Post card from Norway #3

This is a stub, to be completed later. It follows on  from #2.

We will begin with Finnkirk Rock. The thing about Norway is fiords. The next thing is cross-cuts, so there are nests and nets of channels, and before there were maps, the early Scandinavians must have had something like what we Australians have learned to call song-lines. That meant naming features, and remember that this area was not just the Germanic Vikings: there were Russians, Sami people (Lapps, if you must), and Finns.

Post card from Norway #2

 This follows on from an earlier post, but it is a work in progress.

Up near the Russian border. there are signs in Cyrillic for the odd border-crosser. We saw a couple of mini-buses coming through, an a girl on  bicycle, who was apparently headed for Russia. Kirkenes was heavily swarmed by Germans and heavily bombed by the Russians, who then liberated it, and apparently behaved nicely enough. For me, the best thing was birch trees,  well north of the Arctic Circle, and more significantly, loads of mistletoe, the clumps in the tree here.

This is a novelty for Australian botanists, because we all know very well that the tree line cuts out where the snow line comes in, and we are far to the north of the snow line. There is even sea ice: not ice bergs as such, but floating lumps.

 

As we came into Kirkenes, we saw our first sea-ice. These are slim planes of frozen fresh water. At first, they were less than obvious, but then they were more numerous and thicker.

Once upon a time,  ports up here were blocked in winter, but this is growing rarer. We knew about this from complaints in Amsterdam that one could no longer skate on the canals. Shortly after, on Saaremaa, a sand island off the Estonian coast, we heard how the moose that bred on the island could no longer escape over the sea ice in winter. 

But climate change is, as we all know, a  myth.

I have been amusing myself catching snow flakes in my beard, and leaving tracks in the snow on the deck. After a first walk on snow, wearing spikes as overshoes, we have now mastered the art of spotting and avoiding slippery ice.

Skate-boarding and wheelchair work would be a challenge up here, but I was very much taken by this snow-ready version of a Zimmer frame, and I saw a man scurrying along on a ski-based push scooter.

Back at Kirkenes, I saw a snow cannon in action, and we asked why in such a place of deep snow, they needed to make more of it, but apparently there will be National championships in a ski-based motocross competition.

We nodded sagely, and went to get what we called a Norwegian hot chocolate. At least our sense of the ridiculous has not yet frozen solid.

Here is yet another port that we called into yesterday. Hurtigruten got started as transport for local people and freight up and down the coast, but now it is mainly for tourists. Even in the time we have known the service, the vessels have grown larger and more luxurious. It is no longer rough and scruffy, but that's the down-side of tourism.

That's enough: more later, perhaps. I thought these were puffins, but they weren't.

These sea eagles, on the other hand, near Finnkirk Rock, were the real McCoy: I will come to tge rock in #3

And that ends #2

I have already created the stub for #3, but nothing much there, just yet.

Post card from Norway #1

We are one week into our travels, so its time to show and tell. This will come in dribs and drabs when I find time away from shore excursions (as I start this, we are near Nordkapp, as the very top of Norway. Anyhow, bookmark this page, and drop back in to read more.

We flew Sydney-Dubai -Oslo, got our bags and asked a young man how to get seniors' tickets to Oslo-S, and he said that as seniors went at half price, I should go through the turnstiles at full price, while he ushered Christine around them. We congratulated each other on our joint mathematical genius, and reached Oslo in no time at all.

The next morning, we caught a train to Bergen, which took us over the mountains, where the notion of spring had yet to catch on, as seen by the icicles sighted near Myrdal. Then came the bummer: it was Easter Sunday, the train stopped at Voss ("technical reasons"), and all of Norway was driving back from the mountains, so it took three hours, not the promised hour and a half.

With jet lag biting in, we grabbed a cab, and got absolutely ripped off. That's life...

English is the primary second language of Norway, and they seem to assume that even foreigners will speak it, give this sign from an Oslo bookshop. On the cruise, announcements are in Norwegian, English and German: the French, it seems, are expected to manage to understand the English.

Tours off  the boat are in German and English, though some of the guides give more detail in German. We toured Alesund with a German couple, and got a great deal of social history.

They were a bit short on the humour side, or perhaps they just did not know what skate boards  are, but my delight in finding a troll on a skate board left them cold.

On with the tour  then, we are travelling along the cost of Norway in what was once a freighter line that took a few passengers, and expanded. This is our third visit to Norway, so we know they are very strong on managing and climate change, but when jet lag saw me out of bed before dawn, I snapped this island, and totally failed to se the wind generators out on the ridge behind. Eat yer heart out, Don Quixote!

The next morning saw me also up befores dawn, trying to catch sunrise in the mountain tops, but the intense (to us) cold drove me in before I saw it. There is snow and ice everywhere!

As we had been to Nordkapp in summer (a chilly 18C at midsummer, we gave today's excursion a miss,.

Still, as we pull out from the wharf, we are all being plied with hot chocolate and apple cake, so I will post this much and finish it later. At least you have the pics.

After dinner and slipping in a bit more, this next one marked where we crossed the Arctic circle.

And here is Chris, looking happy, just after we did so.

Interesting to us: trees well north of the Arctic circle. Two typos in that line: time for bed.

We went on a coastal walk. The 'guide' was of little value: failed to point out the barnacles, and gave us a load of old cobblers about a tsunami putting the Dogger under water, when it was a case of melting glaciers.

He also failed to mention the lichens and this moss, and had no knowledge of how Hrafna-Floki used ravens to find Iceland. In short, not much chop!

When people are going into guiding, they really need to be able to stay ahead.

Then again he failed to point out these snow-covered rocks, which tell a very relevant story.

The antique physics teacher in me said nothing, but I certainly thought it.

Back on the boat, this snowy hill was beautifully framed by a bridge. Norway has many, many bridges, and even more tunnels.

Trees, however, are another matter. All the same, this one was north of the Arctic Circle,  as were the ones below, clearly planted to act as an extra snow fence.

This last one in this first tranche is of Honningsvåg, and it reminded me of a style I knew as a child. I thought it might have been like L S Lowry, but an artist mate, Tamsyn Taylor, tells me it is reminiscent of Breughel. See what you think...

Here ends the first round. I ill put a link to the others as they kick off. (The next one is now complete.)