On Norway’s Coast, a Voyage to the Top of the Continent
Aboard the Finnmarken, one of the cruise ships of the Hurtigruten line that call on Norwegian ports from Bergen north to Kirkenes above the Arctic Circle.
SETTING to sea in a howling midnight blizzard may not have the same romantic resonance as sailing off into the sunset, but it does have a certain elegance all its own. Crossing the dimly lighted docks in Bergen, Norway, on a November night, head hunched into collar and squinting against the furious flakes, I was in a perfectly balanced state between alarm and excitement. Here was travel the way it was back when everyone didn’t travel: brave and cool, vaguely suspect, bracing and healthful.
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." 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.”
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