Finland (Part 3 of the Norway Trip)

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 After our visit to the Russian border on Sunday, we continued our bus ride crossing the border into Finland. The terrain became level with more lakes and forests of birch trees as well as evergreens.  The temperatures were quite warm given how far north we were, topping out in the low 80’s.  We soon began to see reindeer along the road. Most of the traffic was cars with travel trailers or small RV’s.  We stopped for lunch at a place run by a Sami family (The Sami are the indigenous people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and northwestern Russia). It was a country resort area that had campgrounds, cabins and a restaurant along with their own reindeer farm.  Several reindeer hung around the front of the restaurant looking for a handout. We had a good soup, salad and a reindeer stew with mashed potatoes and a nice dessert of a crepe like pancake with a good berry sauce. The lady who owned the place spoke to us after lunch with her daughter translating. To hear a bit of her talk  click here  After some photo ops with the reindeer we got back on the bus and continued to the town of Ivalo where we would be staying for the next two nights.  With no air conditioning the room was rather warm, but the meal we had together was good and the room was comfortable.  We were joined in Ivalo by another Grand Circle staff member from their St. Petersburg office. Tatiana was very nice and knowledgeable on the logistics end of things. She was a good addition to our group. We again had to shut the curtains tight and I wore my eyeshades to keep the light out as it was still fairly light overnight.
The next morning we had breakfast, then found the one ATM in town and some of us hit it up for Euro’s which is the currency used in Finland as they are part of the E.U.  We then bussed to the Silda museum of Sami life and culture.  This was a very well done museum with a great local guide who took us through it in some detail. The Sami people are similar to people from the Steppes of Russia and do not look like Inuit as most Americans think of people from the Arctic regions.  There are several distinct sub-groups of Sami people, each with their own dialect, style of dress and culture.  In addition to the extensive collections inside, there were typical Sami structures built for living, farming and hunting and trapping animals for furs and to protect reindeer herds from natural predators. Like in the American West there was a Gold Rush in the 1870’s that saw some of the same types of stream mining activities we would have been used to from our history.  It was a fairly short lived Gold Rush as things go and gold mining is a thing of the past now in that area.  I got to try my hand at doing a Sami reindeer lasso on a wooden reindeer and was able to “capture” it on my second toss.  It is a different technique than the American cowboys as there are so many trees you cannot do a traditional cowboy style throw.
After wandering through the outdoor exhibits we reconvened in the museum cafeteria for lunch—chicken this time, not reindeer!  After lunch it was time to head out to a working reindeer farm and meet the family who runs the farm and get to have some up close and personal time with some reindeer.   We were briefed on the way that it is very impolite to ask a reindeer farmer how many reindeer they have—akin to someone asking one of us how much money we make, so we all heeded that admonition. We were greeted by two men in Sami dress, which consisted of pants and a tunic like shirt and hat that looked a bit like a night cap.  The colors were red and green and I wondered if that might be where we got the connection with reindeer and Christmas, but I did not ask.  They had on a belt with a hunting knife with a reindeer horn handle in a leather scabbard and a wooden cup carved from a burl of a birch tree and finely sanded with the handle and bowl all in one piece.  After being greeted, we were shown around the farm a bit and taken to a corral like area where they have a feeding station for some of their herd.  The owner took a thick piece of wood and struck a tree trunk with it, making a loud sound that called in the reindeer in that area.  They came on the double as they know it means they are going to get some hand fed food pellets from us tourists.  We were given as many handfuls as we wanted and were able to hand feed the reindeer that showed up, with additional feed being placed in a trough for them to finish off.  We took lots of pictures and were told about managing these animals.  Both the male and female reindeer have antlers which are shed annually.  It is a cottage industry gathering them for local crafts as there is big competition from Asians who want them for Chinese medicines—principally aphrodisiacs.   The reindeer come in various shades of brown and some are white and off white, but not albino.  The owner said the white ones are somewhat less robust than their brown coated counterparts. The reindeer are managed much as cattle are in the U.S., but more of an open range situation. Instead of branding, they have ear notching done as calves that are unique to a family member, so all know whose reindeer are who’s when it comes time to round them up and take about 40% of the herd for slaughter.  Nothing is wasted as hides are processed as well as the meat and bone.  Several of the reindeer we hand fed have been trained to pull a sleigh in the snow.  It takes several years of training and not all of the reindeer “get it”. Some of us had an opportunity to try our hand at lassoing another dummy reindeer. This one had actual antlers, which made it a bit harder than the museum’s one.  I tried it a several times and kept overshooting to the left as the technique is so different from a cowboy lasso.  We were shown to an octagonal log structure set up like a meeting hall with wooden tables and benches. We were served coffee and tea with cookies and got to hear more from the owner. He had been working in the IT field and got tired of city life and came back to the family reindeer farm and was now in charge of the operation. Our tea/coffee cups were the same wooden ones they wore on their belt.  He explained that the knife and cup is the Sami “survival kit” as they can drink the water in the streams and rivers with their wooden cups and use the knife in a myriad of ways to operate in the outdoors in all seasons.  After we finished our tea break and talk, we had an opportunity to visit a small craft store set up on the property. They had a lot of good things reasonably priced, but a lot of it would not have been allowed to be brought into the U.S., so I did not get anything, but Suzy bought a pretty pair of earrings made with metal and reindeer hide.  After that, it was back to the bus and a return ride to Ivalo and our hotel to rest and prepare for our home hosted dinners.  This is a special feature that Grand Circle/O.A.T. does in any trip they run.  The group breaks down into manageable sub-groups and each sub-group visits a local family to share a meal with them and interact.  It is always a highlight of the GC/O.A.T. trips we have been on and something we were looking forward to.  We bussed to the various homes and let our assigned members off for the evening and then picked them back up to return to our hotel for the night.  Our group of 7 people met with a young woman named Janika who was employed with one of the national parks in the area.  Her boyfriend is Hungarian and works as a tour guide and was off doing a tour out of the area, so we did not meet him.  They had just purchased the home we were in less than a year earlier.  It is their first home and they are thrilled to have it and very proud of what they have done with it so far.  Janika made a special point to show us the home, including their wine cellar accessed through a trap door in the kitchen, and their built in sauna in the master bathroom, which is not unusual for Finnish people as they dearly lover their sauna’s.  Our meal was excellent, prepared by Janika herself and included soup, home-made bread, beef, potatoes and cooked carrots with a nice dessert.  The upside of her having the Hungarian connection was that she served Hungarian wine with dinner and all who had some said it was very good.  We were able to have a great discussion and ask questions.  She asked if we knew that the game “Angry Birds” was an invention of a Finnish person and none of us older folks knew that.  Instead of a second car in their garage, they have a snowmobile and trailer for the long Arctic winters.  We saw lots of pictures of them ice fishing and snowmobiling, but also travel photos of them in warm places like Spain and Italy.  She did say their traveling was pretty much on hold now that they have a mortgage to pay.  You could tell they were very active outdoors people year around.   We had an opportunity to take pictures with Janika and before we knew it, it was time to be picked up and gather the other sub-groups and head back to our hotel to pack up for our flight the next morning to Helsinki.
We were up fairly early, had breakfast and brought our luggage down for loading up on the bus to the airport.  It was not far from our hotel and since it was an in-country flight on Finn-Air, our processing was minimal.  All went as planned and we left on time and arrived on time.  The airport was a ways out from the city center, so we had another bus ride into the city. Our hotel was in a good location and we were very surprised at how luxurious our rooms were.  The building at one time had been the city jail, but one would have ever guessed it.  Our room had air conditioning which was a saving grace for us as Helsinki was quite hot and sunny.  After we got settled in, we did a short orientation walk with our tour leader, came back and had a presentation from a local public school teacher on the education system in Helsinki and Finland.  She was very informative and we kept her beyond her time a bit with all of our questions. Suzy as a retired teacher spent a little extra time with her one-on-one. She was honest about the fact that over time their leadership of the world in education is starting to slip as class sizes increase and local budgets are cutting back on funding of schools.  One of the reasons they do so well is that teachers are given the same place of honor in the community as police and firemen. Masters degrees are required and the classroom teaching programs are very competitive to get into.  After the talk a few of us went with our tour leader to a local restaurant for dinner as dinner was on our own. It was a rustic place with lots of farm implements and down home country cooking, Finnish style. We all had hearty meals; several of us did reindeer in one form or another.  After walking back to the hotel, we cleaned up and read for a while, but still had to use the curtains and eye shades to fool ourselves that it was really nighttime and we could go to sleep.
The next morning was bright and sunny and promised to be yet another hot day. Our itinerary kicked off after breakfast with a bus tour of the city with several stops along the way. The first was in a pretty park where a statue had been erected in stainless steel in honor of the Finnish composer Jean Christian Sibelius. Most any orchestra or concert band has his “Finlandia” in their repertoire. The sculpture captures in stainless steel what the artist felt the music of Sibelius looked like.  We continued on with many points of interest along the way. Our local guide pointed out that Helsinki had not suffered the damages of WWII that other European cities had, so much of its architecture has been preserved.  I am a fan of Art Deco and there is plenty of that style in Helsinki. The train depot looks like it would fit in in Chicago and is not surprising as the architect who designed it also designed some of Chicago’s Art Deco landmarks. Finland also has a long history of being a leader in the design of home goods and it is interesting to see how the designs of the 1930’s to 1950’s are once again hip  Since our local guide was a woman, she also pointed out the stores that had the attest in Scandinavian fashions for women’s wear.
One of our main points of interest stops was the Central library called “The Oodi”.  It was a very striking building architecturally speaking, very modern looking, but I was not sure why we were going to spend time looking at a library, until we went in and saw just how much it had to offer beyond books. The entry level is spacious with an information center that provides information on the city as well as the building.  There are rest areas, bathrooms, a café and access to a plaza for outside sitting with tables and chairs. The second level is dedicated to all sorts of individual and group experiences, from crafts like sewing and cooking, to 3-D printing, robotics and video and music recording studios. There are meeting rooms, game rooms and other collective areas that can be reserved. The only cost is for materials used. The third floor is devoted to traditional book stacks, but even here the architecture with flowing ceilings and a wooden ramped floor that ends at a point on an incline makes for interesting ambience to sit and read in easy chairs looking out over the city through glass walls, or in privacy pods to cocoon yourself.  Robots are being introduced to assist in shelving books back in the stacks.  There is liberal access to Internet enabled computers throughout the library.  Access to different floors is enabled via escalators, elevators or stairs.  You can do an Internet search on Oodi library in Helsinki and get some great photos of the exterior, which I did not take.
Our final stop was at the main plaza in front of the Lutheran Cathedral.  We took our group photo there and said farewell to our local guide. Most of us also skipped the bus ride back to the hotel and walked to the harbor area where there is a Farmers Market and also little food stands.  We had lunch at one of the stands and after doing some looking around in the market, we regrouped and took the water taxi over to the fortress island with Chase.  The island sits in the harbor,  is some 630 acres,  and was at one time the main defense point for the city.  The rode over gave us a nice view of the harbor area and the city from the water side.  Once we got onto the island, Suzy and I realized we had been about walked and toured out. There was plenty to see and do, but we mainly just strolled around and had an ice cream in the shade.  We made our way back to the water taxi and from there navigated back to the hotel, bought some cool drinks, from the desk,  hit the showers,  and enjoyed some AC.  We had about an hour before our farewell gathering and dinner in the hotel.  We gathered in a small auditorium and Chase took us through a debriefing of the trip and we discussed what our favorite parts of the trip were.  Following that, we went to a private dining room in the hotel and had our farewell dinner—chicken this time, no reindeer!  We had received out various airport pickup times in the auditorium and since a number of people were continuing on the tour extension to Stockholm, we said our farewells to our various group members and Chase.  Since he was going with the people on the extension, Tatiana was assigned to make sure the rest of us got our cars and drivers for the trip to the airport the next day. After all of this, we went back to our room and packed up one last time for the flight back home.
The next morning we had our normal breakfast buffet in the hotel dining room, which was very good each day we were there.  We ran into the Stockholm group finishing their breakfasts and heading out to the bus to the airport.  Our car and driver was to pick us up at 9:30 so we continued a leisurely breakfast, returned to our room and brought things down to meet our transport to the airport. Tatiana saw us off and we enjoyed the comfort of a sleek Audi with a speedometer that topped out at 300 km/hr. which is about 180 mph.  I am sure that was a German spec Audi made for the autobahns as our driver obeyed all posted speed limits, but got us to where we needed to. We were traveling once again on Lufthansa, business class, so check in was a breeze and after a quick pass through security we went to the business class lounge and awaited our departure for Munich. We had another uneventful flight and had more time in the Munich lounge between flights, but almost overstayed as we did not realize we had some immigration work to do before we boarded our flight to Dulles.  It all turned out well and we had a very comfortable and nice flight to Dulles, with an excellent in flight meal.  I put on the headphones and listened to a collection of all the Stax recordings from 1968 in Memphis, which went on for about 6 hours.  Suzy watched several movies and dozed a bit. We arrived on time, and had a quick reentry thanks to our signing up for Global Entry status.  We got our bags off the belt and headed out to meet Steve and Allyn Bamberger who took us home in good order.  We had missed the triple digit weather in Woodbridge, but it still was hot and humid.  We got reacquainted with our pups, who loved on us for a bit, then went on about their business as if we had never left.  We unpacked what we needed, foraged for a bit of food in the house, cleaned up and hit the sack, but of course we took a week to get to where we could sleep normally and not be wide awake at 3 or 4 a.m.
We had a wonderful time on the trip, saw a lot, learned a lot and came back with a great appreciation of Norway and Finland.  If you ae over 55 and in relatively good shape, I strongly recommend the Overseas Adventure Travel (O.A.T.) trip we took.

Norway Trip Part 2: Bergen to Kirkenes

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Our bus trip back from the fish farm brought us back into Bergen. On the way to the Hurtigruten Ship dock, we stopped at a shopping mall so people could visit the “Wine Monopoly”, the state run wine and spirits store, and pick up supplies for the remainder of the trip.  Several of us who were not interested remained on the bus, including Suzy. After that stop we went on to the terminal building where we processed through some minimal security and boarded the MS Nordnorge. We had turned over our bags at the dock and were free to wait for our cabins to become available at 4 p.m. It gave us some time to explore the ship, which was not large, but did have a 500 person passenger and crew capacity and was fully booked for this trip.  The ship looks like a small cruise ship, but also carries cargo and cars up the west coast of Norway, stopping at towns both small and large to let people on and off, deliver and pick up cargo and cars, and provides a tourist experience for groups like ours. When we processed in at the terminal we received a card that granted us exit and entry on board, but was also tied to a credit card for onboard purchases. The ship had a regular dining room, a café and a snack bar with coffee, tea, ice cream and pastries during the day. It had two conference rooms, one of which our group used every day to hear a lecture from our tour leader, Chase, on various subjects.  After a mandatory safety briefing we were able to access our cabins. Ours was on the 3^rd deck and had all the room we needed. Our group’s time to have dinner was set at 6:30. Breakfast and lunch were buffets, as were a couple of the dinners, including our initial dinner on board, while others featured a fixed 3-course menu.  The servers and housekeeping staff were generally young people from Sweden doing summer work.  The ship had 35 stops it could make, a number of them were at night and were very brief, while others were much longer and allowed for tourist activities.  The ship had excursions of its own which could be purchased; however, our group had its own itinerary.  We set sail out of Bergen while we were at dinner.  We had no other activities scheduled for the evening and the ship had no on board entertainment activities, so we called it an evening and got a decent night’s sleep.
The next morning after breakfast we entered the Alesund fjord, stopping at the town of the same name on the way in and had some time to look around, then continued into the fjord and went the length of it in about 3 ¼ hours and then returned the same way we came with plenty of lovely scenery and waterfalls along the way.  I took an after lunch nap and rallied in time for dinner, followed by our first talk, about Norway in general and  featuring a humorous video of what it means to be a Norwegian. Chase also shared some of his wedding pictures with the group at our request.  They make a very handsome couple.
Our next day was a long stop at the major city of Trondheim. Trondheim had German U-boats stationed there in WWII and as a result got bombed by the Allies and much of its pre-war architecture was destroyed. We had a bus tour of the city, with an overlook stop for photos.Click here for a short overlook video We next made a visit to the Nideral Cathedral, tehn returned to the ship with a talk on Norwegian food and dress. Norway is about 40 percent self-sufficient in feeding itself with surpluses in the areas of potatoes and fish and deficits in grains, fruits and vegetables, and other meats.  Milk production is subsidized so there are plenty of dairy products available.
We had an “Inner Circle” cocktail reception at 5 p.m. before dinner which by virtue of the  number of Grand Circle/O.A.T. trips we had taken, all 23 of us were qualified for, with the exception of one couple we granted honorary status to so they could be included. Sparkling wine, orange juice and a taste of Meade (fermented honey) was served up by one of the ship’s staff in our conference room and we had a pleasant time of conversation before dinner.
It was an early breakfast the next morning and then out on deck to see us pass the Arctic Circle at around 8 a.m.  At 10 a.m. we had a talk on WWII and Scandinavia, which was very interesting to me as a military history buff. Norway was attempting to be a neutral nation when WWII started, but their neutrality was violated a number of times and finally hostilities came about resulting in a fairly rapid takeover of the country by the Germans with organized fighting continuing for some months in the more rugged north. The end of the hostilities saw a Nazi occupation that ran from 1942 to 1944. Sweden remained neutral throughout, Finland had had a war with Russia in 1939 and when the Germans tuned on the Soviets, Finland ended up with a large German presence in the north of the country until Russia pushed them out to Norway in 1944.  The Germans practiced a scorched earth policy in their retreat from northern Finland, but made a more orderly withdrawal from Norway.  In terms of the Norwegian populace, (according to Chase) about 20% were active collaborators with the Nazi’s and about 20% were in the Resistance and the remainder just tried to survive day to day. As far enemy occupations go, the German’s treated the Norwegians fairly well as they looked upon them as fellow Arian racial stock. There were not many Jews in Norway, but hundreds were deported from the Oslo area with the help of the collaborating city police force.  Post-war Norway retaliated strongly against those who had aided the Nazi occupiers with trails and executions for several years after the war.  Women who had taken up with German soldiers had their heads shaved (as was the case in occupied France). Children of Norwegian women and German soldiers had a very hard time in school and were ostracized growing up.  The one story that sticks with me is of the sabotage of a ferry in a deep fjord that was taking “heavy water” produced by Germans for atomic bomb research out of the country. The resistance people who planted the bomb knew it would kill friends and family riding the ferry but they did it anyway and destroyed the material putting a major roadblock into Nazi efforts to build an atomic weapon.
The next day we had several stops, none of them as long as Trondheim, but enough time to see the area.  Our first stop was in Bodo where we met an acquaintance of Chase’s named Per (Pear) who along with an infant son in a stroller gave us a walking tour of the town and also recounted his experience with the socialized medicine in Norway.  One of his older children had been diagnosed with a very nasty form of brain cancer and nothing could be done for him in any of the Norwegian cancer centers. There was a study going on in New York at Sloan-Kettering that looked promising, but the cost for treatment was estimated at just over 1 million dollars. The family applied for the government to pick up the cost and were turned down at several levels, but eventually approved nationally. The family moved to New York and spent almost a year at a Ronald MacDonald house whole treatment was done which turned out to be successful and the family returned to Norway.  Unfortunately several years later the cancer returned in another form and took the child’s life, but it was an example of socialized medicine coming through in a big way.   We got back to the ship and went on our way stopping in the small town of Svolvaer.  This was a picturesque fishing village, but also the scene of a major raid by the Allies against the German’s in 1942. Allied Naval and Marine forces attacked the German garrison and the harbor. They destroyed several ships and captured some 300 prisoners and got away before re-enforcements could be marshalled against them.  The German naval vessels destroyed are still at the bottom of the harbor which is very deep.  The small town has a privately owned WWII museum run by an interesting fellow who has collected thousands of artifacts, uniforms and pieces of equipment from all sides of WW II, German Soviet, British and American alike.  There was stuff crammed in every corner and display case, to include a silver purse belonging to Eva Braun (Hitler’s mistress), some drawings of Disney’s 7 dwarves purportedly done and signed by Hitler, Nazi Christmas ornaments and a very chilling “Gestapo Room” behind a closed door.  It was hard to take it all given in the brief time we had in the town.  We got back on the ship and sailed north, entering a small but very narrow fjord known as the Trollfjord.  This was another great photo opportunity to be outside on the front deck of the ship as in some places the cliff walls were very close to either side of the ship.  It is very deep and opens up into a small bay where we could turn around and come back out. We saw several eagles on the cliffs and magnificent mountains still lit by the sun despite it being around 11:30 p.m. Click here for a short video of the Trollfjord
Our next day brought us to the town of Tromso, the last town of size in the northern part of the country.  It was another perfect day for walking and we explored the harbor area, looking at repurposed warehouses from commercial fishing and whaling days.  Chase procured some smoked whale meat and we all had a sample. It tasted much like smoked beef, but was much denser.  We had admission to a Polar Museum there and had a local guide take us through and tell us more about the Arctic explorers but also a lot about the indigenous people from the Arctic, their lifestyles and the lifestyles of the trappers, whalers and seal hunters who were in the area before it was developed.  We returned to our ship and continued north passing by chains of barren islands.  BY this point it literally was daylight all night, so we made good use of our blackout curtains and eye shades.
Our next day brought us to the North Cape area of Norway, stopping at the town of Honningsvag. We had a local guide who actually was from Portugal, but lives in town and runs a bar as well as doing tour groups.  He was very good.  We bussed out of the town and out to the end of the land where the most northern point in Europe lies at 70 degrees 10 minutes and 21 seconds North Latitude.  It is marked by a large metal globe which we all took turns having our pictures taken by. There is a museum and theater which ran a good film on the seasons of 24 hour daylight to 24 hour darkness and the Northern lights.  They also had a good exhibit on the WWII Allied convoys that supplied Russia in the Port of Murmansk to assist in their war effort against the Germans and how dangerous convoys were with all the U-boat activity, but how much of a difference those supplies made in the long run defeat of Nazi Germany.  We returned by bus to the ship and after dinner had a talk on Scandinavian politics which was very interesting. Norway, Denmark and Sweden are constitutional monarchies and Finland is a republic with an elected President. Norway is a founding member of NATO and takes defense seriously.  It has turned down joining the E.U. several times in referenda, so sympathizes a bit with the UK and their Brexit. Sweden is still neutral and not in either NATO or the E.U, but Finland and Denmark are both in the E.U. with Denmark being a NATO member as well, but focused on their Air Force as there is only a tiny Army.  Hot button issues for Norway are immigration and toll roads. In fact the fastest growing political party is an anti-toll road party that has come together recently in opposition to putting tolls on the roads.  North Sea oil monies are held in escrow as a rainy day fund and they are operating without a current deficit, having a balanced budget and a very hefty tax burden to pay for the social welfare state.
Sunday morning found us at the end of our ship journey as we docked in the small town of Kirkenes.  We were off the ship at 9 a.m. and onto a bus that took us into town, but there was little to see or do as there was no one out and about early Sunday morning. Kirkenes is very close to the Russian border and there is even a monument to Russian soldiers who liberated the town from the Nazi’s in WWII.  We had a local guide who was actually German but is living there. He gave us a tour of a large underground shelter constructed built by local miners who worked the iron mines in the area to protect their people from bombing that went on.  Kirkenes was pretty much destroyed in WW II above ground, but the large facility underground was a safe haven.  It doubled as a fallout shelter during the Cold War but now is a tourist attraction. The iron mining had dwindled in recent years, but we noted that a large facility had Chinese writing on it and we learned that a Chinese firm has purchased the mines and ore plant and is starting up production again—getting their hands into everything it seems.  That also explained the new Chinese gate in the town square and the local Chinese restaurant (although they are also catering to the many Chinese cruise ship tourists who visit).  I asked Chase on the side if this proximity to Russia engendered any spying and he indicated it did. He told me a local Norwegian official from the town had been arrested in Murmansk several years ago with a large amount of Russian currency that was speculated may have been intended to procure information.  He is still being held in Russia. An interesting fact is that people living in a 25 mile area on either side of the border have a special passport that allows back and forth cross border travel with little scrutiny.  Russians come across to buy Norwegian gasoline for their cars and groceries while Norwegians cross to load up on Russian booze which is much cheaper than in Norway. After finishing up in the town, we continued our bus ride along the road that leads to Murmansk and stopped at the border with Russia for some photo opportunities.  I could see a lot of signals intelligence towers on the Norwegian side of the border on some nearby mountain tops, which I am sure is used by NATO to monitor the Russian Baltic Fleet in Murmansk. At this point we loaded back up on the bus and head to the Finland border and said farewell to Norway.  Stay tuned for Part 3 of this travel blog which will cover our time in northern Finland, Helsinki and the trip home.

Trip to Norway: Part 1

Oslo to Voss to Bergen

Click on this link for photographs associated with the narrative

Suzy and I booked this trip a little over a year in advance. We had selected dates, but had to change them early this year in order to attend our niece’s wedding. The change in our travel dates was providential as our trip was slightly later in the summer and we had excellent weather, as well as an outstanding tour group leader.  Our trip ran from July 8-25^th, and got off to an inauspicious start when our friend taking us to Dulles airport was rear ended at a stop light on the Prince William County Parkway and we were delayed getting to the airport due to the required police investigation of the accident (the other driver was cited).  We did get to the airport in plenty of time to make our Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, Germany and after a short layover, on to Oslo.  Our decision to go business class was a sound one as we were able to rest as well as use the Lufthansa lounges while awaiting all of our international flights.
Arriving in Oslo we were picked up by a car and driver and delivered to our hotel where we were met by our tour guide, Chase Alexander Jordal. We had been introduced by e-mail and a personal phone call before we traveled, so we were able to recognize each other right away and make our face-face introductions. Chase was the perfect tour leader for our group, having lived for a time in the U.S. and having an American mother and Norwegian father.  He is also an officer in the Norwegian Army Reserve and fit right in with the many military veterans in our group. He had been married just over a year and we were his first tour group, having signed on with the company in November. He is working on his Master’s degree and desires to teach and eventually get into school administration, but we think he also has a future in Norwegian politics. We were given an opportunity to get into our hotel room and have a little rest. After a nap, we joined the rest of the group in walking to a local restaurant and having dinner with our tour leader.  After dinner we were on our own, so walked around the waterfront and had an ice cream before heading back to our hotel and turning in for the night.
After a hearty breakfast in the hotel we met in a conference area and had a welcome briefing and “getting to know you session” with our tour leader and the other members of the group.  The 23 group members were all seasoned travelers with Grand Circle/OAT and turned out to be a good group to be with.  Our next event was a bus tour of Oslo with a local guide who did a good job of pointing out the sites and letting us out for some guided stops.  We were impressed with the modern opera house that sits in the harbor like a giant iceberg and other city buildings with a very modern look to them, to include one that looks like a barcode like you see on a package and also the world’s narrowest apartment building, only 7.8 meters wide. We then bussed to the Vigeland sculpture park.  The park is a very large green space, but has hundreds of bronze sculptures as well as a central set of stone sculptures all created by a man named Vigeland running from the 1920’s to the 1940’s. The theme is human life at all stages of life and their relationships with each other.  The central pillar of stone is one piece and very impressive.  Even more impressive was the fact that the city commissioned the artist and provided him with all the funds he needed for supplies, equipment, associates and a personal income.  The park was undamaged during the Nazi occupation years and some of the final pieces were done during this period. After the park we got taken to the “Fram” museum which houses the polar exploration ship named “Fram” and was designed to survive being iced in at the polar cap for several years without breaking up. The polar expedition era in Norway produced a number of national heroes, most notably Fridjof Hansen and Roald Amundsen.  These people and their contemporaries were like the Mercury astronauts in terms of going where no one had gone before and achieving fame in their time, some like Amundsen losing their lives in the process.  I cannot imagine being in a ship stuck in the ice for several years, but these hearty souls managed to do it and not go stir crazy.  We then were taken to a Viking boat museum with 3 long boats unearthed over the last 100 years dating back to the 8^th and 9^th century and well preserved along with many implements and items that were buried with the ships as part of a Viking King or Queens funeral. The burial and preservation techniques used are why these artifacts did not simply rot way over the centuries.  After lunch in the outdoor café by the museum, we were on our own for more explorations and overstayed our opportunity to get back to the hotel and walk to the parliament building to meet a friend of Chase’s who is a staffer in the Parliament. He had offered to show a bit of the building to those of our group interested in seeing the inside of the Parliament building and having a discussion about taxation policies.  As it turned out, Chase had a friend or acquaintance in almost every town or city we visited in Norway and they all were willing to share some expertise with us to go deeper into Norwegian life and culture. We made it a point not to miss any other of these encounters for the rest of the trip. We did use the time we had in the late afternoon to visit the Norwegian Historical Museum which had several interesting temporary exhibits to include the only complete Viking helmet from that era as well as other artifacts and treasures. We only had about an hour to look around before closing time, so we did not see it all by any means. After returning to our hotel and cleaning up for dinner, we walked as a group to the waterfront and had a fixed menu fish dinner at a nice restaurant. We were on our own after that and did some exploring around the waterfront before returning and turning in for the night.
Our second full day in Oslo started after breakfast with a walk to the July 22, 2011 memorial.  This incident was an act of domestic terrorism by an alt-right Norwegian trying to eliminate future leaders of the Labor Party at a youth summer camp on an island in a lake out in the rural area.  His plot included building and detonating a car bomb outside of some government buildings that caused a lot of damage, injuries and several deaths. He dressed in the uniform of a policeman and moved freely from the van containing the bomb to a car he had parked outside the blast area. Counting on the confusion of the bombing, he drove directly to the lake, took a ferry over using his police cover as a ruse, and got the operators to think he was going to provide security based on the bombing threat. Once on the island, he broke out a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun and began shooting at the operators of the camp and the youth, eventually killing and wounding a large number of people. The final death toll between the bombing and the shooting spree was some 62 people, including several who died jumping off cliffs to tray and swim off the island.  This incident stunned the nation as it was home grown. The shooter was captured, tried and convicted and sentenced to the maximum prison term of 22 years, but as there is a legal provision of keeping someone confined who poses a future threat, he will never get out of jail (Norway repealed their death penalty a number of years ago).  The memorial is sober and still only a temporary one, but has photographs of all those who died (with the exception of a few whose families did not give permission and are represented by a blank picture frame) and their ages, some as young as 14.  There is a documentary film that plays continuously which has interviews with survivors describing the day and the fear they all had.  Apparently all the political parties (and there are quite a few) in Norway get young people involved in summer camp activities, which for the most part are like any normal summer camp, but there are opportunities for rising leaders to be identified. In the politics of Norway, voters vote for a party rather than a person to represent them in parliament and the parties that get a certain threshold of votes get seats in parliament with the people who fill those seats picked by party leaders. The island where this massacre occurred hosts several of different political party’s youth over the course of a summer and it has only recently resumed hosting the camps.
After this somber visit, we walked as group to a major arterial street and boarded a tram to the West end of Oslo. Tram lines are very prevalent and active in all the major cities we visited.  In the not so distant past, Oslo was split into a West and East end with the money on the East end and the manufacturing on the West end. The housing in the West end reflected the blue collar nature of the neighborhoods, smaller, cheaper and more favored by students and immigrants.  With the coming of the 21^st century, the West end has begun to gentrify. Breweries and surviving industries have located out of the city and the former textile mills, dye plants and warehouses have been turned into apartments, shops and green spaces.  The river that runs through the heart of the area has been cleaned up and provides a very pleasant walk of several miles along either side of it.  Our local guide who grew up in the area in the 60’s took us on quite a hike while telling of how it was to grow up in a one room apartment with little modern conveniences. We saw things like a huge complex of grain silos turned into an 11 story student housing complex.   We passed several parks and noted lots of Dad’s with small children and learned that the generous amount of maternity/paternity leave granted to the parents of new children are split into 3 parts, one for the mother, another for the father and a third portion that the parents can decide who stays and who goes to work.  We ended our hike in an area with lots of counterculture trappings and street art murals.  We had lunch on our own in a street market that was an enclosed building with lots of vendors as well as small places to eat. After lunch we took a city bus back to our hotel.  Suzy and I then went on a hunt for postage stamps and found a post office where we were shocked to have to pay the equivalent of over $3 for an international post card stamp.
After that walk, we went to the palace to visit the home of the Norwegian King and Queen.  Norway is a constitutional monarchy having opted for that rather than a Republic when it obtained its independence from Sweden in 1905. Suzy had obtained tickets online before we left the states for an English speaking tour and we were able to do that on our own beginning at 4 p.m. It was very interesting and well done and we got to see quite a bit of the palace, but unfortunately, no photographs are allowed so we had to settle for some postcards.  The Royal Family is well regarded by the people, but do not exercise the power of the government. The sitting Prime Minister and cabinet come to the Palace on Fridays and as a group meet with the King and the next in line for the throne to obtain Royal assents to decisions made by the Parliament.  Assent is almost always given and in the very rare cases where it is withheld the Prime Minister will work with Parliament to rework a matter and deal with it at a later meeting.  We made our way back to the hotel in time to have a coffee, clean up and meet with the group in our conference area with a local journalist who writes for and publishes a conservative magazine in Norway.  This was another acquaintance of our tour guide and was a special event not on the formal program, but we got a lot out of the presentation and follow on discussion regarding the issues of immigration in Norway.  The issues are all familiar, in dealing with people who don’t know the language, can’t find work in their former fields, and lack of assimilation.  Norway as a country of only 4.5 million and a relatively homogenous local population can only absorb so many immigrants in schools and urban neighborhoods.  Although Norway is not a member of the EU, it does have free passage for EU members without passport controls, and as a result suffers a bit from what we would call “economic immigration” from some of the poorer Eastern European EU member nations.  We noted a lack of homeless and beggars on the streets, but were told that there had been a recent uptick in panhandling by Romanians which is felt to be an organized crime thing that the country is trying to get a handle on.  Suzy and I did have to rebuff two young Roma women on separate occasions who were trying to engage us for “donations” while we were in a park having ice cream, but nothing like the Roma experiences we had in Paris!
Dinner was on our own and we found a nice place a bit of a walk away, but worth it to eat in a courtyard. The long light days even in Oslo made it seem like it was earlier than it was, so we were a bit late getting back to our hotel and packing up to leave the next morning.
Our travels commenced by bus after breakfast. We quickly got into the mountains and had some very spectacular scenery.  We also passed by the lake that had the island which was the scene of the July 22, 2011 massacre. A rest stop along the way gave us a chance to stretch our legs and do a small bit of shopping in an enclosed mall featuring stores owned by a hotel magnate. Despite an out of the way location, any business owned by this wealthy Norwegian had to have a shop in this mini-mall. We continued on our way even further up into the mountains and stopped in a small resort town for a group lunch. We went through many tunnels, one of which was 25 kilometers long (about 15 miles).  We passed many waterfalls and cascades, reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands. Once again we made an unscheduled stop to visit an acquaintance of our tour leader on a farm outside the small mountain town of Flam.  Conrad was the young man’s name and he was getting ready to go study in Germany for a year. The family raises sheep on their farm. His mother is Romanian and knits goods for sale in a small cooperative shop in town for the tourists that come up a deep fjord on cruise ships right up to this small town. The cruise ships are a mixed blessing as there are tourists to spend money on local crafts and goods during the stop and also to ride the scenic Flam railway further up into the mountains and back on short excursions.  The downside is there is no infrastructure for the ships, so they run their engines to keep the power on and the sheer numbers of people passing through overwhelm the locals.  Our small group was welcomed by the family. Conrad’s father told us about the farm and also his other occupation as a tour guide in Europe (which is how he met his wife).  His wife was very nice and served us tea, coffee and a cookie in a covered shed.  We encouraged her to show off her knitting work and as a result we arranged to visit the co-op the next morning before we took the railway excursion.  I gave her one of my children’s books as a gift for hosting us on the spur of the moment (The Legend of the Christmas Dachshund). We then continued on our bus journey with the next stop being a “Stave” Church built over 800 years before, all out of wood with dragon’s head carvings on the top corners.  These churches were built by craftsmen in the middle Ages going from place to place, felling large trees and raising the logs on end atop a stone foundation, then interlocking them with cross timbers. The style blended some Viking mythology with Christianity, which was a common element of the early church in evangelizing pagan cultures.  The interior was very dark, but some of the carvings and alter paintings were still in good shape. It was well preserved on the outside because it was covered in tar, so was dark brown to black.  A local youth was our guide to the church and she did a very good job giving us the history.  After the Protestant reformation, the churches were transitioned from Roman Catholic to Lutheran and the ornate decors were taken out.  There are very few of the original Stave churches left in Norway, although there are some reproductions here and there.   This church had been used up until about 40 years ago when a modern church was built nearby.  It is still used for weddings and there is a church cemetery that is still used for burials.  The museum and guides are all local rural youth who work during the summer while school is out.  It is a win-win for them and the local area.  We continued our travels on through the mountain valleys to the town of Voss, where we stayed overnight.  It was a warm day and the hotel had no AC, but was otherwise a good room.  We had dinner in the hotel buffet style and as Suzy was not feeling well we retired at a reasonable hour as we had to be up fairly early the next day to leave again.
The next morning we had an early breakfast and bussed to Flam and into the town to meet Conrad’s mother who had opened the co-op shop early for us. We had about 20 minutes to look at the handmade crafts, mainly jewelry and knitting, but some other things as well. We bade her goodbye and headed to the Flam railway excursion with Conrad coming along.  This tourist railway climbs steep grades and switchbacks with spectacular views of the valleys and mountains.  About halfway up we stopped and had a chance to get off at a very large waterfall and take pictures.  We had been told previously about a legend of something like the Greek sirens that sang beautifully and lured sailors to their death on the rocks in the sea, but this version (called a Nokk) takes the form of a beautiful young woman who lures young men to their death in the falls with her enchanting singing.  As we were stopped and taking pictures, all of a sudden music came over the sound of the waterfall and we glimpsed a figure of a woman dancing to the music on top of one of the embankments near the top of the falls.  She came into view briefly several times then disappeared over the embankment. After this bit of entertainment (I can report no young men went over the falls) and we got back on the train for the remainder of the trip. For a brief snippet of her appearance, click on this link.Water Sprite (Nokk) The return trip brought us back to the Flam station where we went to a different set of tracks and boarded a regular passenger train for Bergen.  The trip was several hours and was a comfortable ride. We arrived at the main train station and Chase struck up a conversation with a Norwegian couple who had been on the train coming back from backpack camping in the mountains. They agreed to visit with us for a few minutes and explained that people backpack camp a lot in the mountains during the summer.  The water in the streams is safe to drink and they can cook simple meals from dehydrated provisions they bring with them.  It was a very nice encounter. We loaded our gear up on a bus and went directly to lunch at an interesting restaurant Chase was familiar with called “Dr. Wiesner’s”.  Up until the early 1900’s it was a public bath house for local residents who had no bathrooms and used outhouses for toilets. They could come once a week and clean up for a modest sum.  The place went through several iterations of things, finally becoming a restaurant.  The current owner spoke to us before lunch was served and explained it is a neighborhood social center (a family was doing a birthday celebration in another part of the facility while we were there).  The other interesting thing about the place was that it brings on inexperienced young people and trains them in how to be good servers so they can move on to jobs in higher end establishments.  Bergen is Chase’s hometown and he liked to come to this place for a beer and conversation on a regular basis.  It had kind of a “Cheers” atmosphere to it, and the food was simple, but good.
After lunch we went to our hotel and settled in mid-afternoon, but went out almost immediately to walk to a vernicular known locally as the “Floibahn” to go from sea level to the top of one of the seven mountains surrounding Bergen.  Suzy decided to stay in our room and rest, but most of us took the “Floibahn” straight up the side of the mountain, getting out at the top and having a large area to wander about for viewing and taking pictures.  There also were two restaurants, a tourist shop and a child’s play area.  Chase challenged us to walk with him back to down a very well maintained and wide path that snaked back and forth and eventually deposited you back in town.  Most of us did so and within a short distance we came upon a kindergarten/preschool for kids.  Their parents put them on the “Floibahn” and they are met by staff at the top and spend the day doing their classroom activities and play outside, then ride back down and are picked up by their parents.  Although our walk back was downhill all the way, I was beat by the time we finished and my muscles were burning from the downhill slope for the 3 kilometers or so we walked.  It was a good thing Suzy begged off as it would not have gone well for her.  By the time I got back to the room I could barely walk and she on the other hand had had a restful sleep of several hours and was feeling better.  While walking back with Chase I asked him where we could get a good hamburger in town as we had been eating a lot of fish since the trip started.  He pointed put a place near the “Floibahn” called “Inside Burger”.  Once Suzy got recovered and I had a chance to rest a bit, we walked back past the “Floibahn” and found the restaurant.  It was definitely a young people’s place, but did have an excellent assortment of burgers and sides as well as a lot of different beers on tap. The décor was 80’s metal rock and we were the oldest people in the place by far, but we enjoyed it as a little adventure by ourselves, plus the burgers were excellent! Although it was after 9 p.m. when we finished, it was still light when we left, so we walked back a different way and checked out some of the other scenery.  There is a place near the waterfront called the “Fish Market” which is a series of red canopies that enclose small food stands and are very popular with the cruise ship tourists from the ships docked nearby, especially the Chinese.  We poked our heads into some tourist shops still open, but bought only post cards.  It was another late night when we finished and sleep came quickly.
The next morning after breakfast we all walked with our leader to the Fish Museum which is located at the harbor in a former warehouse for the exporting of dried and salted cod (called stock fish) for several hundred years. The museum is a learning center for school groups as well as tourists, so the museum guide provided us with a lot of information on the 1000 years of history of the Bergen area, about fishing techniques over the years, the collapse of the herring fisheries in the early 20^th century from over fishing, and the current state of aquaculture in Norway.  We also had a discussion of whaling and how that has changed over the last 300 years. Norway does very little whaling these days, and the only species hunted are the small Minkie whales which are a sustainable resource and are humanely harvested.  We also saw a video on the demise of the sealing industry in Norway from sealskin coats being a coveted high fashion item up to the early 1960’s until celebrity and Greenpeace backlash at the way seals were hunted closed down the industry in just a few years. It’s hard to believe that a brutal killing business existed only to meet he desires of people for fashionable coats.  After our museum learning experience, we had lunch in their restaurant in a private room, with a very good salmon main course.  As we were doing dessert and coffee, a young woman came in dressed in a traditional Norwegian costume and played some traditional music on a Norwegian version of a violin. It is a bit bigger than a regular violin and had dragon’s head carved on the end. It also has 7 strings, 5 are played as usual and two are harmonic resonators. Some of the tunes sound a bit like Scottish or Irish fiddle playing and indicates how the cultures overlapped during the Viking era and the middle ages as people ventured back and forth over the North Sea. The young lady answered our questions for a while and we learned that musicians who study the traditional instruments and music don’t do classical studies in orchestras and vice versa.  We also learned her instrument was just over 100 years old! Follow this link for a short video of her performing for us. Musician
After lunch it was back to the hotel and regrouped for the afternoon.  I took Suzy up on the Floibahn” so she could have the view, but we both rode it back down! We then went in search of an ATM and after a couple of false starts were successful. We stopped for ice cream in a park on the way back (they have great soft ice cream in Norway that does not get drippy in the heat).  Our next event was a one hour discussion at the hotel with Chase’s father who runs a small business that installs Internet and TV cabling to distribute signals for apartments and office buildings where a satellite dish is impractical to use.  Our group had fun kidding him about his son Chase, but we did learn a lot about how much it takes to be an entrepreneur in a social welfare country. Hiring issues, benefits issues, tax issues—a lot of balls to juggle. After that we went to a separate section of the hotel dining room and had our farewell to Bergen dinner as a group. Chase’s Dad joined us, but Chase disappeared just before we sat down and reappeared a bit later dressed in traditional Norwegian clothing.  It was very colorful, but Chase related that it is all wool and itches. He let us take pictures of him and with him. We were at a round table of 8 and had a lovely evening chatting and getting to know the other 3 couples at the table.  After dessert and coffee it was time to go pack up and get some sleep as the next morning we would be heading off to the countryside to visit a fish farm and upon our return we would be taken to our ship for the coastal portion of our trip.

After breakfast the next morning we bussed quite a ways out of town up the coast and onto islands via tunnels and bridges to visit a fish farm. Aquaculture is big business for Norway. Although cod and haddock are still wild caught commercially, salmon and a salmonid relative, the arctic char, are all raised in farms.  Along the way we passed several large oil platforms that were in for repair and refurbishment.  The salmon farm we went to is also a learning center and has a small museum and a restaurant that serves an excellent lunch of fish soup (really like chowder), bread, salad and a dessert.  We enjoyed the lunch, then had a presentation and film given by the son of the owner who took us thought the entire process of hatching the salmon from fertilized eggs, raising the salmon fry and on to the smolt stage at which point they are vaccinated and placed into the ocean pen enclosure where they will grow to the size and weight desired.  We also got information on the business side of things and how important these fisheries are to the economy of the area and to Norway. We also received a safety briefing before walking to the dock and loading up on a rubber hulled speed boat for the ride over to the platform in the ocean where the pens were.  Once at the platform we could see closed circuit TV pictures of the five stock pens with the fish in them.  There are also some tiny fish in with the salmon that feed on algae and keep the salmon clean. We were shown the pelletized feed and then went out by the pens to see the feeding apparatus distribute food in a circular arc and all the excitement of the fish feeding. The particular pen we saw had fish about 10 – 12 inches long.  It takes about 18 months for the fish to grow big enough to harvest. At that point, a specialized boat sucks them out of the pen into a large live well and they are transported to a processing facility where they are anesthetized, humanely slaughtered, and processed into filets for flash freezing or for fresh fish markets locally.   We returned to the shore via the speedboat and had time to visit the museum with a local employee whose family had lived in the area for four generations, well before roads and electricity when the only way to Bergen was by boat and most people raised sheep and fished from small boats.  The catch from a day of fishing would be rowed into Bergen and sold in the fish market, and then the fisherman would have to row back home—definitely a hard life.  These island communities did not have trees, mostly scrub vegetation.  Heating was done with peat which was gathered by hand from the peat bogs on the islands, cut into squares, dried on end and burned.  It took a whole lot of peat to keep a small cottage heated through the winter! This was particularly interesting to me as I had met some of my Scottish relatives years before who gathered and heated with peat up into the 1990’s, using the same tools and techniques as the Norwegian islanders did. The museum’s artifacts, dioramas and photographs were quite interesting, but before too long we had to depart back to Bergen and get to our Hurtigruten ship for the sea part of our adventure.  Stay tuned for Part 2 of the blog that will cover the 6 days we spent on the ship!