Day 6, continued: Bodø and beyond
Oct. 28th, 2004 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenGlaciers aren't all bad. So long as one isn't threatening to eat your house, it's quite beautiful. So distressingly shortly after the Polarlys crossed into the Arctic, I was down in one of the ship's car decks, boarding a small and somewhat battered 1960s fishing boat, Melløycruise II, now converted into a tourist conveyance, to be ferried to Svartisbreen.
Svartisbreen – the Black Glacier - is Norway's second largest glacier, out of more than 1,700 – the greatest of all being Jostedalsbreen. It's not actually black – it’s mostly a pale turquoise-blue colour, where it's not covered in fresh snow – and the locals aren't actually sure why they call it by that name, but they do. It might come from a Sami word which sounds a little like the Norwegian for "black ice" but actually means "blue ice".
From sea level, onboard a small boat chugging quietly up a silent fjord in an early Arctic morning, the glacier is remote, aloof, a roof across the top of the mountain range to our right. Behind distant peaks I catch a glimpse of white, bridging their gaps.
Our young guide, who sadly doesn't introduce herself, is a classical Scandinavian beauty: blonde, leggy and lovely - and fluent in English and German besides her own tongue. She also has a remarkable knack at bird-spotting. Occasionally, a sea-eagle sweeps across our path, sometimes settling in a waterside tree – there are many such growing on a scattering of small, uninhabited islands. These great birds, wingspans reaching up to two and a half metres, are so plentiful here that some have been taken and moved to Scotland in an effort to reintroduce the species there. They sit in trees and regard us. I gaze back through binoculars, rapt. Their eyes seem to hold a mixture of aristocratic, elegant disdain and insane imbecility.
An hour's sail up the fjord, past tiny villages and their apparently inseparable fish-processing factories, and the occasional salmon farm, we come in sight of two lobes of the great glacier as it spills down precipitous valleys towards the mirror-smooth water. The sun barely skims the mountain-tops right behind it, making it almost impossible to get a clear photo, but the sight is dazzling. At this moment, the guide's voice over the boat's less-than-hifi PA system is replaced by the instantly-familiar soaring strings of the Peer Gynt Suite. It's old, it's hackneyed but it's perfect: archetypically Norwegian, hauntingly lovely and perfectly plangent.
I actually weep for the beauty of it.
Soon the Melloycruise arrives at a rickety-looking jetty, where an equally rickety old coach awaits. The more vigorous among us set off toward the mountains on foot, strolling through an Alpine scene. On both sides are the sounds of cowbells, although in this case they're actually on the necks of placid sheep, eyeballing us incuriously. They graze on scrubby grass growing from thin, rock-scattered soil; but a few generations from raw scree, it nonetheless supports a sparse but lush forest of birch. The trees are small and thin-trunked, too slender to yield useful wood for building, but their sheer numbers mean that they're used for firewood and sometimes paper.
The visitors' centre, built from barn-red-painted wood along the same lines as local homes, lies on the opposite side of a tiny circular lake from a descending arm of the glacier itself. Sadly, though, this is nearly as close as you can get. The tip of the ice nearly enters the nacreous blue water in the middle of a broad stretch of smooth-scoured rock: the ice is in retreat, having shrunk back some 50 metres in recent years. This slick expanse is bracketed in birch forest for a hundred-plus metres on either side, after which the lake shore is gravel, so you can get no closer than this to the ice. It's probably wise: glaciers are dangerous places to walk, riddled with concealed crevasses and treacherous rotten ice – but despite this, they're also fragile things. So I returned to the centre for my complimentary drink and cake and browsed the absolutely invariable assortment of carved wooden trolls and T-shirts with reindeer on. For a novelty, though, the postcards here were unusually tasteful, with the exception of an extremely-badly superimposed sea-eagle on a picture of a flock of birds swirling over the fjord. For a country with a certain degree of taste and discretion, except, perhaps, apart from the matter of eating intelligent cetaceans, the Norwegian souvenir range is stereotyped beyond belief. Suffice it to say that the occasional shop with a collection of Viking-themed craftworks or Telemark sweaters is one of rare distinction.
I did not buy a troll.
After a shorter ride up a side-fjord, we boarded a rather more modern-looking coach for the ride to Bodø, where we would rendezvous with the Hurtigrute. First, there was a brief rest stop at Sandhornøy, complete with a perfect little sandy beach – albeit a very frigid-looking one. The charming and giggly guide, Ida – shortly to move to Tromsø to train as a nurse - was a native of Bodø, claimed by some as modern Norway's ugliest city. She passed around a coffee-table book proclaiming its charms in pictures, but I can't help but suspect that the shot of smiling bikini-clad teenagers at the seaside was more than a little posed. Perhaps I do the summer climate an injustice. No-one took her suggestion for a quick swim, though – not even she. Shame.
Next came Saltstraumen with its famous tidal whirlpool: the Mælstrom. Several sea currents converge in a narrow channel here, now bridged, causing a chaotic swirl of icy seawater. It's possible to follow elements of the movement as the area is strangely popular with local seagulls: a small flock sat resting on the surface, continually being dragged through and across and around the whirlpool. Frequently the flock would be drawn out into a long thin line, which then folded back upon itself, looped around or converged into a clump again. It's a real-life fractal: a live strange attractor, constantly changing and never the same twice. It's not only a fun fairground-ride for seafowl, either: two inflatable dinghies were plying to and fro across the currents too, full of happily-screaming passengers. As the boats entered the vortex, their pilots killed the engines, allowing the boats to be pushed and pulled around in random directions. Only on our return to the ship did we discover that said passengers were also on the cruise, members of a different expedition.
On climbing up away from the shore, a problem manifested, in the form of billowing clouds of black smoke from beneath our coach. Ida apologized for its advanced age and assured us it would get us there, but soon we had to stop while the driver phoned his base for help. Time to be grateful for Norway's remarkable telecomms system: even sailing a mile off from uninhabited Arctic shores, I typically have a full-strength signal on my cellphone.
Our problem is more immediate, though: the Hurtigrute does not count people on and off and if we do not return in time, the ship will sail without us. But we're still 30km from Bodø and it departs in 30min.
Whatever the driver's told, he fiddles with something and we are shortly off again, sans smoke trail. We drive in through the outskirts of Bodø, which is an unappealing city of sprawling suburbs – it lies on a coastal plane, beneath a mountain range. The houses are small, generic Norwegian wooden dwellings, mostly painted in the traditional colours of barn-red, yellow and white. One seventeenth-century one is even all three. Apparently, these once represented fixed points on a scale of expense. Red was cheap, pigmented in part with blood. Yellow was more expensive, so a yellow house advertised prosperity, whereas white was costliest of all and proclaimed riches.
Although it lies well within the Arctic circle, there's little to show it about Bodø; it's a very ordinary-seeming city, with shops, businesses and homes – and during our visit, massive roadworks, delaying us further. It also boasts some of the governmental administrative offices, in an effort at decentralisation and retaining business and employment in the north. There's an ancient church, some 600 years older than the city itself, and a modern aircraft museum, although regrettably there's no time to visit this. As we near the docks, we see that the Polarlys is still there: apparently a coach full of thirty or forty people is worth waiting for.
Lunch awaits us too – a special sitting laid on for returning travellers. The meals aboard are consistently impressive: buffet breakfasts and lunches and à lá carte dinners. The buffets, particularly, are not wonderful for vegetarians: breakfast beans or scrambled egg are likely to contain bacon stirred in and the cold offerings revolve around fish and cheese. These days, I've made an executive decision that as soon as I leave the British Isles, all cheese instantly becomes vegetarian – the alternative is a vegan diet and an inability to eat just about anything in any restaurant anywhere. So breakfast is cereal and boiled eggs with toast, supplemented with fruit.
The toast, mind, is a joy: Norwegian bread is, in my humble opinion, the finest in the world, coming in half a dozen different forms from white through to rich browns full of seeds and nuts. It's baked in square loaves, so it's not the French's mass of crust with a wisp of white fluff within, but it's sold and served whole: you slice it yourself, with a bread-slicing machine in most homes, for maximal freshness. Even tiny corner 24-hour stores bake their own bread, albeit from frozen dough. I've spent years trying to recreate something like it in Britain, but even scouring health-food shops for exotic flours, we cannot match the Norwegian's breadth of flavour and texture. Nor, incidentally, can the Swedes.
Lunch is more open: the choice of hot dishes is seldom of any use, ranging from chicken, turkey and a profusion of fish to meatballs and even, appallingly, whale steaks. However, the salad bar is excellent – if one ignores the fish and cold meats – and often the soups are veggie, too. There's always a range of tempting desserts, too: jelly, blancmange, stewed fruit, tarts and pies and puddings, and occasionally exotica such as rømmegrøt: sour-cream porridge. Smooth-textured as semolina, this is served with melted butter and cinnamon sugar. Locals extol its virtues with gusto. Norwegian sour cream (rømme) is much milder than that of southern Europe, and like Italian mascarpone cheese, it's as likely to be found in a sweet dish as a savoury. It's served in waffles with syltetøy (home-made-style runny fruit jam), on vegetables and potatoes, as a pizza topping or dip, with cakes and desserts - as well as on the side with Mexican foods such as quesadillas in Oslo's profusion of Mexican restaurants.
After the first day, we don't get to choose our own seats or dinner. From now on, you sit at the same table every night and eat what you're given. The menu is varied, but all European, centred around meat and fish with small amounts of vegetables or pasta on the side. Presentation is immaculate: the dishes are vaguely nouvelle cuisine in style, served by a friendly, charming and multilingual crew of young Norwegian waitresses. There are also recommendations of wines and the ship's own mineral water. I told them that I was a vegetarian on the first night, when I was told I could have whatever I wanted – I chose an omelette, to make life easy for them. From then on, though, I was presented with an individual veggie starter and main course every day.
Some of the fussier eaters among the British were not best pleased with the diet. If you're used to nothing but meat and two veg, boiled of course, then this comes across as exotic fayre and I saw many plates being sent back full – especially when the seas were high. If you're a little more flexible, though, it's good stuff. The Coastal Express cruise – especially the eleven-day round trip, the full experience, as opposed to the popular option of flying back from Kirkenes – is nicknamed the ten-pound cruise. It's not what you spend – that's two drinks at the bar – it's how much weight you gain en route. After a week, I'm already distressingly close. A year's running is undone, to my dismay; getting rid of it again will keep me busy all winter.
- - - - -
From Bodø, the ship leaves its normal coast-hugging route and sails into open water, sailing west into the sunset across the Vestfjord toward the southern end of the Lofoten island chain to dock at the tiny port of Stamsund on the second island, Vestvågøy. Alas, we don't call at the southernmost tip, home of the splendidly-named village of Å. Rising out of the sea since the end of the last ice age, the islands are extremely mountainous, their jagged peaks forming Lofotveggen: the 100km "Lofoten Wall", outlined against the western horizon. Since to effete, decadent Southerners such as myself, northern Norway seems a remote and harsh place to live, it makes me wonder what sort of person eschews the mainland for these even more isolated towns and villages, so I struck up a conversation with one of the crowd who joined the ship at Bodø. (Yes, a cute blonde one, if you're asking.)
She was making her way home for her birthday the following day, to a village on the far side of the island from a trip to visit friends in Oslo. The fast way home would have been to change planes at Bodø and fly to Svolvær on Austvågøy, the next island along, but being in no particular hurry and with such beautiful autumnal sunny weather, it was more pleasant to relax on the Hurtigrute for a few hours – if not very much cheaper. She'd lived in Oslo for years, as well as København and Berlin and other places, large and small, but Lofoten was best. Why? Well, because it's a quiet, unspoiled region, rich in wildlife and raw nature. It's not really that remote any more – all the islands are joined by bridges and tunnels, or at least ferries, ending with Hinnøy (Norway's largest island).
The traditional islander occupations were fishing and hunting - mainly for seals and whales.
(Now, as a former biologist and quondam member of, and fundraiser for, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth , I confess that I'm not at all happy about this, but the locals are avid to defend these traditional – nay, hallmark – local activities. They arguments are familiar from repetition from a number of people I've discussed this with hereabouts: it's traditional, it's natural; the balance of nature has been disturbed by humans, and it's their part to keep populations of everything from seals to elk in check by taking on the rôle of top predator. As for those things which aren't teeming in hordes – from herring and cod to whales – well, they'll recover, left to themselves. Meantime, it's only fair to keep taking a few, as they always have; if stocks are low, if the catches are smaller in size as well as number, it's not the Norwegians' fault, it's that of the others fishing their waters. And yet, Norway is still the largest exporter of fish in the world. And they don't hunt the whales that are really rare any more; the little ones they go for now are abundant - relatively.
It is not my place to tell them they're wrong, but whaling, in particular, is in my humble opinion Norway's great shame in front of the world. They are not alone; it is that of Japan as well. For the British, it is fox-hunting; for the Spanish, bullfighting; for the French, foie gras… And so the litany continues.
It's the twenty-first century. Practises such as killing for pleasure, or the killing and eating of animals either rare, putatively intelligent or both, are inhumane, barbaric and as obsolete as cannibalism or slavery - both of which, to name just two, are ancient, traditional and were once enshrined as basic rights. If wild fish populations are noticeably, measurably and significantly depleted, then we should all stop fishing those stocks, totally, unless and until they recover. And if that means some traditional ways of life perish, sadly, then so be it, I'm afraid, just like those of the honest people who once made their livings in other jobs that no longer exist.
There is, I feel, a lack of balance in some of the "environmental" arguments I've heard here. That the problems with things aren't the local's fault, so it's not their responsibility. I am afraid that the world doesn't work like that.
But enough of this.)
Today, alongside the ancient ways of life, Lofoten is also a home for artists, craft workers, retired people and others seeking peace and quiet and inspiration from the beauty of nature. My companion was the co-curator of a modern art gallery, one of several on the islands, and next month they were presenting the world première of the newest work by a video artist from London – showing that Lofoten wasn't really so out of the way after all. It is a small community – only about 2,500 on her island and 12,000 or so on the whole chain – but this is a comfortable size. It's enough that you know most of the locals, but not all, and today, when you can nip down to the capital for an overnight visit, it's a good place to live.
Well, I can attest to the islands' beauty, austere though it is, and I should like to return and visit them again. But I'm not sure I'd want to live there.
The islands are dotted with small towns and the Hurtigrute stops at several: first Stamsund, where my companion disembarked, then the slightly larger Svolvær, which offers two attractions for those making a flying visit. One is a museum dedicated to the effects and aftermath of the German occupation and the other is Magic Ice. Give me a choice between worthy or cool and fun and it seldom takes me long to decide, so off we trooped to Magic Ice.
It's a new attraction, based in a converted whalemeat coldroom (so they claim, with, I suspect, a hidden grin) right on the quay. Cooled to –5°C, it's a permanent ice-sculpture exhibition which opened in May 2004. There's even an ice bar, with both bar itself and shelves made entirely of solid-phase H20 – even the glasses. Order a single (eye-wateringly expensive, but that's normal) shot with your entrance ticket and it's served in either a fragile ice beaker or a more solid tumbler. The latter is an etiolated pyramid with a large depression in the base, so the only way to put it down is in a special rack. Used once, they're tossed into a hopper. Why recycle? It's just very slightly impure water!
I had a snaps - linjeakvavit - and shared most of it around. I like it just as little as last time, but it's vaguely authentic.
The sculptures are impressive, though I know little of ice sculpture. There are animals, a cliff of birds, seating and standing groups and figures and more. Some is simply figurative - a model of a Hurtigrute ship - some is less so (a partly-melted copy of a famed stone statue of a sailor's wife waving him off). I particularly liked a huge fisherman hauling in a vast steel net, pushing 10m long. In the net is a huge ice fish, struggling heroically. This piece was epic and must be planned for some permanence, given the metalwork.
Such blatant purpose-built tourist attractions are, happily, fairly rare, which means that when you do see them, it's harder to resist. Even at £15 for half an hour.
Svartisbreen – the Black Glacier - is Norway's second largest glacier, out of more than 1,700 – the greatest of all being Jostedalsbreen. It's not actually black – it’s mostly a pale turquoise-blue colour, where it's not covered in fresh snow – and the locals aren't actually sure why they call it by that name, but they do. It might come from a Sami word which sounds a little like the Norwegian for "black ice" but actually means "blue ice".
From sea level, onboard a small boat chugging quietly up a silent fjord in an early Arctic morning, the glacier is remote, aloof, a roof across the top of the mountain range to our right. Behind distant peaks I catch a glimpse of white, bridging their gaps.
Our young guide, who sadly doesn't introduce herself, is a classical Scandinavian beauty: blonde, leggy and lovely - and fluent in English and German besides her own tongue. She also has a remarkable knack at bird-spotting. Occasionally, a sea-eagle sweeps across our path, sometimes settling in a waterside tree – there are many such growing on a scattering of small, uninhabited islands. These great birds, wingspans reaching up to two and a half metres, are so plentiful here that some have been taken and moved to Scotland in an effort to reintroduce the species there. They sit in trees and regard us. I gaze back through binoculars, rapt. Their eyes seem to hold a mixture of aristocratic, elegant disdain and insane imbecility.
An hour's sail up the fjord, past tiny villages and their apparently inseparable fish-processing factories, and the occasional salmon farm, we come in sight of two lobes of the great glacier as it spills down precipitous valleys towards the mirror-smooth water. The sun barely skims the mountain-tops right behind it, making it almost impossible to get a clear photo, but the sight is dazzling. At this moment, the guide's voice over the boat's less-than-hifi PA system is replaced by the instantly-familiar soaring strings of the Peer Gynt Suite. It's old, it's hackneyed but it's perfect: archetypically Norwegian, hauntingly lovely and perfectly plangent.
I actually weep for the beauty of it.
Soon the Melloycruise arrives at a rickety-looking jetty, where an equally rickety old coach awaits. The more vigorous among us set off toward the mountains on foot, strolling through an Alpine scene. On both sides are the sounds of cowbells, although in this case they're actually on the necks of placid sheep, eyeballing us incuriously. They graze on scrubby grass growing from thin, rock-scattered soil; but a few generations from raw scree, it nonetheless supports a sparse but lush forest of birch. The trees are small and thin-trunked, too slender to yield useful wood for building, but their sheer numbers mean that they're used for firewood and sometimes paper.
The visitors' centre, built from barn-red-painted wood along the same lines as local homes, lies on the opposite side of a tiny circular lake from a descending arm of the glacier itself. Sadly, though, this is nearly as close as you can get. The tip of the ice nearly enters the nacreous blue water in the middle of a broad stretch of smooth-scoured rock: the ice is in retreat, having shrunk back some 50 metres in recent years. This slick expanse is bracketed in birch forest for a hundred-plus metres on either side, after which the lake shore is gravel, so you can get no closer than this to the ice. It's probably wise: glaciers are dangerous places to walk, riddled with concealed crevasses and treacherous rotten ice – but despite this, they're also fragile things. So I returned to the centre for my complimentary drink and cake and browsed the absolutely invariable assortment of carved wooden trolls and T-shirts with reindeer on. For a novelty, though, the postcards here were unusually tasteful, with the exception of an extremely-badly superimposed sea-eagle on a picture of a flock of birds swirling over the fjord. For a country with a certain degree of taste and discretion, except, perhaps, apart from the matter of eating intelligent cetaceans, the Norwegian souvenir range is stereotyped beyond belief. Suffice it to say that the occasional shop with a collection of Viking-themed craftworks or Telemark sweaters is one of rare distinction.
I did not buy a troll.
After a shorter ride up a side-fjord, we boarded a rather more modern-looking coach for the ride to Bodø, where we would rendezvous with the Hurtigrute. First, there was a brief rest stop at Sandhornøy, complete with a perfect little sandy beach – albeit a very frigid-looking one. The charming and giggly guide, Ida – shortly to move to Tromsø to train as a nurse - was a native of Bodø, claimed by some as modern Norway's ugliest city. She passed around a coffee-table book proclaiming its charms in pictures, but I can't help but suspect that the shot of smiling bikini-clad teenagers at the seaside was more than a little posed. Perhaps I do the summer climate an injustice. No-one took her suggestion for a quick swim, though – not even she. Shame.
Next came Saltstraumen with its famous tidal whirlpool: the Mælstrom. Several sea currents converge in a narrow channel here, now bridged, causing a chaotic swirl of icy seawater. It's possible to follow elements of the movement as the area is strangely popular with local seagulls: a small flock sat resting on the surface, continually being dragged through and across and around the whirlpool. Frequently the flock would be drawn out into a long thin line, which then folded back upon itself, looped around or converged into a clump again. It's a real-life fractal: a live strange attractor, constantly changing and never the same twice. It's not only a fun fairground-ride for seafowl, either: two inflatable dinghies were plying to and fro across the currents too, full of happily-screaming passengers. As the boats entered the vortex, their pilots killed the engines, allowing the boats to be pushed and pulled around in random directions. Only on our return to the ship did we discover that said passengers were also on the cruise, members of a different expedition.
On climbing up away from the shore, a problem manifested, in the form of billowing clouds of black smoke from beneath our coach. Ida apologized for its advanced age and assured us it would get us there, but soon we had to stop while the driver phoned his base for help. Time to be grateful for Norway's remarkable telecomms system: even sailing a mile off from uninhabited Arctic shores, I typically have a full-strength signal on my cellphone.
Our problem is more immediate, though: the Hurtigrute does not count people on and off and if we do not return in time, the ship will sail without us. But we're still 30km from Bodø and it departs in 30min.
Whatever the driver's told, he fiddles with something and we are shortly off again, sans smoke trail. We drive in through the outskirts of Bodø, which is an unappealing city of sprawling suburbs – it lies on a coastal plane, beneath a mountain range. The houses are small, generic Norwegian wooden dwellings, mostly painted in the traditional colours of barn-red, yellow and white. One seventeenth-century one is even all three. Apparently, these once represented fixed points on a scale of expense. Red was cheap, pigmented in part with blood. Yellow was more expensive, so a yellow house advertised prosperity, whereas white was costliest of all and proclaimed riches.
Although it lies well within the Arctic circle, there's little to show it about Bodø; it's a very ordinary-seeming city, with shops, businesses and homes – and during our visit, massive roadworks, delaying us further. It also boasts some of the governmental administrative offices, in an effort at decentralisation and retaining business and employment in the north. There's an ancient church, some 600 years older than the city itself, and a modern aircraft museum, although regrettably there's no time to visit this. As we near the docks, we see that the Polarlys is still there: apparently a coach full of thirty or forty people is worth waiting for.
Lunch awaits us too – a special sitting laid on for returning travellers. The meals aboard are consistently impressive: buffet breakfasts and lunches and à lá carte dinners. The buffets, particularly, are not wonderful for vegetarians: breakfast beans or scrambled egg are likely to contain bacon stirred in and the cold offerings revolve around fish and cheese. These days, I've made an executive decision that as soon as I leave the British Isles, all cheese instantly becomes vegetarian – the alternative is a vegan diet and an inability to eat just about anything in any restaurant anywhere. So breakfast is cereal and boiled eggs with toast, supplemented with fruit.
The toast, mind, is a joy: Norwegian bread is, in my humble opinion, the finest in the world, coming in half a dozen different forms from white through to rich browns full of seeds and nuts. It's baked in square loaves, so it's not the French's mass of crust with a wisp of white fluff within, but it's sold and served whole: you slice it yourself, with a bread-slicing machine in most homes, for maximal freshness. Even tiny corner 24-hour stores bake their own bread, albeit from frozen dough. I've spent years trying to recreate something like it in Britain, but even scouring health-food shops for exotic flours, we cannot match the Norwegian's breadth of flavour and texture. Nor, incidentally, can the Swedes.
Lunch is more open: the choice of hot dishes is seldom of any use, ranging from chicken, turkey and a profusion of fish to meatballs and even, appallingly, whale steaks. However, the salad bar is excellent – if one ignores the fish and cold meats – and often the soups are veggie, too. There's always a range of tempting desserts, too: jelly, blancmange, stewed fruit, tarts and pies and puddings, and occasionally exotica such as rømmegrøt: sour-cream porridge. Smooth-textured as semolina, this is served with melted butter and cinnamon sugar. Locals extol its virtues with gusto. Norwegian sour cream (rømme) is much milder than that of southern Europe, and like Italian mascarpone cheese, it's as likely to be found in a sweet dish as a savoury. It's served in waffles with syltetøy (home-made-style runny fruit jam), on vegetables and potatoes, as a pizza topping or dip, with cakes and desserts - as well as on the side with Mexican foods such as quesadillas in Oslo's profusion of Mexican restaurants.
After the first day, we don't get to choose our own seats or dinner. From now on, you sit at the same table every night and eat what you're given. The menu is varied, but all European, centred around meat and fish with small amounts of vegetables or pasta on the side. Presentation is immaculate: the dishes are vaguely nouvelle cuisine in style, served by a friendly, charming and multilingual crew of young Norwegian waitresses. There are also recommendations of wines and the ship's own mineral water. I told them that I was a vegetarian on the first night, when I was told I could have whatever I wanted – I chose an omelette, to make life easy for them. From then on, though, I was presented with an individual veggie starter and main course every day.
Some of the fussier eaters among the British were not best pleased with the diet. If you're used to nothing but meat and two veg, boiled of course, then this comes across as exotic fayre and I saw many plates being sent back full – especially when the seas were high. If you're a little more flexible, though, it's good stuff. The Coastal Express cruise – especially the eleven-day round trip, the full experience, as opposed to the popular option of flying back from Kirkenes – is nicknamed the ten-pound cruise. It's not what you spend – that's two drinks at the bar – it's how much weight you gain en route. After a week, I'm already distressingly close. A year's running is undone, to my dismay; getting rid of it again will keep me busy all winter.
- - - - -
From Bodø, the ship leaves its normal coast-hugging route and sails into open water, sailing west into the sunset across the Vestfjord toward the southern end of the Lofoten island chain to dock at the tiny port of Stamsund on the second island, Vestvågøy. Alas, we don't call at the southernmost tip, home of the splendidly-named village of Å. Rising out of the sea since the end of the last ice age, the islands are extremely mountainous, their jagged peaks forming Lofotveggen: the 100km "Lofoten Wall", outlined against the western horizon. Since to effete, decadent Southerners such as myself, northern Norway seems a remote and harsh place to live, it makes me wonder what sort of person eschews the mainland for these even more isolated towns and villages, so I struck up a conversation with one of the crowd who joined the ship at Bodø. (Yes, a cute blonde one, if you're asking.)
She was making her way home for her birthday the following day, to a village on the far side of the island from a trip to visit friends in Oslo. The fast way home would have been to change planes at Bodø and fly to Svolvær on Austvågøy, the next island along, but being in no particular hurry and with such beautiful autumnal sunny weather, it was more pleasant to relax on the Hurtigrute for a few hours – if not very much cheaper. She'd lived in Oslo for years, as well as København and Berlin and other places, large and small, but Lofoten was best. Why? Well, because it's a quiet, unspoiled region, rich in wildlife and raw nature. It's not really that remote any more – all the islands are joined by bridges and tunnels, or at least ferries, ending with Hinnøy (Norway's largest island).
The traditional islander occupations were fishing and hunting - mainly for seals and whales.
(Now, as a former biologist and quondam member of, and fundraiser for, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth , I confess that I'm not at all happy about this, but the locals are avid to defend these traditional – nay, hallmark – local activities. They arguments are familiar from repetition from a number of people I've discussed this with hereabouts: it's traditional, it's natural; the balance of nature has been disturbed by humans, and it's their part to keep populations of everything from seals to elk in check by taking on the rôle of top predator. As for those things which aren't teeming in hordes – from herring and cod to whales – well, they'll recover, left to themselves. Meantime, it's only fair to keep taking a few, as they always have; if stocks are low, if the catches are smaller in size as well as number, it's not the Norwegians' fault, it's that of the others fishing their waters. And yet, Norway is still the largest exporter of fish in the world. And they don't hunt the whales that are really rare any more; the little ones they go for now are abundant - relatively.
It is not my place to tell them they're wrong, but whaling, in particular, is in my humble opinion Norway's great shame in front of the world. They are not alone; it is that of Japan as well. For the British, it is fox-hunting; for the Spanish, bullfighting; for the French, foie gras… And so the litany continues.
It's the twenty-first century. Practises such as killing for pleasure, or the killing and eating of animals either rare, putatively intelligent or both, are inhumane, barbaric and as obsolete as cannibalism or slavery - both of which, to name just two, are ancient, traditional and were once enshrined as basic rights. If wild fish populations are noticeably, measurably and significantly depleted, then we should all stop fishing those stocks, totally, unless and until they recover. And if that means some traditional ways of life perish, sadly, then so be it, I'm afraid, just like those of the honest people who once made their livings in other jobs that no longer exist.
There is, I feel, a lack of balance in some of the "environmental" arguments I've heard here. That the problems with things aren't the local's fault, so it's not their responsibility. I am afraid that the world doesn't work like that.
But enough of this.)
Today, alongside the ancient ways of life, Lofoten is also a home for artists, craft workers, retired people and others seeking peace and quiet and inspiration from the beauty of nature. My companion was the co-curator of a modern art gallery, one of several on the islands, and next month they were presenting the world première of the newest work by a video artist from London – showing that Lofoten wasn't really so out of the way after all. It is a small community – only about 2,500 on her island and 12,000 or so on the whole chain – but this is a comfortable size. It's enough that you know most of the locals, but not all, and today, when you can nip down to the capital for an overnight visit, it's a good place to live.
Well, I can attest to the islands' beauty, austere though it is, and I should like to return and visit them again. But I'm not sure I'd want to live there.
The islands are dotted with small towns and the Hurtigrute stops at several: first Stamsund, where my companion disembarked, then the slightly larger Svolvær, which offers two attractions for those making a flying visit. One is a museum dedicated to the effects and aftermath of the German occupation and the other is Magic Ice. Give me a choice between worthy or cool and fun and it seldom takes me long to decide, so off we trooped to Magic Ice.
It's a new attraction, based in a converted whalemeat coldroom (so they claim, with, I suspect, a hidden grin) right on the quay. Cooled to –5°C, it's a permanent ice-sculpture exhibition which opened in May 2004. There's even an ice bar, with both bar itself and shelves made entirely of solid-phase H20 – even the glasses. Order a single (eye-wateringly expensive, but that's normal) shot with your entrance ticket and it's served in either a fragile ice beaker or a more solid tumbler. The latter is an etiolated pyramid with a large depression in the base, so the only way to put it down is in a special rack. Used once, they're tossed into a hopper. Why recycle? It's just very slightly impure water!
I had a snaps - linjeakvavit - and shared most of it around. I like it just as little as last time, but it's vaguely authentic.
The sculptures are impressive, though I know little of ice sculpture. There are animals, a cliff of birds, seating and standing groups and figures and more. Some is simply figurative - a model of a Hurtigrute ship - some is less so (a partly-melted copy of a famed stone statue of a sailor's wife waving him off). I particularly liked a huge fisherman hauling in a vast steel net, pushing 10m long. In the net is a huge ice fish, struggling heroically. This piece was epic and must be planned for some permanence, given the metalwork.
Such blatant purpose-built tourist attractions are, happily, fairly rare, which means that when you do see them, it's harder to resist. Even at £15 for half an hour.
