By Alan Behr, Tribune News Service
The sun drifted teasingly toward the Norwegian Sea, an amber ball suspended as if from a string. It touched down gently on a low peninsula as the Richard With turned to starboard. The finger of land threatened to obstruct the view from those of us standing on a high deck astern, but we checked by our watches: For the second time on our cruise north along Norway’s western coast, we had viewed the sun at midnight. Nods and words of agreement rose in Norwegian, English and other languages.
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Here was another bonus for having taken this trip not long after the summer solstice. My primary purpose was to sail the fjords — the long, glacier-formed inlets that jut into Norway’s expansive western coastline. Along the route north, the fjords shelter harbor towns over which verdant mountains rise like castle walls. In front of many, a modest lighthouse stands sentry.
You can tour the fjords by road, but for me, that would be like visiting Paris by helicopter; the point of Paris is to walk it and to feel it, and the point of the fjord communities is to steam into them and to come to know them by sea and by land.
I had boarded my ship, the MS Richard With of the Hurtigruten line, in Bergen, an old trading city with a famous harbor-front row of historic, wood-framed merchant houses. I had wisely allowed myself an overnight at a new and luxurious hotel, the Skostredet, to better manage jet lag and also to treat myself to a funicular ride up the nearby Mount Floyen for dinner at the gourmet Floirestauranten. There, I had checked my backpack for my essentials: a 1961 Leica 280mm telephoto lens retrofitted to a contemporary Leica M11 digital camera; binoculars from the same German source; and a very particular flag, carefully unwrapped around its pole.
The MS Richard With steaming through the fjords of Norway. (Alan Behr/TNS/TNS)
By dinnertime the next day, I was aboard my ship and was underway.
Two years earlier, in Oslo, I had struggled to find things that were uniquely Norwegian, so cosmopolitan and diverse had the nation’s capital become. Hurtigruten’s six-night Northern Express would now give me the chance to see Norway among Norwegians. That is in good part because, like others in the line’s fleet, the Richard With is a cruise ship with all the amenities and comforts that the idea of cruising implies, but it is also a ferry, taking locals to ports of call up and down the coastline. At mealtimes, and on shore excursions, I had the chance to get to meet couples and families who were just passing through, to and from homes nearby. All the while, however, I kept secret my purpose for having chosen this northbound route and why the flag furled inside my backpack was part of my visit.
Excursions by bus helped me understand the experience of living and working by the sea, and it was good to walk into towns and along the countryside through which the fjords pushed seawater so imposingly inland. But the biggest thrill came when a group of us donned protective suits in the port of Bode and boarded a flotilla of rigid inflatable boats. Our captain and guide was a solid, agreeable young woman who looked to have lived and worked before the mast since childhood. She steered us up the Salstraumen, a small strait that quickly led us into one of the world’s strongest tidal currents.
Our boat pitched and rocked, our motor seeming at times to wrestle with the strait for control of our destiny as we poured in at high speed under a gray dome of unmoving cloud. We slowed to a swimmer’s pace, and around us seagulls climbed and then dove onto broad whirlpools — the maelstroms — famous vortices of such mythical strength that writers from Edgar Allen Poe to Jules Verne promised that to sail as close to any as we did was to risk being sucked into the depths. Our faces and goggles were now sprayed with water; it was a rugged, yet somehow ethereal thrill — rather as if consciousness had intruded itself upon a darkening dream just enough to offer peace.
Not long after, aboard the Richard With, we celebrated our crossing of the Arctic Circle. When my father had crossed the equator in service with the United States Army in World War II, he had been subjected to an elaborate (and rather rude) initiation ceremony — and got a certificate that I still have. Here was I, decades later, welcomed into my own geographic rite of passage by our ship’s captain, who poured ladles of ice down my back to the cheers of fellow passengers. And I got a certificate. That evening, we welcomed the midnight sun.
71°10’21”N: Our largest excursion group of the trip arrived at the North Cape, the northernmost point on the European continental landmass. A pedestal-mounted skeletal globe marks the spot. I took turns with a father-son team from Poland, snapping each other’s pictures beside the landmark.
We returned to the Richard With and steamed eastward through the Barents Sea. Nearly 1,000 feet below us lay the mangled wreck of the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst — sunk by the Royal Navy on Boxing Day (Dec. 26), 1943. Our final meal aboard ship was dinner, served to me quietly by my waiter as I enjoyed my final view of the sea from my table just below prow-facing picture windows.
We disembarking passengers left early the next morning, along with our luggage, for Kirkenes, population 3,400. The town, which lies on Norway’s short eastern border with Russia, is supported by two notable sources of trade: tourism and espionage. It enjoys an international reputation as a quiet and inviting den of spies, with Russian agents trying to keep an eye on NATO, and with the West appropriately returning the favor.
During the Second World War, when Norway was occupied by the Germans, the Soviet Union bombed the town often; appropriately, the first stop on our tour was the large, dark and cold bunker that could house a good portion of the population during raids.
Then we came at last to the border crossing with Russia. The fjords had topped my European bucket list for years along with one other destination: St. Petersburg.
Scruples now prevent me from visiting what had been Leningrad and that, for all I know, will soon be called Putingrad, so this could well be as close as I will ever get. To remind myself and anyone else who cared to notice why I would not cross the border, from my backpack I withdrew and gently unfurled the flag I had so carefully packed: the blue and yellow national banner of Ukraine. I gave it a good wave in case any Russian border guard was looking and then, with the help of another passenger, planted it in the ground just below the last meters of Norwegian territory.
I spent the night in the Snowhotel, an ice hotel of the kind where you literally can sleep in a large igloo. And, I chose a conventional, comfortable cabin instead, heated to room temperature. After helping to feed the hotel’s resident reindeer, I then flew back to Oslo.
Snowhotel Kirkenes, guest room for igloo-style accommodations. (Alan Behr/TNS/TNS)
There, I returned to the Munch Museum, where the works of Norway’s famously gloomy (and brilliant) artist Edvard Munch, are on permanent display. On this occasion, however, there was a large temporary exhibition on the themes of illness, injury and death — which is about as an appropriate Munch experience as a curator can offer.
It all seemed to fit, oddly enough. From the fjords, with their majesty, maelstroms, reindeer and tales (and numerous statues) of trolls, to the modern interruption of good daily life brought on by Russia’s merciless war, to the brooding, humanizing power of great Nordic art. I had finally done what I had set out to do two years before: I had seen and at last got an authentic understanding of this austere and yet graceful nation
If you go
At sea: Hurtigruten. The line operates the MS Richard With and similar ships, all to a fine standard. +1-888-969-8297; www.hurtigruten.com/en-us/; reservations@hurtigruten.com. Tip: Book as many shore excursions as you have time to enjoy.
In Bergen: Skostredet Hotel. Domkirkegaten 6, 5017 Bergen, Norway; +47-55-30-40-50; booking@skostredethotel.no.
In Kirkenes: Snowhotel Kirkenes. Sandnesdalen 14, 9910 Bjørnevatn Tromsog Finnmark, Norway; +47-78-97-05-40; info@snowhotelkirkenes.com
Caution: Beware that third-party reservation services have tarted themselves up to look like they offer the official sites of these and other Norwegian hotels; they are not, and they may charge excessive additional fees.
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