Roots Tour Part 4

Saturday, June 13, 2009 We boarded the Kong Harald at 5 pm, settled into our cabin, had a wonderful smorgasbord dinner, and received an orientation and safety talk, and explored the ship. We sailed out of Bergen at 8 pm.

Sunday, June 14, 2009 There were 7 stops today, including 2 in Alesund, both before and after going up the Geiranger fjord. Tom decided to stay aboard during the first Alesund stop at 8:45 am, but I went ashore for a fast walk on the waterfront. Nothing opens before 10 am, but the sun was out and the town is charming. We Hurtigruten passengers who chose to get off had the place to ourselves Alesund had burnt to the ground in 1904, and had been rebuilt in the Arts and Crafts style. The buildings were 2-3 stories in many pastel colors, with pitched roofs and slate shingles. Canals threaded through the town, so many buildings had beautiful sailboats parked beside them. We learned that many of the towns which consisted of wooden buildings at the turn of the 20th century, had burned and been reconstructed using masonry. Tom and I chose to stay aboard the ship for the nine hour round trip up the Geiranger fjord. The fjord was beautiful from the boat , with many a photo op which you will see when we return.
Most stops each day are brief, but there is usually one each day of at least 2 hours, so you can get off and explore.

Monday, June 15, 2009 The highlight today was Trondheim. It had been the center of the Vikings, and was formerly called Nidaros. Warriors from Trondheim had conquered all the towns up and down the coast by 872 AD, so this is considered the year that Norway was first unified. Trondheim was also a pilgrimage site from 1030, after the death of St Olav, until the Reformation in 1533. A church was built on the site in the 11th century, and later a cathedral.
The ship dock is far enough from the town, the stay so short, and the visiting hours for the general public arranged so that you have little choice but to sign up for a tour if you want to see anything. We chose to go to the Norwegian folk museum. It is near the ruins of the residence of one of the early Viking warriors. They have collected a number of historic buildings and reconstructed them on the site, including the earliest stave church, built in the 1100's. Many of the original timbers were still intact, and some of the original painting in the interior. Our guide had us stand inside the church with the light of a single candle, and she sang an ancient Norwegian hymn, to give the effect which the original parishoners might have hadexperienced.
The museum also had several re-creations of villages from the 1800's. The first one looked like something from medieval times – log construction and sod roofs. The other houses were actually moved from other sites and looked more Victorian. They had belonged to merchants who wished to show off their wealth. Finally, when we had less than 10 minutes to board our bus, we came to the main museum building. They had a wonderful display area which was especially designed to engage children. I think the Swedish Museum in Chicago may have taken some inspiration from this one. We took lots of pictures.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 Today we crossed the Arctic Circle. Hestmann Island on our port side marked the spot, it's summit being directly on the line. Later, near noon, we visited Bodo. Tom wanted to walk the docks and I hiked up to the cathedral and the local museum.
There was a funeral in progress at the cathedral, and the mourners were just queuing up for the procession. They put white markers with black crosses on the tops of the first cars in the procession. They looked like the kind of signs you are used to seeing atop taxis. After the funeral was gone, I went inside. It is a large church, with beautiful stained glass windows at the front and back, but no windows along the sides. Instead, each side was hung with ~ 6-8 Rya rugs in subdued colors. Under the pews, instead of kneelers, there were pipes which looked like heating pipes. I imagine it could get really cold in such a large space during the winter.
The museum is across the street and housed in a library-like building which was one of the few to survive the German bombing in April of 1940. Most of the center of town was destroyed. They had a wonderful Ken Burns style film which used photos of life before WWII, and had photos of the 1940 bombing. It did not say how many people were killed, but indicated that most had abandoned the center of town for the outlying farms. It is a real eye opener to realize how many towns in Northern Norway were destroyed during the war either from the initial bombing in 1940, or from the retreat of the German army, when they destroyed everything left behind them.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 The longest stop today was the town of Tromso, which has the northernmost university in the world. Tom and I decided to walk to the university museum which has a major display of Sami culture. It was about a 30 minute walk from the dock, and with the nice weather, was fun. We walked through neighborhoods with wooden buildings with slate or ceramic roofs. Tromso was relatively unscathed by bombing during the war. Our Canadian friends were joined on the ship by a cousin who was 86, had grown up in Tomso and had a wealth of information about life in the town. He said that the town was occupied by the regular German army and not the SS. His family was forced to house 2 young German soldiers, but they were so young that his mother felt sorry for them and occasionally shared food with them. We did notice that there was a memorial to eight Jewish citizens of Tromso who had all died in the same year.

The streets wound around the town's hill, and though there were no sidewalks, there was also little traffic. The grass and shrubs were greening up nicely, and there were daffodils, rhododendrons quite a few bedding plants in the yards. We had noticed pallets of the plants being offloaded from our ship on most of our stops. We were surprised to see quite a few trees in the yards. As we were walking up, a man of about our age came roller skiing at a brisk pace down the hill. He looked like he was thoroughly enjoying himself. When we walked back down to the ship we heard the most beautiful tenor voice singing opera. An older man was out on his porch serenading the birds.

In several of the towns, we visited outdoor equipment shops. Most of the towns had cross country ski trails and ski slopes. One of the shop's employees said that it was cheaper to visit resorts in Italy or France than to go to the resorts of Norway. In general, prices are really high by our standards, due to the influence of oil money from the offshore drilling.

Thursday, June 18, 2009 The weather continues to be sunny and cool. We got off the ship at Hammerfest for a walk along the 1 road along the waterfront. The landscape is pretty much treeless this far north, but there were wildflowers coming out, and lots of grass, mosses and lichens. Tom waded down on the beach, and stuck his toe in the water. He said it wasn't much colder than the Pacific at Cannon Beach. We collected a rock to bring home, and it sparkled, because the rocks around here contain chips of mica. As in most of the towns this far north, fishing is the main industry and there are piles of crab pots, racks with nets, and boxes of long lines with fishhooks at the ready for when the season for each harvest begins.
Our excursion today was from Honningsvag. We did a bus tour to the North Cape, the northernmost point of continental land in the world. The hills around here are bare of trees, but there are large herds of reindeer grazing on the mosses, lichens and grasses. The reindeer belong to the Sami people, who have lived in this area as long as anyone knows. The reindeer are brought over by boat to the summer pasture and for calving, they fatten up, and then swim back as winter approaches. The Tromso museum said that there was an account of the Sami by an early Italian explorer dating from 350 BC. We visited a Sami camp with a summer teepee, a reindeer, and tool that people had made in earlier days for everyday use. The young Sami man was dressed in traditional felt garb with a 4 pointed blue cap. He was obviously very well educated and switched easily between Norwegian, English, German and Italian while answering the tourists questions about Sami life and customs. We later found out that there has been an effort to preserve Sami language, and Sami children are taught in Sami throughout elementary school.

Our visit to the North Cape featured cool, windy, but sunny weather. From the cape you are looking directly North at nothing but ocean. If you could fly or sail in a direct line from there you would end up in Alaska, probably near or in the Bering Straight. The visitor's center and the viewpoint sit about 1,000 feet above the ocean, and we could see a cruise ship and several fishing boats down below. There is a long tunnel from the visitor center to a viewing point under the cliff. We were told the area gets only about 15 sunny days per year. People from all over the world were there, and have come to this point in the past. There was one room furnished by the king of Thailand, whose father or grandfather had visited the cape in the 1800's. Our guide on the trip gave the tour in English and Italian, and we ate lunch next to a couple from India.
Friday, June 19, 2009 The weather became cloudy, windy and colder overnight. We went past some open water during the night and had a little wave motion. We prepared to get off the ship in Kirkenes at 9:45 am. We took a tour to the Russian border and saw a bit of the countryside. It was cold with intermittent drizzle all day. Many, if not most of the signs in Kirkenes are in both Norwegian and Russian.

We drove through some forested areas on the way to the border. There were both evergreens and deciduous trees. There is a national park in the area which contains 50 brown bears. The bears are protected and monitored by scientists who live in the park. We did not see any bears, but we did see more reindeer.

There were huge bare hills with flattened tops around the town, which we learned were actually tailings from the iron mines. The mines and the town's location made Kirkenes a strategic location during WWII. There were over 300,000 German troops stationed there in preparation for an invasion of Russia. It was one of the most bombed cities in WWII. The Russians liberated it at the end of the war after the Germans burned most of the remains of the town during their retreat. The surviving Norwegians holed up in an underground shelter in town, and in one of the mine shafts. Some people died in the underground shelters, and 12 babies were born underground. The people of Kirkenes took great hope from the births as a symbol that life goes on, even under the worst of circumstances.

The border itself is guarded by young Norwegian soldiers. The Norwegians had a checkpoint station there and outside of the border area, was a nice gift shop. We understand that there is regular bus service back and forth into Russia, and the town was full of Russian fishermen who use Kirkeness as their base to avoid red tape at home. There is a ship repair facility in town and their main business is fixing Russian fishing boats. There were many young Russian men in town, and they were buying perfume and pretty trinkets for their wives and girlfriends. We were told that there is regular bus service between Kirkenes and Murmansk, Russia. The gray skies, the low ~ 40 degree temperature, and the cold rain did little to make the town look inviting. The overall effect was pretty dark, even though we were in the midnight sun latitude. I can't imagine living there during the period when the sun is below the horizon all day – a period of about a month in December and January.

We returned to town and whiled away the time visiting the local indoor shopping mall, walking around town and having lunch in the one centrally located hotel. The airport bus arrived at 6:30 pm to take us out for our 8:50 pm flight to Oslo.