Americans aboard, my sister and I may have started out with a higher appetite for nonsense than any of the sturdy Northern Europeans who made up most of the passenger list. Very politely, I’d like to say that in our first prowl around the ship that would be our home for a week, the “no nonsense” seemed a dram overbearing.
We found a promising room called the Salong Vesteralstuen, with a miniature dance floor and ring of booths and bar tables, but it was dark and empty, and the curtains of the bar were tightly drawn.
In the Salong Trollfjorden, or Troll Fjord Lounge, which was a sort of Naugahyde men’s clubroom with long-haired tapestries, several graying couples who had been speaking German to one another nodded at our hellos and then stared at us silently. In the glassed-in Panorama lounge, the observation salon at the top of the ship, there was another bar, but it was closed up tight.
The two-for-one sale obviously had failed to produce a windfall of takers. The Vesteraalen, 350 feet long and built to hold 540 people, with 147 cabins, was carrying fewer than 40 passengers staying in berths plus another few dozen locals who got on for a stop or two and mostly stayed put in the booths of the cafe, which was open all night.
This low occupancy was normal for the winter, Mr. Pijfers told us later, and is even more pronounced on Vesteraalen’s larger sister ships like the Midnatsol, which is built for 1,000 passengers. “Oh ja,” he said, towering over us from behind his desk. “Thirty or 40 people on a boat like Midnatsol is not so cozy. It is better to be on this boat in winter.”
Soon it occurred to us that an empty boat meant empty cabins that might be bigger than the one we’d paid for. Ours was perfectly clean and functional and the beds comfortable enough, and we would have thought nothing of it had the boat been full, or even if we had been with our respective partners rather than our disrespectful siblings. But neither pertained.
“You could just ask,” Bethany said.
I screwed up my courage and headed out to the reception desk to talk to a fellow who looked in his uniform to be about 14 years old but could have been twice that age, and who cheerfully moved us into a triple. He wore his hair tight to his head except directly in front, where a patch of bangs stood straight up in the air like a snowdrift. Perhaps it was a mystical premonition of what we were to read later that evening, but as I thanked him, something made me think of an elf.
We celebrated by buying a nightcap in the cafeteria and repairing to our spacious new cabin where I read aloud “The Seeress’s Prophecy” from “The Poetic Edda,” the ancient book of Norse mythology that is a collection of Norse stories told in verse. It was the only Norwegian literature besides Ibsen that was available in my home bookstore. It’s a hallucinatory tale of giants, elves, trolls and dwarves in a land deeply confused about its relationship to the sun. It is available in several versions, including a translation by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 1999).
“Fili and Kili and Bivor and Bombur?” I mused. “Gee, I always thought Tolkien made up his own names for the dwarves in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’”
Overnight the snow broke up into squalls that came and went as the ship traveled through classic fjord land of otherworldly beauty. We’d seen pictures of the fjords as green canyons of summer, but with a winter fog hanging low and the water various shades of gray below, the views from the ship were surprisingly modernist. It was a world of clean horizontals — water meeting the land, vapors meeting the tops of the fjord walls — bisected occasionally by a plunging curve of cliff or the tumultuous vertical of a frozen waterfall. Add to this the snow that periodically blotted out the scene, and the total effect was mesmerizing. It was easy, we thought, to see where the Norwegian affinity for crisp and spare design found its inspiration.
Periodically we went out on deck, where the same view en plein (howling) air made it equally easy to see how locals of an earlier vintage might have found inspiration to say, “Hey, Harbard, what say we get your longboat and head south for a little, you know, heh, heh, heh, plunder?”
The vast and nearly empty Panorama lounge, with its long rows of comfortable booths along the windows on either side, was the perfect place to sit and revel in the passing scenery. The mountains plunging into the fjord waters were always changing enough to be interesting, but never so rapidly as to make you worry about missing something. The result was hypnotic in the same very good way that driving across the Painted Desert or the Dakotas can be.
There was time to sit and watch and dream up all manner of stories about the people who might live in the improbable little dwellings that look weirdly like Midwest farmhouses, or the lives lived there in the distant past. There was time, too, for reading thick novels, for writing old-fashioned letters, or, in the case of some fellow passengers, knitting long scarves. There was time to let go of time.
Hurtigruten vessels don’t tarry; in most towns the ship docked for an hour or less, giving us just enough time to stroll up and down the main street. Every day, however, we docked in at least one town for a stretch of several hours.
On our first day we signed up for the architecture tour of Alesund, a major fishing town that burned to the ground in 1904 and was rebuilt almost entirely in the Art Nouveau style. The town’s sturdy stonework is gaily decorated, though in suitably restrained Norwegian fashion, but here and there it is a bit overwrought and fortresslike, and we decided that it might have been the work of Fili and Kili, the dwarves of the Edda.
By this line of reasoning, the next day’s town, Trondheim, had clearly been constructed by elves. There, beside the River Nid, ancient wooden houses of various hues huddled together in the intermittent snow. (A cargo of wood from Vinland, the Norse colony thought to have existed briefly on the shores of what is now eastern Canada, was sold here around A.D. 1000, according to the official Hurtigruten guidebook, and is said to have been the first American export to Europe.)
Slim-hipped women wearing leggings and furry boots, tuniclike parkas and pointy Nordic caps walked on snowy streets in the company of handsome wiry men who were similarly attired. Even the cathedral fed our fantasy; from certain locations its magnificently simple cone of a spire, flanked on either side by smaller pointed towers, looked for all the world like a giant cap and ears peeking up over the rooftops. Imagining ourselves in a suburb of Santa’s Workshop, we stepped into the steamy Dromedar Kaffebar (Nedre Bakklandet 3; 47-73-502-502) for a sweet and rich mocha, called kaffechoc, that cost 42 kroner.
We might have stayed in Trondheim happily for a day or forever, but the Vesteraalen was sailing. Not for the last time did we wish we had bought a ticket that allowed us to catch the next day’s boat, a service the line offers. We wished it again later that same night, in fact, when Mr. Pijfers announced that the ship would be delayed in the protected waters outside Trondheim because of the weather. There was a hurricane, he said, and swells in the seas that we needed to cross were predicted to be from 12 to 24 meters high.
“If you know that I am exactly 2 meters tall,” he said when we asked for details (that’s nearly 6-foot-8), “then you can imagine six of me.” That is a lot of wave, and he was being modest: the prediction put the seas as high as 12 Mr. Pijfers.
“A hurricane?” I asked, thinking like most North Americans of a late summer storm out of the Atlantic. “Did it come up the coast of America and across?”
“Oh no,” he said. “This is a hurricane from the North Pole.”
The storm caused us to skip the port where we could have gone ashore to a Viking re-enactment feast. We were not heartbroken; only six people had signed up, and as Mr. Pijfers said, “A Viking Feast with only so few is not very cozy.” We went instead in circles for 10 hours, surrounded on two sides by snowy mountains and on the third side, between us and the raging sea, by a band of low rocks. It was pitch black by 4 p.m., and we retreated to our cabin to sample the various aquavits we had bought in Trondheim.
The savvy Hurtigruten traveler always tipples before meals. There is plenty of food in the dining room, much of it of the smoked fish variety and all of it very good. (A week will raise your omega oils to a level that will get you through next summer and beyond.) But no one orders drinks, or even sodas, which are absurdly priced. Instead, everyone disappears a half-hour before dinner to have a glass of wine or whatever in their cabin. We didn’t figure this out until Trondheim, where in a spirit of cultural exchange we bought the aquavit.
“We drink this one with fish,” said the helpful sales-elf as she handed us a bottle of clear liquid. “And we drink this one with meat,” she said pointing to a beautiful amber bottle. “And this one is for after dinner.” When we asked, on the strength of the food recommendations, if we should have it actually with our meal, she said, “Oh, no, drink it like schnapps, in a shot or three, and chase it with beer.”
The aquavit was light and delicious and got us happily through the rest of the trip, though the Edda poetry we read on that pre-hurricane evening told a cautionary tale of a beautiful giantess who drank too much and regretted it.
The hurricane rocked and rolled our ship to the point where we had to get up in the middle of the night and batten down the half-read novels that were banging around the cabin. But it also blew away the squalls and blizzards, and we awoke to a clear cloudless dawn sometime after 10 a.m., when the sun finally hauled itself over the horizon. The snowy peaks we had seen in the far inland distance the day before now rose only one row behind the fjord walls, and in some cases directly out of the sea. The glorious and forbidding North was upon us.
Sometime during the next few days we passed an astounding mountain with a hole right through the middle of it. It seemed impossible that it might be a natural phenomenon, and Mr. Pijfers explained that it was said to have gotten that way when an amorous troll was chasing a beautiful giantess and an arrow was shot, a hat was thrown and there was some defensive business with a rolling pin, and then the sun came up and it all turned to stone. It made perfect sense when he said it. No longer merely breathtakingly beautiful, the winter landscape on either side of the ship was now lovely and mysterious in the dangerous way that makes you yearn to know it better but wonder if you’re really up for what it might demand in exchange. We were happy to be safely aboard.
Everyone came out on deck as we passed a magnificent snowy range named the Seven Sisters and saw the crests of their braids catching the rays of a sun that by that point didn’t bother to come above the horizon at all. When the sun does that kind of thing — when dawn lasts a couple of golden hours followed by dusk lasting a couple of reddish hours with nothing in between — it’s hard to keep track of time.
Somewhere along the way we had crossed the Arctic Circle, and in the Salong Vesteralstuen, were presented with certificates and shots of aquavit. Somewhere else we huddled against the warmth of the smokestack up on the aft deck and looked at the northern lights half the night — a blush of green that came and went over the ghostly winter landscape like a false promise of spring. We visited a little town where old lady elves kick-pushed themselves along the streets on personal standup sleds.
Near Tromso, we went dog sledding in the dark, flying over fresh snow, up and down hills, looking at the lights of the town spread along the water in the distance and laughing all the way at the good fortune that brought us here to sit under a reindeer skin behind a dozen relentlessly cheerful pups. Three hundred dogs howling and barking and baying and otherwise begging in the moonlight to be included in the sledding adventure was memorable, but the sledding itself was worth the trip all the way from America.
Back on board, by the time we were approaching the northernmost point of Europe, the almost comically dramatic cliffs overlooking the Arctic Ocean known as the Nordkapp, or North Cape, we’d made friends with many of our fellow passengers, even the Germans from the Troll Lounge, who as soon as they discovered we spoke a bit of their language were revealed to be huge fans of America.
Then there was the couple we called “the mysterious newlyweds,” a pair of cooing lovers from somewhere that doesn’t speak Norwegian, English or German. By apparent virtue of their romantic status they were the only passengers assigned to a private table every evening at dinner.
“Yes, we are just married,” the groom said when I cornered them at last in the cafe and asked how they came to be spending their honeymoon on the Vesteraalen in winter. The bride smiled in an adorable way. “We are engineers from Madrid, and we wanted not just to go to the beach or something. But somewhere different.”
I refrained from asking if the prospect of 20-hour-long nights had fit into the honeymoon calculus, instead inquiring whether they had found what they came for.
“Yes it has been ... ,” the groom began, and then stumbled a bit with the English. The bride picked up where he left off, saying, “All of our dreams of this trip have turned out to be true.”
Thinking about it later, I realized I could almost have said the same thing myself. Almost, because secretly I really would have liked to have seen an iceberg. But that will have to wait for next winter, when I just may go to the South Pole.
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As a part of its contract with the government to deliver mail and freight along Norway’s Atlantic coast, the Hurtigruten ship line, which is primarily a passenger line, aims to have one northbound and one southbound ship visit each of the 35 ports along its route every day of the year. Because the boats are nearly empty of passengers in winter, a traveler at this time of year can count on finding a voyage on a compatible schedule.
At the home port of Bergen, the southernmost port on the route, many passengers board one of the 11 Hurtigruten ships that make this run and disembark, as my sister and I did, six days later at Kirkenes, the last stop. From Kirkenes, flights are available back to the south. Those who book passage for the full 12-day round trip on Hurtigruten are rewarded by seeing the ports that were visited in the middle of the night on the northbound voyage during the day on the southbound trip.
The current base price per person for a double berth is $654 one way and $1,194 round trip, but special promotions, like the two-for-one winter deal, are common. For information, call (866) 552-0371 or visit www.hurtigruten.us. Prices for trips that allow you to stay in various towns for a day or two of sightseeing and cross-country skiing must be individually calculated. (There may also be a fuel surcharge.)
Excursions on land can be booked on board the ship. A dog-sledding trip at Tromso was 900 kroner a person (about $130 at 7 kroner to the dollar) in October, and a trip to the North Cape was 665 kroner.
Some of the additional cost of the 12-day round-trip may be recouped in cheaper airfare, since a round trip on the ship allows you to buy a round-trip airline ticket to Bergen.
United/SAS recently offered fares from Newark to the Bergen airport for $602, and Northwest had one for $676. (Lufthansa, KLM, Continental and British Airways fly to Bergen from Kennedy Airport.) A search for flights from New York to Bergen one way and then back to New York from Kirkenes and connecting cities found a ticket on United for $730, but all of the other options were over $900.
Paul Schneider’s new book, “Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend,” will be published by Henry Holt & Company this spring.
