Overview
Better to spew text and be wrong than to sit on ones thumbs; I might very well be ignorant and welcome correction.
The Norwegian coastline is the second longest in the world after Canada. It varies from being very square and rocky, to being extremely green and lush. There is a fair amount of isolated housing along the coastline and vast tracts of untouched land.
There are a fair number of considerations which go into a Fjord tour. There are 2 norwegian carriers who operate on alternate days.
- Havila
- Hurtigruten
Hurtigruten is the longstanding name associated with this trek. Their ships apparently vary in quality, although some online resources claim they have been updated. On this trip, I saw one boat and it still looked like a frigging ferry. These boats might serve the same purpose as a ferry, but if one is constrained to a vessel for close to a week (or two weeks if one opts for a round trip) then it would be nice if it feels comfy.
Anyhoo, the bulk of my experience now is with Havila.
They operate a round trip cruise from Bergen to Kirkenes and back, I believe 15 days in total. The trip North is in higher demand than the trip South, and hence commands a higher price. You have to explore this by putzing around with parameters on their website and exploring options. There are further catches; the northbound route arrives at several of the larger coastal cities at a civilized time and grants you longer hours to explore these cities.
There are 30 something ports, most of which are ferry stops and then a couple cities you get to explore, including:
Bergen (awesome) Trondheim Svolvaer Hammerfest Kristiansund Tromso Kirkenes
I have a high opinion of Trondheimn and Tromso and wish I had had more time in both. Both warrant protacted exploration, but that would be a different blog. I did enjoy exploring some of the smaller towns I would never otherwise have visited. Small town Norway looks like oddly healthy, and places with 5000 people living there have public transportation and playgrounds for kids. I am not always pro-Norway, but I think they throw a lifeline to their smaller towns which benefits everyone. Yes, economic oppotunity abounds in the capitals, no you dont want your society to fall into a gravitation well where all the small distributed towns established over centuries collapse into ghost towns.
Weather clearly matters; when you have direct sunshine the voyage will vault from great dramatic landscape, to something verging on the biblical. We got 1 day of sunshine on a 6 day, 5 night cruise. This did not make me lament the cruise, and you accept the risk by visiting this well known soggy coastline, but if you can steer this, and stastically you can, you should.
Also, be warned the midnight sun fails at around July 25th, so if you are seeking that, you should plan accoridingly.
If I were to revisit this cruise, I would probably aim for late May/early June.
“In Tromsø, Norway, the Midnight Sun officially lasts for about 64 days, running from May 20 to July 22”
“Spring (March – May): Generally the driest part of the year. April and May see lower totals, averaging around 60 to 90 mm (2.4 to 3.5 inches).”
I am using Tromso as a reference, when really Trondheim might be the better sample point being roughly half way down (up!) the cruise.
The food was pretty damn solid, though I can’t burst into song too hard as I love flavour and hence have gone out of my way to develop my palette to the extent that I am as non-Lutheran from a food perspective as one can imagine. What would the ideal boat food look like to me? Probably Viet or Thai as a baseline; though Japanese, Korean and Chinese chefs would all have been met with open arms.