Hurtigruten, Coatal Steamer

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Hurtigruten, The M/S Polarlys

October 14, 2001

Dear Friends and Family,

There are two ways to go from the north of Norway to the south. First is to take days, driving good but narrow roads, over bridges, through tunnels and onto and off ferries. A real adventure by the sounds of it. Or, one can use the Hurtigruten coastal ferry and deposit the car in the hold for three days and enjoy one of the most picturesque voyages in the world. We took the easy route, the Hurtigruten.

In Tromso, we went to the offices of the "TFDS", the company that has run the Hurtigruten for over 100 years. Since we are going off-season, we had no trouble at all booking space for us and our car aboard the MS Polarlys, the newest boat in the fleet.

The Polarlys is about 400 feet long with 255 cabins and space for 50 cars. There are a variety of accommodations on four cabin decks. We asked for the least expensive cabin, an inside double, because the TFDS rep said no one spends much time inside their cabin anyway and all the cabins are complete with shower and toilet. In fact we were assigned an outside cabin with a nice window but our view was mostly of the lifeboats so it seems this still qualified as an "inside" room. Whatever, the rep was right, we did little more than sleep in here.

In Tromso, the southbound Hurtigruten boards at 1:00 in the morning, so our first challenge was to stay awake that late! We shopped until the stores closed but that's just 6:00 p.m. Tromso has a reputation for being an all-night town but that must be during the summer because when we were there, it became a ghost town after dark - and dark came early.

After closing the stores, we visited a very nice seafood restaurant. Thanks to off-season, we didn't need reservations here either; we were the only customers. Nevertheless, the food was very good and the young chef even came out and gave Marianne the sauce recipe for her sea catfish. We lingered over dinner for a couple of hours. It was most pleasant and we continued to have the place to ourselves. When it came time to pay the bill, we remembered that Norway is one of the most expensive places in Europe and good dinners come with San Francisco prices. But, tonight the food would have held up to California standards, so we were satisfied.

We were also still hours away from boarding. Marianne came up with the great idea of going to the movies. In Norway, foreign movies are shown in their original language, with Norwegian sub-titles so we could choose among the two or three American movies showing. We chose The Moulin Rouge with Nicole Kidman. It was an interesting musical comedy and it was showing in an old restored theater to a full audience of young college kids and professors. All in all, it was an interesting diversion and useful for killing two hours.

Finally, we could go down to the port and go onboard. We put the car away on the car deck, went to our very comfortable cabin, and crashed. We definitely are not used to staying up to the wee hours.

The next morning, we went to the dining room for our breakfast buffet. We discovered two things. First, buffets will kill us from overeating. We must be more careful. We also discovered that the majority of people on this boat were older than we are. This was a real age shift from Tromso. The Hurtigruten seems to cater to retired tourists, many of them Americans, who have the time to make the 12-day journey from Bergen in the south to the North Cape and back. There is also a regular clientele of people simply going from one town to another, but on our ship, most folks were just enjoying retirement. Marianne and I were somewhere in between, the story of our journey.

Many tourists were travelling on tickets that provided three meals a day in the main dining room. I don't know how they did it because we could barely manage one buffet a day, supplemented by a small meal in the very pleasant cafeteria. Boat travel means the restaurant is always convenient - probably too convenient.

During daylight, most people headed for the "panorama lounge", a room across the front of the highest deck in the ship with huge picture windows. The veterans quickly took up positions at the very front, below the slanting front windows, ready for whatever wonderful sights appeared on the horizon. (We'll talk about what we saw out the windows in a separate diary.)

The other activity from the coastal voyage is visiting the towns along the way. Every day the boat stops a half-dozen times, usually for an hour or so. We boat people crowd the ship's door to have the opportunity to wander off for awhile in one of the picturesque small communities. During our three days, no stop was long enough for more than just a quick walk through town but these walks were refreshing breaks from eating, sitting and reading. This is what passed for vigorous exercise for us!

Back on board, we managed to squeeze in a visit to the navigation bridge. The First Officer gave us a tour of operation of the very modern MS Polarlys. Navigation is completely computer controlled using GPS satellite signals to command the boat to weave through the islands. If needed, the "manual" steering wheel is a knob the size of a teacup. It looks more like a Nintendo control than one for a large ship. Even more impressive are the controls for docking the ship. The Polarlys has two cross-mounted propellers in front to push the bow left and right. In the stern there is an auxiliary thruster that extends below the boat like an outboard motor and can rotate 360 degrees. The result is a 400-foot ship that can turn in place, commanded by the navigation officer twitching his Nintendo controls. Pretty amazing for us engineer types.

The rest of our on-board life was more of the same. Sleep. Eat. Read. Walk. Stare out windows. Repeat. After three days, we were both adapted to the leisure and ready to go off and use our own navigation controls to see one or two fjords in Norway up close.

Take care. Relax, within reason. Exercise, within reason. Enjoy where you are.

John and Marianne

p.s.: Coming up:

-- Sights from the Hurtigruten

-- First day in the Singing Fjord

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Created October 20, 2001

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