Alta and Kristiansund: in Norway Again, the Final Stops on Our Month Long Cruise

The Hillside at the Rock Art Museum

The Older Rock Carvings

Newer Carvings

More Rock Carvings

Scene by the Fjord Shore

The Hjemmeluft Fjord from Another Angle

Downtown Alta

The Titanium Clad Church

Upon leaving Arkhangelsk, Silver Cloud spent another day at sea traveling back to northern Norway.  We could tell when we left the White Sea – the smell of sewage and other chemicals disappeared and Michael and I stopped coughing.  The Russians haven't paid much attention to environmental issues until recently.  Even now their clean air efforts are minimal.  As a result, the air and water were highly polluted.  Even the fresh water the ship produced from seawater through a reverse osmosis process smelled bad.  We were really happy to leave Russian waters.

The single day Michael was comfortable wearing shorts on this whole cruise was the day we were in the Barents Sea north of Norway at 71 degrees plus north latitude on our way back to Norway from Russia.  The air temperature was comfortably in the 70's Fahrenheit for most of the afternoon.  Michael and I were able to sit on deck, read by the pool, and even walk some laps on Silver Cloud's top deck in the bright sunshine.  The good weather did not last past the 71^st degree of latitude.  The following morning as we neared Alta, still in far northern Norway, we experienced fog and drizzle.

 Fortunately for our planned excursion in Alta, Norway, the weather cleared for most of the morning.  Our initial thoughts after visiting the three Russian sites were that the two last stops in Norway were almost anticlimactic.  Well, we were wrong.

Just outside of Alta is a World Heritage Site, the rock carvings at Hjemmeluft.  Michael and I chose a tour to visit the museum that preserves these ancient stones.  The setting was beautiful; the rock carvings were very different from American Indian petroglyphs we had seen in various parts of the southwest United States.  The Alta carvings are between 9000 and 2000 years old and depict animals, mostly reindeer; men in boats as well as men hunting and herding.  The museum staff had painted the chiseled carvings red to make the outlines visible to visitors.  Michael and I broke away from our tour group after about half an hour of listening to the guide point to a petroglyph and announce," This is a man with a spear; this is a deer."  We weren't getting any insight into the significance of the carvings so we walked ahead and covered about three miles of up and down pathways through hundreds of rock carvings set in magnificent scenery along a fjord.  We had a most pleasant hike in memorable surroundings.

Later in the day we took the shuttle bus to the center of Alta to visit an indoor shopping mall and view a most unusual church under construction there.  The building is in the form of a spiral covered in titanium panels designed to reflect the brilliant starlight and frequent Northern Lights during the five month winter season.  It appeared grey in the drizzle. Rain curtailed our visit to the town center.  Ironically the weather cleared as we sailed out of the harbor.

We heard from one of the guides on the tour bus that inhabitants of northern Norway often find the  two months of continuous daylight more of a problem than the two months of darkness.  All the town streets have streetlights that are very close together; even the ski slopes are lit.  Winter sports are carried on even when it is only twilight or dark for days on end.  The guide telling us the story found summer much more disconcerting. It is hard to make yourself go to bed in the continuous daylight.  One can fall asleep at two in the morning and wake up at five and not know whether it is five am or five pm.  He told of a friend who showed up for cocktails at someone's house at four am.

Following a the Silver Cloud's stop at Alta we spent another day at sea working our way south to Kristiansund which is not far from Bergen where we started the northern leg of this cruise.  It rained most of the day so we didn't get to spend time outside on deck.

The Silver Cloud arrived at Kristiansund on the fourth of July, just another Thursday to the local population.  After early morning fof, the weather turned sunny and warm.  Michael and I took our final tour to the Stave Church at Kvernes and along the scenic Atlantic Ocean Road. Kristiansund is on four islands connected by bridges and ferries.  Our tour bus took a new, miles long tunnel to the mainland; another reminder that Norway is spending much of its oil and gas wealth on infrastructure.  We drove for miles along the shore of a fjord past hillside farmland until we reached a very rural white church built in the nineteenth century.  This turned out to be the "new" church.  The very old Kvernes Stave Church was Just beyond this church.

We met a local guide who told us that the stave church, built on a frame of wood posts called staves, was one of the newer churches of this type.  The stave church dated from the twelve hundreds, AD, toward the end of the stave church era.  It likely replaced an even older church first built around the year 1000 AD during the period Norway was first Christianized.  The church has been lovingly maintained and restored.  It has unusual painted scroll work on the interior walls and individualized woodcarvings on the pews.  The altar and the pulpit are decorated with carvings of religious figures.  As in all Scandinavian churches, a model of a ship hangs near the entry; a reminder of the men in danger and those lost at sea.  Michael and I had not taken the opportunity to visit a stave church on our earlier stops in Norway.  This visit to a very picturesque example was a fitting final tour.

The tour bus continued on to the Atlantic Ocean Road.  The road is a two-lane highway along the coast stringing many small islands together.  It is an engineering feat and an interesting sight.  We drove along a section of the scenic highway as the weather deteriorated and it began to drizzle.  We were able to stop to take pictures for a bit as the drizzle let up briefly.  I suppose that this too was a fitting end to our sightseeing in Norway.  We had rain during some part of the day during every stop we made in the country.

In the evening, as the Silver Cloud approached Copenhagen where we would depart for the airport and a flight home at an early hour, the Captain held his final formal reception including the parade of all the crew members.  Michael and I dressed one last time in our formal wear and had our picture taken.  We said our goodbyes to the ship staff and to our fellow travelers at dinner.  The staff did acknowledge our United States holiday with a cake decorated to resemble the U.S. flag.  The flag was short a few stars but the effort was appreciated.

Michael and I experienced a most unusual and wonderful trip.  We visited nine countries, rode trains in several nations and explored interesting cities.  We saw mountains and fjords.  We went to three places in Russia that not many tourists have visited.  We visited at least six World Heritage Sites and saw many other places of historical interest.  In most places the weather cleared long enough for us to do all the things we really wanted to do.  We visited enough different places to get an appreciation of the beauty of northern Europe.

Thanks to all my readers for following along.   I enjoyed the trip immensely; I enjoyed writing about it and selecting pictures brought back memories of special places.