On board Hurtigruten
Trip Start
Jul 23, 2010
1
19
25
Trip End
Aug 16, 2010
Vardø, North Norway, Norway
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Quick drive through town to port, where our old lady of a ship waited for us. I am actually quite delighted that we are traveling on an older, smaller vessel. It’s built in 1956 and carries far fewer passengers than the other ships in the fleet. Of course, the cabins are ultra-dinky – really more like train compartments than cabins. But each has its own facilities, so that’s something.
Lunch was served right after our arrival – a very tasty collection of fish, veggies, fruit and cheese. Nums. At 12:45pm, we departed the harbor at Kirkenes, sailing up through the fjord. The land surrounding the fjord is flat and barren … clearly carved by glaciers then swept by snow and winds and waves. Stark but beautiful. The sun was out, and it was quite pleasant to sit on the upper deck and enjoy the view … maybe a bit windy at times, and it would have been nicer had our good jackets arrived with us, but we were okay. Plus, the ship provides blankets, which makes it very comfy.
We sat outside for much of the voyage, excepting the new passenger briefing, to our next stop, Varno. We had only 45 minutes at this town, but we walked through the streets to see the old fort (built originally in the 1300s; its current incarnation was built around 1750; the fort is credited with keeping this part of Norway in Norwegian hands for centuries). The town was the center of "Pomor" trade … which, as far as we can tell, just designates any trade between Norway and Russia. The town also has strange domes on the cliffs – apparently, these were some sort of listening station for NATO during the Cold War … but now have “civilian functions.” Finally, we were delighted by the very strange church with a steeply sloped A-frame roof which formed the steeple.
Returning to the ship, we sat out on the stern for a while, enjoying the nice light and sunshine. We read for a while and otherwise relaxed. Dinner was at 6:30pm: tasty but especially nice presentation on the dessert. The dessert was a mascarpone cream with fruit, served in a tumbler with a caramel cracker. At the bottom of the tumbler was the marscapone cream; sitting on top of the cream was a twig with very red, juicy currants and a large orange berry/fruit, with dried leaves still attached. The caramel lattice was propped up on the glass, and the edge of the plate, on one side, was decorated with the outline of a fork, in cocoa.
After dinner, we made two stops at different ports. At one, we got off to walk part way down the dock … but since we had only 15 minutes in the port, we did not want to go far. At the next stop, we did not even dock anywhere near town, so we just stayed on board. As we departed, the ferry retained one dock line, which we used to spin ourselves around. We could hear the line moaning as we spun, but I assume they do this on a weekly, if not daily, basis, and so I wasn’t too worried about everything snapping off.
The sunset was lovely – we were playing story cubes in the lounge but kept running out to see how the color had changed and take more photos. We tried to keep our conversation relatively quiet during the game, but we were laughing a lot. Fortunately, while many people seem to speak English, we have not heard much of the language on the ship, so I suspect most people speak English as a second language. To bed by midnight.
