Norway by Ship and Rail
Luigi and Manly, 1991
Except for the facts that Luigi threw up on the dinner table, I left my broad-brimmed hat on
the ship and SAS lost my duffel bag on the return flight, our venture to Scandinavia was highly
satisfactory. The duffel bag was sent to our apartment the day after we got back, none the worse
for
the experience, and the Bergen Line reports that no one has turned the hat in to them.
Luigi flew to Stockholm on Saturday, August 31, arriving on the first of September. She was
taken to the conference center a few miles outside of town for the biennial convention of the
International Congress of Architectural Museums. Delegates from all over the world were there,
though mostly from Europe. Those from Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were there at the time
President Bush announced that the United States would recognize the independence of those
countries from the Soviet Union, and grew tearful at the announcement. When the business part
of
the convention ended, those delegates who wanted to stay for a couple of days were taken on
various
tours of Stockholm and environs, including a visit to Upsala, the old capital of Sweden.
She flew to Oslo to meet me on Sunday, September 7, when I flew in from Chicago via
Copenhagen. We both got on a flight to Tromso and there changed planes to Kirkenes, in the
extreme northeast of Norway, a few miles from the Russian border. There we stayed at a
pleasant,
small hotel where the tile floor in the bathroom was so heated that we could not comfortably walk
on it barefoot. For dinner they served some excellent reindeer steak. The next day we were taken
by bus to the dock where we arrived before the Bergen Line ship Midnatsol appeared
around the outer end of the local fjord. This ship and several others combine to provide daily
service
to a large number of Norwegian towns whose only means of transportation is by sea. When it
docked, a hole in the port side opened up and disgorged dozens of passengers and another opened
up to disclose a couple of freight elevators, one for automobiles and the other for whatever other
cargo was to be taken or left.
We had a nice cabin on one of the lower decks, and could look out the porthole whenever it
was not obscured by a dock to which the ship was tied. The cabin was much like the one Dodge
and
I had on the Kzherzhizhanovsky but lacked a refrigerator, and the loudspeaker was in the
hall,
so we had to open the door to hear announcements. Announcements were made, usually by a
woman
in Norwegian, English and German, and sometimes by a man in those three languages plus
French.
When we got to sea, the Arctic Ocean was fairly rough -- not with many whitecaps but with
high swells that made the ship roll and pitch a lot. At dinner I had a beer and then found that the
empty bottle kept falling over. A number of those passengers who had bothered to show up for
dinner left before finishing their meals, and Luigi started to but didn't leave quite in time. That
first
evening was the roughest the sailing got; most of the time we were in fjords or in the lee of
islands.
Because of the ship's schedule, we would stop at any hour of the day or night to discharge or take
on cargo and local passengers. We would go to sleep being rocked by the waves of the open sea
and
awaken motionless in the middle of the night to see a truck tire, used as a fender against a dock,
obscuring most of the view from our porthole. Sometimes it was the other way around.
Although most of the places we sailed were for business purposes we did go into Troll Fjord
just to see a particularly spectacular sight. Steep granite cliffs emerged nearly straight up from the
water on both sides of the fjord and there were snow fields and glaciers at the top of some the
bordering mountains. The other fjords were beautiful and well worth looking at, but none were
quite
so dramatic. The scenery is not quite so magnificent as that along the Inside Passage to Alaska,
but
it is still magnificent enough.
The food was generally good. There were two seatings at lunch and dinner, and open seating
at breakfast. Breakfast and lunch were served buffet style and dinner we were served by the same
women who acted as chambermaids. The first two meals included proper smorgasbords with
many
different kinds of pickled herring and other cold fish and sausage and cheese. There was enough
other food so that anyone who chose not to eat from the smorgasbord would not go hungry. We
sat
at a table near a window with a very pleasant couple named Bergstrom from a suburb of
Minneapolis.
He is 85 and of Swedish descent; she is 83 and of Norwegian descent.
On the third day of sailing mostly south we crossed the Arctic Circle. On an island near where
the ship sailed, there is a globular sculpture to mark the location of the Circle. That night the
weather
was clear and we were treated to a magnificent display of the Northern Lights, hanging in curtains
overhead. A day or two later those of us who boarded at Kirkenes were given colorful
certificates,
signed by the captain, declaring that we had crossed the Arctic Circle on September 11 on the
ship
Midnatsol . It was written in large letters in Norwegian with small letter translations of
the
respective phrases into English, German and French.
Saturday afternoon we reached the end of the cruise in Bergen, which we were told is one of
the wettest places on Earth. It lived up to this reputation and most of the rest of the afternoon,
that
night and the next morning it rained. The rain was not constant, so we did get out for a brief walk
before dinner, hardly getting wet very much under Luigi's raincoat and my poncho when the
precipitation resumed just as we were heading back to the hotel.
On Sunday we took the train from Bergen, on the Atlantic coast, to Oslo on an inlet from the
Baltic Sea, over a range of low mountains (4,200 feet) that were high enough to keep all but a
reasonable amount of rain in the western side of the country. It was a beautiful ride, with
mountains,
lakes, rivers and fjords much in evidence. Near the top were several snow fields and a few small
glaciers. We saw a few dairy cattle and lots of sheep grazing. A woman with a cart came by every
couple of hours, selling sandwiches, beer and other essentials. The beer, a Norwegian brew called
Ringnes, is quite good.
The SAS Scandinavian Hotel in Oslo proved to be quite luxurious, especially since we were
upgraded to a prize room on the 22nd (top) floor. Smoked salmon appetizer and reindeer steak
marked our last dinner in Norway; in the morning we flew to Copenhagen; Luigi first because that
was how her travel agent had arranged it, and I later because the Bergen Line, who made the
arrangements knew better how long it took to get from Oslo to Copenhagen. So I could and did
enjoy the glorious breakfast on the 21st floor with a view in the opposite direction from our
bedroom's. We met without difficulty at the gate for the flight from Copenhagen to Chicago, and
arrived without further incident except for the lost duffel bag.