After having spent a great day in Kirkenes (see my posts here and here) we were ready for our “Norwegian Coastal Voyage” down the coast to Bergen. We were early going to the harbor and were the only ones there. I took a couple pictures of our ship. Since 1893 there have been ships going up and down the coast of Norway to service the small communities there. They are more accessible by sea than by roads. Over 70 ships have been used in the last 100 plus years during the Coastal Express operation. The company is now called Hurtigruten. It has a daily departure from Bergen, crossing the Arctic Circle, and going all the way to Kirkenes close to the Russian and Finland borders. Travelers can take the classic voyage which is the 12-day roundtrip or select one portion only – the 7-day northbound or the 6-day southbound. Because of commitments in Oslo we decided to take the southbound voyage from Kirkenes sailing to Bergen. The ship taking this journey for our required date was the MS Lofoten, one of the oldest ships in the fleet. Below is a picture of all the Hurtigruten ships journeying on this Coastal Voyage. The MS Lofoten is the ship on the bottom of the page below, in the lower right hand side corner. The MS Lofoten and MS Nordstjernen are called “classic” ships. They are not “cruise” ships. They also call them “intimate” ships, reminiscent of classic steam vessels. They can accommodate 200 passengers. They stop often, at about 34 ports. Passengers can hop on and off from one port to the next. By the middle of the voyage there were only 60 passengers left on board our ship (maybe 6 Americans.) The Lofoten did not have elevators (my knees could tell…) no TV in the rooms. There was a dining room, snack room, a couple of enclosed lounges and a panorama room, a bar. I’ll show pictures in my future posts. Many passengers prefer this “old lady” to the newer ships. It has a lot of wood and brass. It reminded me of the ferries I used to take to go between Dieppe in France and Newhaven in England when I was a teenager – classic but not fancy. Hurtigruten emphasizes that their ships are “working” and not cruise ships. They carry mail and cargo as well as passengers (animals and bicycles.) They make short stops at some ports – such as 20 minutes and some longer stops. Excursions are offered. You take the excursion out of one port and meet the ship down the coast at one of the next stops. We could not take advantage of many excursions as there were not enough passengers on our ship interested in them. Below is a map I found on the Web. It shows our flight from Oslo north to Kirkenes and some of the ports where we stopped on our way south. This is called “The World Most Beautiful Voyage” by Hurtigruten. It is indeed beautiful to go down the coast of Norway. Most of our time was spent on the deck watching the ever changing panorama. My blogging friends have asked me in my earlier posts about Kirkenes why we went to such a remote section of Norway, or why we selected this area. I’ll answer all these questions now. I do not usually tell much about my feelings, but I’m going to, to give you a sincere answer and the two reasons we went. The first reason was to travel to a new place. I do love to travel, as those who have read my posts know. My love of traveling started early, as a wee child, when my grand dad would bring me a small suitcase full of postcards showing many cities of the world. When I was about 6 years old my mother and I took a ship to Turkey to bring back my Armenian grandmother (my father’s mother) to Paris. I made my first trip, solo, at 13 ½ years of age – to England. Since then I have been to 49 countries so far (see description here and here.) Some people have a passion for playing tennis, others cannot stop writing, I love traveling. I have a budget, so I read a lot about the different ways to travel and will go when there is a good occasion. It’s more like “there is a fare sale to New York – let’s go” even though I may have preferred to fly to Washington, DC, at the time. The opportunity is often the destination. The Departure Platform Victoria Station, James Jacques Joseph Tissot, French, 1836-1902 "Le voyage pour moi, ce n'est pas arriver, c'est partir. C'est l'imprévu de la prochaine escale, c'est le désir jamais comblé de connaître sans cesse autre chose, c'est demain, éternellement demain." - Roland Dorgelès, French novelist, 1885-1973 (To travel for me, it’s not to arrive, it is to go. It is the unexpected during the next stop. It is the constant desire, never fulfilled, to learn something new. It is tomorrow, the eternal tomorrow.) - Roland Dorgelès, French novelist, 1885-1973 The Departure, Henry Bacon, American, 1839-1912 Last October 2009 one of my blog readers, TorAa from the blog TorAa Mirror in Oslo, invited me to come to the Oslo Blog Gathering planned for August 2010. At the time I checked and realized that Norway was the most expensive country in Europe so I did not think we could manage it. However we had enough “frequent flyer” miles on Delta to get a free airline ticket so I kept my eyes open. Years ago I had read a travelogue on the “Coastal Voyage” in Norway and thought this would be a marvelous experience. I checked several travel agencies and received an attractive offer from a Norwegian agency in New York. In the meantime, Renny of the blog RennyBA’s Terella in Oslo, was organizing the Blog Gathering and explaining all the incentives – such as reduced rates in a local hotel and the “Oslo Pass” which paid for all local transportation and entrance fees to many museums and other places in Oslo. Everything worked out and we decided to take the Coastal Voyage and attend the Blog Gathering. We went and we loved it. I’ll have more posts in the future on this trip. As you see, blogging had a lot to do with our trip to Norway since this is way I met both TorAa and RennyBa of Oslo. Now to answer the first question: traveling makes me happy. While traveling anywhere - I find happiness - and this was a great opportunity not to miss. Picture taken from the back deck on ship The second reason is more difficult to explain. When I left Paris and came to this country in the sixties – to travel – I lived in San Francisco for about ten years. This was a great city where I made many friends. There was always a lot going on. (I talked some about it in this post here.) The sixties were a decade of great changes. I loved San Francisco and the freedom I had there (away from my very strict father.) I was already taking photos in San Francisco in those days Having fun on the beach in San Francisco When my mother was widowed I started to go to France more often and as she became ill with Parkinson’s disease I tried to visit her twice a year in Paris, for decades. Here in Georgia my work as a customer liaison between our foreign trainees and our company kept me very busy. I worked with trainees from all parts of the world. When I went to visit my mother in Paris I would often take an extra week and visit some trainees’ homes, like Indonesia, Italy or other places. A lighter moment with some advertising characters in the Lausanne railroad station, Switzerland During those years I did not have much contact with American people; most of my work was with the foreign trainees. My mother died in 2002 and I retired about three years ago. Suddenly I did not travel as much and had no foreign trainees or foreign customers around to talk about international affairs. I realized that America had taken a sharp turn to the right and become much more religious and some even preached extremism in their tax-free churches. In Georgia we did not have many friends. We are in Newt Gingrich’s county where most of the people are very conservative. Dialogue is difficult if you are not an adherent to the “Tea Party” or member of one of the many “conservative” churches. “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” - Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, historian, social critic, 1870-1972 A Shepherd and his Flock, Wright Barker, American 1891-1941 I started blogging last year and find it terrific to be able to visit friends virtually all over the world. But it is not the same as travelling. Traveling for me is a way to get away from the prevailing pessimistic atmosphere in the US right now. I was raised, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., to judge my friends by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. I watch with dismay the hidden racism which is still within the old majority and the ugly denial of freedom to people of different sexual orientation in a country which claims that everyone is free. Intolerance makes me sad as typified by the rejection of other religions than Christianity or of people with no religion. It seems that people have changed since the 60's – what a decline – ignorance, prejudice and resentment are blanketing the land in many areas (I did not say all areas as, I hope that in some parts of the US, it is not the case.) Greed is omnipresent on many levels. The religiosity is oppressive. The hate coming from talk-radio hosts and some TV channel is palpable. I feel uncomfortable with Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s narcissism and their speech tying religion to politics to the disoriented white mob following them. So I travel to stay happy, to get oxygen from other parts of the world, to have intelligent conversation with kind citizens of foreign lands. That is my second reason – and if I have to go past the Arctic Circle to find that, then I go – no problem. Postcard of the North Cape, the northernmost point of Europe “And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things. “ – Martin Scorsese, American film director born 1942. Photo taken aboard the MS Lofoten in August 2010