I’m sure there are some travelers who book cruises just for the experience of cruising –trouble-free travel to pretty places with a heavy dose of pampering. The specific destination is of secondary importance. That was not the case for us. This trip was about going to Norway; the cruise was merely the means for making that happen.
In 1959, after my junior year in college, I set off on a summer-long adventure to Europe. I had spent a year in Israel after my freshman year, an experience that instilled in me a wanderlust that has never left, so after two years of grinding through two simultaneous undergraduate degrees and a weekend job that provided just enough money to finance a trip, I was ready to hit the road again.
Over 8 weeks, I traveled through England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and, finally, Norway before taking a ferry across the North Sea back to England and home again. Although I had to traverse Germany by train to get to Denmark, it was not part of my travel plans. Just 14 years had passed since the end of WWII and many Jews like me were not ready to set foot on that cursed soil.
In some places I hitchhiked to save money, at other points I rode the train. Hitchhiking in Europe at that time was both common and safe, as it was in many parts of the US. At some point, after arriving in Norway, I connected with two master hitchhikers, one from Australia, the other from New Zealand, who encouraged me to join them on an excursion to Flam, a little village on a fjord, about which they had heard from that amazing underground network of travelers I’ve encountered elsewhere. The small train, once steam, now electric, went from the tiny dot of a town up into the mountains. It was the most beautiful spot of my entire journey and is the reason, 66 years later, that we embarked on this cruise.
Flam was listed as the first stop on this Viking itinerary and on that fact rested our decision to sign on. The starting point for the trip was in Bergen, halfway up the coast, an attractive and bustling town which we wish we had more time to explore, but the ship embarked just a few hours after we boarded. Every town we stopped in during the week had an old town and a history going back nine or ten centuries to the height of Viking culture. There was a great historian from one of the local universities on board, so we heard lectures on Viking history almost daily, focusing particularly on the unsubstantiated myths about their culture and how much, in fact, is unknown.
In any case, the routine was for the ship to sail mostly through the night and awaken every morning in a new port. So, there we were in Flam, ready to test my romantic memories about the place. The area around the port was unpromising – tour buses and a long row of semi-fast-food establishments. Rosellen and I have a string of stories about places we loved and made the mistake of revisiting with disappointing results. But once we boarded that storied train and headed up into the mountains, all those years of describing this Shangri-La were validated – amazing rock faces and, everywhere, waterfalls fed by pristine mountain lakes cascading down them. We left the train at a rustic mountain hotel where we were offered waffles topped by strawberry jam and sour cream, a ubiquitous offering for visitors at almost every stop during the week. I was able to sample a gluten free version from the ship’s kitchen. Otherwise, I ate a lot of naked sour cream and strawberry jam at numerous stops.
For me, whatever else happened the rest of the week was gravy. My memories were confirmed as more than adolescent fantasy. Nothing else we saw matched the beauty of Flam, sitting eight hours from the coast, down a deep fjord, but each stop satisfied other interests.
In 1959, on my previous visit, Norway was still an austere country, surviving mainly on fishing, especially salmon. (Factoid – Norway has the second longest coastline of any country, topped only by Canada.) It was still recovering from a brutal Nazi occupation, against which it threw up a valiant resistance and paid a hefty price. In the late 60s, oil was discovered, transforming the country into one of the most prosperous in Europe. I’m telling you this now because our next stop was Stavanger (Sta-VAN-ger), the headquarters of the country’s offshore oil industry. I know many of us are primed to see oil as the embodiment of environmental evil, which it is, but the oil museum in Stavanger is a beautiful piece of architecture and the displays of rigs and the process of oil and gas recovery are tributes to the genius of engineering. I’m just giving credit where credit is due.
I’m going to pause the stop-by-stop account of our trip to make some general observations about Norway. I’m about to step into a role that I tend to mock – the seemingly all-knowing visitor who has it all figured out after just a week or two in the country. Here it goes. Norway is an admirable country. It has used its new-found wealth to benefit every one of its 5+ million citizens. The safety net is made of fine mesh, with very little chance of anyone falling through. That includes universal health care. They are on the way to operating on 100% renewable energy. There’s definitely hypocrisy at work here (the Saudis and the Emirates are doing the same), but they are looking out for the long-term interests of their people. The oil will run out one day, but the money it has generated will not have been squandered as it has in other oil-rich countries.
In the many articles I’ve read over the years about the successes of the Finnish education, the response to why we can’t replicate it goes like this. They’re small. They have a relatively homogeneous population. They don’t have to overcome the legacy of slavery. They’re used to high taxation. All of that is true, but it still takes vision and principle to fashion a society based on the common good rather than greed. Norway appears to be a very livable place.
There were other stops. Kristiansand is a sweet little town with an old fish market, a fort dating back to the Napoleonic Wars and an impressive new art center, fashioned out of abandoned storage silos. Oslo, the capital, with a population of 750,000, has a unique opera house on the water – shades of Sydney – which some think is intended to look like an iceberg. The main attraction of our visit to the capital was a park within a park, the city’s answer to Central Park, which had embedded in it a smaller sculpture park with 200+ human figures at various stages of the life cycle, all by the Norwegian sculptor Gustav Veigeland. Very moving. Time was too short to take in the extensive museum scene, featuring, of course, Edvard Munch, their local hero.
The final stop took us out of Norway to Skagen, Denmark, where the local attraction is a giant sand dune which is slowly moving across the peninsula, burying churches and houses along the way. The area is a favorite vacation place for Danes, the setting for a delightful PBS series, Seaside Hotel, now in its tenth or 11th year, spanning post WWI to the start of WWII. We scored points with the local guide when we announced ourselves as devoted fans.
The all-night and all-day trip across the North Sea to Amsterdam that ended the trip brought me back to my journey from NY to Haifa at age 18, with stops only in Gibraltar and Naples and nothing but water in between. Then, the seemingly endless ocean offered infinite opportunity to reflect on what lay ahead. Now, it was a chance to think about how it all turned out. Truth is I was mostly worrying about whether our luggage would be waiting for us when we left the ship. Adolescent romanticism had given way to colorless practicality. But for that one brief moment on the train in Flam, I was back at the start, awed by the world’s wonders and hungry for more.
