Cruising the wild west coast aboard a working ferry
And when we tired of the Norse theme, we settled back in our deck chairs and started looking for familiar shapes in the wrinkled granite mountains hulking above us.
"Looks like a big pile of driedup bread dough to me." "Nah, I'm seeing the back side of a herd of elephants."
Cruising the Hurtigruten line, a fleet of 11 ships that ferries people and cargo along 1,250plus miles of Norway's fractured coastline, is a far cry from riding the luxury liners that tango their way around the warm waters of the Caribbean, the South Pacific and the Mediterranean.
These are working ships as much as pleasure boats. There are no comedians, chorus girls,http://www.rotisserieportugalia.ca/uggs-5202-infants-erin-boots-c-256, bingo, silly name games or midnight buffets just astonishing scenery, lame jokes and vivid imaginations. And the only sandy beaches are so far north of the Arctic Circle that a latesummer temperature of 60 degrees had locals talking about a heat wave.
The cabins were comfortable, but not plush (only the larger ones had TV); the food was tasty (basic Scandinavian fare), but no flaming desserts; dress was casual no tux or fancy gowns needed here.
The real star of this show was the scenery and it was spectacular. By day,
we reveled in r
ugged coastal mountains and glaciers, sea life, birds and reindeer, as well as the quaint, colorful villages and farmlands tucked into the uneven shoreline. By night, we were entertained by the dancing of the Northern Lights.
Hurtigruten means "fast route in Norwegian. Some Englishspeaking Norwegian passengers we met aboard our ship, the Nordlys, couldn't twist our vocal chords into the right lilt to pronounce it as the locals do, so we just called it the "hurdygurdy."
For more than 100 years, the Hurtigruten ships have provided a serious lifeline for Norwegians from Bergen, in the raindrenched southwest coast, north to Kirkenes, on the Arctic border with Russia.
One of the Hurtigruten ships leaves Bergen every evening, taking 12 days to make a round trip. They stop at 35 cities, towns or settlements, often just long enough to pick up locals making a short hop to the next port or to exchange cargo spools of fishing line; cases of tomatoes, potatoes and beer; drycell batteries, appliances, vehicles or building supplies.
Vacationers can choose between oneway or 12day roundtrip voyages, or segments in between. Most of the coastal stops are at small communities and take only a few minutes to unload cargo and a few passengers. Many stops are in the middle of the night. Stops at larger communities, such as Alesund, Trondheim, Bodo and Tromso, are made during the day, with several hours to leave the ship.
To Americans, Norway may seem like a bucolic backwater, but it has a complicated and fascinating history. That and the aweinspiring scenery that unfolded before us like a Discovery Channel special provided plenty of entertainment.
From our deck chairs,http://www.17thletter.co.uk/supra-women-white-c-54, we wondered what this rugged land must have been like for the Ice Age people who lived here amid receding glaciers and howling seas, and for the Vikings who rambled from these shores as far south as Turkey and as far west as North America, conquering everyone in sight. We wanted to meet the Samis, the indigenous people who still herd reindeer in the treeless regions above the Arctic Circle and are considered by some to be direct descendants of the ancients who settled here despite the cold.
We wanted to learn more about the lives of the fishermen who've been Norway's economic mainstay since the Middle Ages, when they furnished the dried cod that filled Catholic Europe's bellies on fast days. And we wanted to explore Norway's role in World War II, where battles between the Nazis and Soviets left nearly every farm, settlement and town in the north a smoldering ruin.
We sailed from Bergen on a Saturday evening in early September, under lowering clouds the color of dirty socks, with the ship lurching through 4 to 6foot waves and splashed with windswept foam. Friends who'd made this voyage at the same time a few years ago had warned us: bring your woollies and antidotes for motion sickness because autumn comes early on the Hurtigruten line.
But within a couple of days the Nordlys was gliding over smooth seas in sunshine warm enough to coax most of the 350 passengers to the aft decks to ogle the scenery unraveling behind us.
Much of Norway's coastal landscape doesn't seem as vast as Alaska's Inside Passage, but its rugged, rocky terrain has its own charm. The fjords that mark the coastline were carved by glaciers. Most of the ice melted some 10,
UGG Fashion Collection,000 years ago, and the rising sea rushed in to fill the lowlands. It left behind an islandstudded coastline lorded over by mountains that float on immense pockets of oil and gas that have brought prosperity to today's Norway.
The landscape runs the gamut from heavily forested in the south, with fluttery birches and Norway firs, to treeless and windswept in the Arctic regions. Rounded blobs of barerock mountains might be the view one day and jagged peaks iced with white glaciers grace the next. As we meandered through the coastal island, we were never out of sight of land and sometimes we squeezed so close to the rocky shore that folks pulled their elbows from the railings as we passed.
Every culture that has settled here left an indelible mark on the land. Fishing villages and tiny farming settlements still nestle in folds of the mountains that would have provided shelter and a few acres of arable land for the earliest people. Today, only 3 percent of the land can be farmed, while the rest is wild and uninhabited.
Most of these narrow parcels of farmland abutting the inland waterways were settled eons ago, and every now and then we'd see a pile of soccerballsized rocks near the shore marking Viking graves, we were told.相关的主题文章/Original Link：
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