Color Fantasy   We simply have to do something about the word “ferry”, and I mean in all languages. It’s used in two different ways, which becomes misleading. If you take a ferry across a river or harbor, either as a foot passenger or with your car, that’s one thing. It’s what most people picture when they hear “ferry”, a crossing of just a few minutes, a good example being the Staten Island Ferry across New York Bay, which lasts 20-25 minutes. But then there’s the misleading use.

Looking back to the late 1800’s when passenger ship travel was even more common than today. There was the long-distance travel, across the Atlantic, or to the Caribbean or wherever. At the time that was the only way to get there. Now it’s simply the more pleasant way to get there.

But there was also the short-distance sea voyage, usually done by what were known as coastal steamers. Before planes, before major highways, even when railroads were just developing, taking a ship along the coast was quite common. If you had to be in Baltimore or Washington the next day out of New York, you would take a cabin on an overnight coastal steamer, and arrive early the next day. This was also done on all our major rivers, including the overnight boat from New York up the Hudson to Albany. As a matter of fact, the overnight route from New York to Boston was so important that, to avoid the rough seas on the far side of Cape Cod, the Cape Cod Canal was dug through the land entrance to Cape Cod, primarily to accomodate Boston-New York ship commerce for passengers and freight. Needless to say, the canal is used today primarily only for pleasure boats. First with the coming of the railroads, to say nothing of other travel modes, coastal steamers essentially disappeared. Why take an overnight boat to Boston from New York when the train takes just a few hours?

But the coastal steamers never really disappeared, at least in those places where they had no rail or road competition, or where they could still make the trip faster than by land, or at least more pleasant. For instance, there are the two ship routes from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland; a ship shortcut from Maine to Nova Scotia; the shipping route up the Inside Passage to Alaska; overnight routes across the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the North Sea, and others. These are the contemporary incarnations of the old short-distance coastal steamers, but most of them have accomodated to the automobile age, and these coastal steamers now usually have car decks, a very clever business move on their part. The only thing is, these short-distance cruises—and that is just what they are—are weighted down with the name “ferry”, as though it were a ten-minute ride across the river. In the past, when asked about “cruises” (a word I don’t like, since it sounds too flighty and flippant—travel to me is is enjoyable because it is serious, educational business, a quest for new experience), I’ve mentioned that Beverly and I, and now I, have taken over the years 34 “sea voyages” (although actually, a couple were on rivers). When I say that some were voyages of one night only, I’m sure that raises some eyebrows, and if I use that word—“ferry”, that confuses the issue further. Nevertheless, our sea voyages have varied between one night (a good number of times) and seven weeks (around South America).

The current trip is quite unusual in regard to these voyages, because of their number: six. Three are longer: on the Deutschland to Spitsbergen (16 nights); on the Queen Mary 2, Hamburg-New York (8); on the Göta Kanal within Sweden (3). Three are shorter, of one night each, on ships sailing between Oslo-Kiel; Stockholm-via Åland Islands-Helsinki; Helsinki-Travemünde (the port of Lübeck, Germany). These six sea voyages will bring my lifetime total to 40. Never mind that some are only of one night. If I’m sleeping in a cabin on a ship, to me it’s a sea voyage.

I’m going into this detail to make a point. The trip on the Alaska State Ferry system last year was quite nice, and makes a good example. First, these ferries/coastal steamers exist because there is no land route available in the Inside Passage. Second, there are two sorts of trips. Going north from Juneau up Tracy Arm to Skagway was on a hydrofoil. It was a day trip of a few hours, there was nothing more than a snack bar available, and no cabins. THAT was a ferry. Later, sailing from Skagway to Sitka, it was a standard ship, took overnight, the cabin was modern and complete (although spartan), the table-service dining room was charming, with good food. THAT was a (short-term) voyage, whether you call that ship a ferry or not. Those are my criteria.

That said, as pleasant as the Alaska voyage was, the voyage on the Color Fantasy “ferry” would knock your eye out.

The Color Line, which is Norwegian, but with an English name, has several sea services, one of them being from Oslo down to Kiel in Germany. It takes a day and a half, from 2 PM to 9:30 AM. In 1973, Beverly and I had made the overnight connection from northern Denmark, near Skagen, to Oslo, but on another line. For the most part, these routes exist, less out of necessity (one could drive from Norway to Germany via Sweden and Denmark, including bridges) but because it’s just the more pleasant way to go. I needed to go to Kiel to catch the Deutschland, and chose this method.

I had heard that they had recently (December, 2004) added a new ship to the Oslo-Kiel service called the Color Fantasy, and I lucked out, since that was the one leaving the day I wanted to leave. And what a ship. The Color Fantasy is advertised as the world’s largest cruise ship—with a car deck. It is 15 decks high. It has a central Promenade midships that is three decks high, with the windows of some inside cabins opening on to it. The Promenade has shops and “sidewalk” cafés. There is a casino. All the elevators have glass cabins, with views along the Promenade. There is a Grand Buffet where I had dinner (not included in the cabin fare). There are also two other rather pricey restaurants. There is a theater with two shows per evening. This is a FERRY?

The Color Line solicits passengers to take round-trip cruises, with just a few hours at the opposite end, which emphasizes the cruise-like nature of this ship. The Color Fantasy has a capacity of 2750 passengers. I will mention for the shock value that the QM2 takes a mere 2620 passengers. These figures are perfectly true, but misleading. Remember, a ship making long voyages has to have room for provisions, a lot more deck space for passenger relaxation, and space for a very large crew. I’m sure the Color Fantasy keeps on getting fresh provisions in Oslo and Kiel and needs much less place for storage. Also, there are no cabin stewards on board at all, since onshore cabin cleaners come on board in Oslo and Kiel, and leave again before departure. Still, the passenger numbers remain impressive.

The Color Fantasy sailed south out of the Oslo Fjord, which kept on getting wider and wider. After a while, we passed one of its sister ships, the Color Festival. We entered the Skagerrak, later the Kattegat, which, all sailor’s jokes to the contrary, remained wide enough so that one had difficulty making out the Swedish coast on the left and the Danish coast, including Skagen, on the right.

After dinner, I went to the second of the two shows. The theater had, in front of the regular proscenium, a thrust stage, which hydraulically rose and fell for fancy entrances and exits. (This is a ferry?) The show had about six very energetic singer-dancers, all with Scandinavian names, who performed in perfect English. It was billed as a salute to film, with a quick Chaplin scene at the beginning, but was in reality a salute to Broadway, since they did scenes from Annie and other musicals, which I suppose counted, since they also had been made into movies. There was just one thing that I was probably the only one to notice, but I had to have a secret smile. In the beginning when they made a number of film references, they mentioned “Fred and Ginger”. That would have been fine, except they pronounced Ginger with the same G’s as in “gargle”, in other words Ghingher. I just wonder if Rogers would have become Roghers, too.

The southern end of the trip was to be at night. I didn’t mind that, except that I wanted to see us sail under the new rail-and-road bridge over the Store Bælt/Great Belt connecting the two major Danish islands. They estimated it would take place at about 5 AM. It’s just as well that I didn’t set my clock, because it would have been too late, anyway. I just happened by pure chance to wake up at 4:38 and looked out of the cabin’s large window. We had left the Kattegat, were in the Store Bælt and had just gone under Storebæltsbron/The Great Belt Bridge, way overhead. My cabin happened to be on the east side of the ship, and dawn was just breaking, with the sun sitting on the horizon under the bridge. It was a postcard view.

In the morning we pulled into the Kieler Förde, the large estuary leading into Kiel, and docked at Norwegenkai/Norway Quay, a rather new terminal right near the center of town. I knew I had planned all this quite carefully, but just how well it worked out surprised me. I was wondering what I’d do with my bag all day until the Deutschland sailed in the late afternoon. Also, where would the Deutschland be? As the Color Fantasy pulled into Norwegenkai, there sat the Deutschland in the next berth at the very same terminal. It was perfect. I dropped off my bag to be loaded onto the Deutschland later on, and had the beautiful day to myself. I joked with people that day that, although people usually transfer between subway lines, trains, streetcars, or buses, in this case I was doing a change between ships.

Kiel Canal   Kiel is most prominent for its Kieler Woche/Kiel Week, which this year runs from June 17-25, one week plus two weekends, a time that just fits in between my leaving and arriving in Kiel on the Deutschland. That is just as well with me, since the Kieler Woche is a regatta, in which I’m not particularly interested. But I was glad I’d be coming to Kiel because of the Kiel Canal.

The canal was built in 1895 through Schleswig-Holstein. It runs west from Kiel and connects the Kieler Förde just north of town with the Elbe, downriver from Hamburg. It has a lock at either end. I saw this end, with its lock, from the water, and maybe when sailing on the Mary in a few weeks I’ll spot the other end of the canal in the Elbe. Sailing through the 98 kilometer canal saves 280 nautical miles going around the entire Jutland peninsula. It is the world’s busiest artificial waterway. It’s officially the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal (NOK), but internationally, the Kiel Canal.

I saw it from above for the first time in the late 1980’s. We were taking the train from Hamburg near the west side of Schleswig-Holstein up to Westerland on Sylt. I say from above, because the train crossed the canal on a high bridge, high enough for water traffic to fit underneath. I had forgotten at the time we’d be going over the canal, and was surprised to see it (we were still somewhat green then, or, to put it another way, every year one is less green than the previous year).

Sylt (ZÜLT) is the northernmost of the Frisian Islands, in the North Sea, running along the western edge of the Jutland peninsula, and its northern end is the northernmost point in Germany. Westerland is its main city, and a major seaside resort. You can only reach it by train, which runs over the causeway known as the Hindenburgdamm. Even cars have to be loaded onto the train to and from Westerland. We wanted to go to Westerland to visit its famous nude beach, which was our first such experience, later followed by two such beaches in Ibiza, one in mainland Spain, then the US. In any case, at a northern beach one learns of the culture of the Strandkorb.

North Sea and Baltic beaches are enjoyable, but the water can be chilly, and wind can be a problem. For this reason there are Strandkörbe to be rented. A Strandkorb, literally “beach basket” is a wicker structure best described as a marriage between a chaise longue and a phone booth. You sit on the chair part with your legs stretched out, and the “phone booth” surrounds the upper part of the body on three sides, protecting it from the wind, and, if necessary, from the sun. As I recall, they usually come double-wide. More often than not, you can tell from a distance where the wind is coming from by looking at the sea of Strandkörbe and seeing which direction they’re facing.

But on this trip I wanted to see three very specific canal-related things, all located in exactly the same spot, in Rendsburg, a larger town on the canal about 1/3 of the way out from Kiel. I had downloaded a town map and printed it out before leaving home. After dropping off my bag that morning at Norwegenkai, I took the five-minute walk across the footbridge to the center of Kiel, just where the railroad station is located. I used my railpass for the half-hour ride to Rendsburg.

I saw, and experienced, the first thing just before arrival. The original railroad bridge across the canal had been a swing bridge that had to be opened and closed as needed, so it was replaced in 1911-13 by a Hochbrücke, literally “high bridge”. To allow adequate clearance, it was built 42 meters/ 137.5 feet above the canal. But that’s only part of the fun. As the train approaches from the south, you find yourself climbing higher and higher, then crossing the canal. The only problem is, Rendsburg is immediately on the north bank, so the train crossing the canal finds itself 42 meters above the Bahnhof/Station. The problem is solved by the fact that the train then turns right along a huge, oval loop, descending over the eastern part of town until it’s at ground level, with the loop crossing under itself and the train pulls into the Bahnhof. The whole structure is kept in pristine condition, and is regularly maintained.

To see the second thing, I had to walk from the Bahnhof about 20 minutes through town down to the canal, actually directly under the Hochbrücke. As the local historical signs explained, with the raising of the railroad line, some towns on the south bank lost their local stations and access to Rendsburg. This was solved by building a Schwebefähre, literally a “hanging ferry”, to the superstructure of the Hochbrücke, and under it, as it crossed the canal.

What we are talking about here is a transporter bridge. I first reported on them (Reflections 2001 Series 2) after having seen one in the film “Billy Elliot”, which turns out to be the one in Middlesborough in Northern England. Beverly and I visited the newly restored and landmarked one in Newport, Wales. The one in Newport was a stand-alone structure, that is, the upper bridge superstructure is meant to support the transporter mechanism only. In Rendsburg, it’s the railroad bridge that’s supporting the crossing mechanism.

In both cases, a platform with room for about eight cars, with pedestrians and bicycles on a side lane, hangs from above by cables. In Rendsburg (where it’s free), it leaves every few minutes, and is heavily used. In addition to crossing on it, I watched it for quite a while, since it was such a beautiful day, and there was often vehicular traffic left that had to wait for the next crossing. The mechanism above moves across, and the platform hanging from it glides across the canal. It’s really quite graceful to watch.

I like to compare the different terminology. Calling it a transporter bridge implies that only a piece of a bridgeway is in place, and that piece of the bridge moves across the open space in lieu of the rest of the bridge “that isn’t there”. Calling it a Schwebefähre (hanging ferry) implies that it’s not a bridge, but instead a ferry being held above the water, and never actually getting to touch it. This Schwebefähre is nicknamed “Die eiserne Lady” (The Iron Lady). There is only one other Schwebefähre in Germany.

The third thing I wanted to see in this spot was the canal itself, and the Schiffsbegrüssungsanlage. Don’t be put off by the length of that word, which is really three words written together. Separated it’s Schiffs+begrüssungs+anlage, which is literally the Ship Greeting Area.

Do not picture the canal as some dreary industrial area. Although there were a couple of grain silos along the canal in Rendsburg, they were not unattractive, and the canal wends its way through farmland and green fields, an idyllic Schleswig-Holstein landscape. People were picnicking on the lawns on both sides of the Hochbrücke-Schwebefähre structure, and had come to watch the boats on the canal. There was a list posted of major ships due to come through over the next months. On that day, the Europa was due some time, but I was sorry to see that the Deutschland was not, nor on our return day. I would have enjoyed traveling on the Kiel Canal, but it was not to be this trip. As it turns out, the Deutschland was to do the Kattegat/Skagerrak route in both directions.

While I was there, a number of pleasure boats came by, and the odd freighter or two, but nothing exciting. I was just about to get ready to leave, when I looked to the west and saw a large white mountain heading around the bend through the green trees. I had lucked out, because the Europa was passing just then.

The Ship Greeting Area is essentially a restaurant for people who want a pleasant meal with a view. Outside there’s a woman in a booth who announces things as necessary. She said the Europa was on its way from Hamburg to Malmö, Sweden, across from Copenhagen. As the Europa slowly progressed, its massive size was impressive, especially compared to the small vessels that had been passing. As it passed under the Hochbrücke, it gave the impression that it just fit. Of course, all of us at the Schiffsbegrüssungsanlage were busy doing our job, which was waving furiously at the people on the Europa, who were happy to wave back.

Spitsbergen   I was happy to get back to the pleasant ship life on the Deutschland, which has an upscale style that even the QM2 doesn’t always equal in some ways. For instance, before we boarded, waiters came around in the terminal with glasses of sparkling wine. Before unpacking and taking care of other urgent business, I saw in the schedule it was time for the Elegante englische Teestunde, Elegant English Teatime, that I’ve always enjoyed in the Lido Terrasse lounge with white-glove (literally) service, so I had my first cup of the jasmine green tea I’ve gotten to like. Of course the food on board proved to be as good as ever, workers were busy polishing all the brass fixtures, and everything was ship-shape.

We pulled out onto the Kieler Förde, and the captain announced that they wanted to check the readings of their compass before proceeding, so we took about 20 minutes, and the ship just stayed in one spot, gradually revolving 360°. An engineer had opened the large, freestanding compass up on the open deck in the front of the ship and a bunch of us were chatting with him while he worked. At one point, somone pointed a camera at him, and he asked them to back away. He said there were a couple of meters around the compass in all directions of non-metallic area, so the compass wouldn’t be thrown off, and if the man’s camera had a mike, even the tiny magnet in the mike could throw off all the compass’s calculations. I was just in the mood to toss in my two cents, so I told him I hoped the compass wouldn’t be thrown off by “meine magnetische Personalität” (my magnetic personality). The engineer started laughing so hard he had to lean on the compass housing. I didn’t think it was all that funny, but I suppose he wasn’t expecting a comment like that. In any case, I felt the voyage was off to a good start.

Proceeding down the Kieler Förde, something struck me. Even though German uses the word Fjord, I suppose Förde is the actual German word for this kind of estuary. I also saw somewhere that Kieler Förde was translated into English as the Kiel Firth. That reminded me of the Firth of Forth in Scotland near Edinborough, with the famous Firth of Forth railroad bridge Beverly and I had gone to see. Therefore, firth is probably the native English word corresponding to the Norwegian word fjord.

It took that night and a full day to sail through Denmark, around Skagen (you still couldn’t see it in the distance), and around southern Norway to reach Bergen. It was odd to have been in Oslo twice within about a week, and then in Bergen twice within a week. The Deutschland docked right at the end of Vågen, and I walked back to Bryggen and the market at Torget. There had been a package of five English tours that had been offered, and my agent in Chicago that purchases ship voyages for me at my direction offered to give them to me as a gift, so I had an English-speaking tour with four others in a small van, while most of the people on the German-language tours filled bus after bus. We then had another sea day proceeding up the Norwegian coast to Tromsø, usually protected from the rougher seas by staying within the inside passage of the many coastal islands.

Since the AC adapter for my laptop had blown out in Oslo, I was unable to do any writing for over a week, and fell behind. I had asked the Concierge on the ship to get me another one in Bergen, but it was the wrong voltage. The Concierge then got me the name of an electrical shop in Tromsø, where I was going to try my luck. Meanwhile I had plenty of time to finally read.

At Newark Airport, I had been hoping to be able to pick up a paperback of The Da Vinci Code, since I was apparently the only person on the planet that hadn’t read it yet, and I was successful. I started reading it flying across the Atlantic, and piecemeal in Norway (it’s good the chapters are short), but, since I couldn’t use the laptop to write after Oslo, it was sailing up the Skagerrak and up the Norwegian coast that I finally had time to finish it. It was good, and did some things I like to also do on the website, like explaining word origins such as “horny” and explaining curious customs, such as why Friday the 13th is considered unlucky.

I also had time to read an article in a magazine about the QM2 and Hamburg. I always knew it had been well received there, which is the reason why it had started doing two round trips from there to New York this year (I’ll be leaving Hamburg on it on its first westbound trip this year). The article did point out that the QM2 has to be careful of the tide in the Elbe, since there is only enough clearance for it at high tide. Apparently at the time of its visit last year, the shores were full of people early before its arrival and departure, hundreds of small boats were everywhere on the river, so that you could almost “walk across the river without getting your feet wet”, and there was also Hamburg’s largest fireworks display ever, with fireworks being set off at seven locations down the Elbe as the QM2 sailed out. The article said Hamburg is preparing another great reception this year (I’m glad I’m on the first of the two sailings), and “you shouldn’t miss it”, since the whole QM2 event causes Gänsehaut/gooseflesh. Apparently they expect hotels to be sold out in Hamburg that weekend, especially on Sunday, July 16, the day the QM2 arrives and departs. Although Southampton is the QM2’s home port, people tend to refer to Hamburg as her “secret home port”, that’s how much she’s appreciated there.

People don’t often imagine the large size of Scandinavia. Often, maps of Europe emphasize central Europe and cut off the top of Scandinavia. It should be realized that, if Sweden were flipped on its southern coast, its northern part would reach southern Italy. The same is true about flipping the map of Norway, except that it starts out so much further north than Denmark or Sweden do, that it’s just that much more impressive that it would still reach down to Rome.

We crossed the Arctic Circle (Polarsirkelen in Norwegian), 66° 34’N, at 7:25 PM on June 15. North of here at this time of the year it’s constant daylight (and constant sunlight, if and when the overcast clears). If you have trouble visualizing why this happens, see if this helps. When I watch the sunset at home in the winter, the sun seems to plunge straight downward and it gets dark quickly. If I were to follow where the sun might be after sunset I would be pointing relatively straight down, then behind me, until it rose the next morning. But as spring turns into summer, the sun seems to go down slowly at an ever steeper angle, and it gets dark very slowly. If I were to follow its path then, it wouldn’t go below me but more to my right side before rising again. If I were further north that effect would increase. At the Arctic Circle in June the sun wouldn’t go below me or to my right, but would go “down” only to kiss the horizon, then come up again. The point where the sun does that is the definition of the Arctic Circle. When at the North Cape or beyond, in Spitsbergen, that descending to the horizon becomes less and less, until the sun is pretty much making an oval above your head, providing constant daylight. As it turned out, during the trip we had a lot of overcast, but on several occasions the bright sun was very visible in the period around midnight.

The day after crossing Polarsirkelen, we arrived an hour early in Tromsø, so I had time to run over to J.M. Hansen Elektrisk and get the AC adapter I needed. To celebrate, I spotted a wool hat I liked and bought it. Actually, both the sweater and hat will be useful in Spitsbergen. The wool hat is a squat cylinder. It has a flat top and the sides come down to the brow in front, and further down over the ears and in the back. It comes close to matching the navy blue and white pattern of the sweater. With this outfit, plus my jacket, it’ll be easier to face the rigors of Spitsbergen.

Tromsø is on an island between the mainland and other, larger islands protecting it. Actually, as I see it, the district is called Trom and in Norwegian,“ø” means “island”, explaining how the name Tromsø is formed, including a possessive S. It’s small, yet the major city in Northern Norway, with an important university. Because of all the North Sea oil coming into Norway, there have been a lot of infrastructure improvements, and it seems that almost everything is connected now by bridge or tunnel. Tromsø now has bridges connecting it both to the mainland and the outer island. The tour went to Polaria, which has an IMAX presentation on the Arctic, and live seals and an aquarium of local life.

We’ve said that Norske Havet is the Norwegian Sea. It turns out that Norwegian joins other languages in calling the Mediterranean the Middle Sea: Middelhavet. So now we should challenge ourselves to figure out what “Ishavet” has to be. Any ideas? Hint: it’s appropriate to the current discussion.

The word “is” (ISS, I as in skI; like saying “east” and dropping the T) means “ice”. So now do you have any better guess as to just what Ishavet is? I hope you assumed that the Ice Sea is the Arctic Ocean, since you’d then be correct.

The most famous building in Tromsø is Ishavskatedralen. Take it apart into its five component pieces: is+hav+s+katedral+en, which is ice+sea+’s+cathedral+the. The Ice Sea’s Cathedral is expressed in English as the Arctic Cathedral. It’s a stark white, modern building just across the bridge up the side of a hill on the mainland. It looks like about five square ice blocks that have fallen forward on each other like dominoes, or, alternatively, it looks like an iceberg. The spaces between the leaning “ice blocks” are the windows. The building is a regular church and not a cathedral, but “cathedral” sounds more imposing. The style of the building takes the best advantage of catching available light during the different times of the year.

To reflect back for a moment, in 1973, although we were driving most of the time, we did take the Hurtigruten service along the coast. Hurtigruten (“The Quick Route”) is an official coastal service established in the early 20th century to connect all the towns along the coast, in other words, the traditional coastal steamer. In addition to passengers, it carries goods. It starts in Bergen, although we caught it in Trondheim, and made all the stops up and back to Trondheim. That was our first time crossing the Arctic Circle and seeing Ishavskatedralen in Tromsø. Among many smaller towns, we stopped in Honningsvåg (more in a moment), and went all the way to the very last town in Norway before the Russian border, Kirkenes. There isn’t much in Kirkenes, but my best memory (my mind’s eye is not lying here) is coming across a field simply crowded with the brightest yellow flowers I’ve ever seen and taking a picture of Beverly sitting down among them with her skirt spread around her.

There is another point to the geography of Norway. Yes, the upper ¾ of its length is a thin coastal strip, but it should be noted that this coastal strip doesn’t run north-south like Chile does, but at a very steep angle towards the northeast. Trondheim, at the start of the narrow strip, is already above Oslo, in eastern Norway. You are then above Sweden, and by the time you reach Tromsø, you are north of Stockholm, on the Swedish east coast. Going past Honningsvåg, which is on the northern “hump” of Norway, SOUTHeast to Kirkenes, you are above Finland, which is in Eastern Europe and in the next time zone, although all of Norway remains in its time zone. Kirkenes is such that it’s actually further east than northern Finland. Although you normally lose an hour going EAST over time zones, you lose one instead going from Kirkenes WEST into Finland. In addition, Kirkenes is already so far east that, crossing from Kirkenes further east into Russia you have a time zone loss of TWO hours.

On this trip our next stop after Tromsø was Honningsvåg. Picture it this way. The northernmost part of Norway, and also of Europe, is on Magerøya Island, a coastal island forming part of that “hump”. Honningsvåg is a small town on the SOUTH end of Magerøya, and the famous Nordkapp (North Cape) is a 45-minute drive north to the northern end of the island. It is a further indication of Norway’s oil wealth that even simple Honningsvåg is connected by tunnel under the channel to the mainland, for easy driving to all points south.

We had already ridden up earlier to the North Cape from Honningsvåg. I checked Beverly’s travel diary before leaving, and it was on July 12, 1973. Although at that time it was foggy, and we unfortunately couldn’t see the water at the bottom of the cliff, we had seen the exhibits there and had been there. I wasn’t about to buy a ticket to ride up there again, especially since it could simply be socked in again, for which it is famous. Anyway, I suspected we’d see it later from the ship, as we sailed around Magerøya up to Spitsbergen, our next stop. I was perfectly right. A couple of hours later we sailed past the very imposing cliff of Nordkapp under bright sunlight, and it was nice to see.

One always stumbles over technicalities. Nordkapp was discovered in the 1500’s and declared to be the northernmost point in Europe. It has since been measured at 71° 10’ 21” N. But then they measured the somewhat less imposing next peninsula west on Magerøya and found that to be 71° 11’ 08” N, or just slightly further north by 47” (47 seconds of a degree). These facts are even posted in Honningsvåg, but it doesn’t bother anyone. Nordkapp remains an impressive sight, and is easily accessible. The joke is, is that Nordkapp’s real claim to fame is being positioned well enough so as to be able to have the northernmost bus parking lot in Europe.

In Honningsvåg I did have a pleasant sunny morning walking around town. There wasn’t too much to see, but I stopped into a bookstore on my usual language quest. What might I find of interest in Norwegian?

I had always heard people joke in Minnesota about rivalries between Norwegians and Swedes, but I hadn’t ever come across anything in Scandinavia indicating it. That is, not until I was browsing through a book named “Inte sjuk, bara svensk”, which is “Not Sick, Just Swedish”. So apparently there is just a bit of friendly ethnic joking going on here, similar to Polish jokes in the US or Ostfriesen jokes in Germany, where East Frisians are the people who you want to know how many it takes to screw in a light bulb. Not really knowing Norwegian, I only understood a joke here and there (there were all really quite juvenile jokes), but here are two for you to figure out as well.

There was a totally blank page that had the heading: Svensk labyrint.

There was the below question-and-answer. Remember the type of humor involved, expect it to be juvenile, and keep in mind the philosophy of plunging in and “picking up” as much language as you can. Then I’m sure you’ll also get the gist of this “joke” in Norwegian:

So much for ethnic humor, although maybe I should look in Sweden for a similar book about Norwegians.

I was in Mrs. Lindner’s sixth grade class in PS 108 on Arlington Avenue in Brooklyn. As I count backward, it would have been 1952. We were all to do “research reports”—that is, inasmuch as sixth graders can do research—on various countries. I got Norway.

Some years earlier, there had been a Broadway play about a Norwegian-American family living in San Francisco. It was made into an early television series called “Mama”, starring Peggy Wood. My interest in that show might have possibly foretold a developing interest in ethnicity in general, and language in particular.

My mind’s eye (that liar) tells me that I specifically asked to do my report on Norway, based on this interest. I may be wrong and got Norway by chance, but I don’t think so.

I had finished the rough copy of my report in longhand in pencil on large sheets of paper. We were all to read our reports in front of the class. I was scheduled in a few days, but either someone was absent, or something like that, and one day Mrs. Lindner (we all knew her first name was Rhoda) asked me if I was ready early and could give my report right then, from my draft copy, which I did.

Mrs. Lindner apparently had high hopes for her students, because whenever we stood in front of the class to do reports, we stood in front of a microphone mounted on a floor stand, for “preparation for later life”. (The fact that any public speaking I’ve ever done since, as far as I recall, has never involved a mike is a triviality here, disrespectful of the memory of Mrs. Lindner!)

There were two problems with Mrs. Lindner’s mike, though. First of all, it wasn’t connected to anything. We all knew it, the power cord was just lying on the floor around the base of the stand. Even if it were connected, it probably wouldn’t have worked, and anyway, a mike wasn’t needed in a small classroom. I suppose Mrs. Lindner felt it gave us poise when speaking before a group

The second thing is, the mike was a prehistoric relic. By 1952 the standard ice-cream-cone style hand mike, also mounted as a floor mike, was normal. Mrs. Lindner’s mike was what I refer to as an X-in-an-O mike from the 1920’s and 1930’s. It had a large O-shaped ring on the top of the stand, with the mike suspended inside from four springs in an X pattern. But we again are being disrespectful of the memory of Mrs. Lindner.

So I got up that day and stood with my fistful of first-draft pages in front of the class, being careful not to step on the homeless mike cable on the floor, and speaking clearly into the stone-deaf X-in-an-O mike. I read what I had written (that is to say, pretty much copied from encyclopedias) about Norway’s history, people, and whatever else Mrs. Lindner had carefully guided us to discuss, including a category that stays with me to this day: “Transportation and Communication”. But toward the end, I had added something on that had not appeared in Mrs. Lindner’s outline. In doing my “research”, I had found that Norway had jurisdiction over a territory—we called them colonies in those days—way in the north called Spitsbergen. Being so far in the north, it really interested me, and, even though I had great difficulty finding it on any map, I added a section at the end of my Norway report telling all I could find out about Spitsbergen, little though it may have been.

I was just a bit uneasy as I told the dead mike about Spitsbergen, since Mrs. Linder had made it quite clear just what the structure of our reports was to be, and “Colonies” was most definitely not included as a category. But when I finished, I looked over towards her seated at her desk and she was smiling.

It is now fully 54 years after presenting the Spitsbergen addition to my Norway report to Mrs. Lindner and the class. I find myself—at very long last (carpe diem!)--not only on a ship crossing the Arctic Ocean from mainland Norway north to Spitsbergen, but writing a second “report” on Spitsbergen, and not longhand in pencil, either. This time, technology is cooperating. Instead of a dead mike in front of me with a homeless cable on the floor, I have in front of me a plugged-in “live” laptop. The fact that the cable I arrived in Norway with died in Oslo and needed to be replaced has nothing to do with Rhoda the Teacher after 54 years. I can instead only attribute that event to the charmed workings, effective within eight hours after I saw her at the waterfall, of Huldra the Wood Nymph.

My more recent research before leaving home did not involve sifting through encyclopedias as in 1952, but rather doing some judicious googling on the internet. Some of the following information also came from lectures on the ship. It had never been clear to me why the word Svalbard often came up in connection with Spitsbergen. As it turns out, Spitsbergen is by far the biggest island in this archipelago, or cluster of islands, known as Svalbard, which include three other much smaller, yet good-sized islands, plus many smaller ones. Spitsbergen being the largest island in Svalbard causes people to call everything here Spitsbergen. Svalbard is about 400 miles from the Norwegian mainland to the south, and 600 miles from the North Pole to the north.

On the first of this month, just four days before I left, there was a front-page article in the New York Times saying that 49 million years ago, the North Pole had Florida-like temperatures. At that time, Europe was much further north (I wonder if it was physically connected to Spitsbergen?). If you keep in mind that the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska would have still existed then, closing off the far side, and if you keep in mind that even today, the Norwegian Sea is really the main access to the Arctic Ocean, and if that sea were quite a bit smaller because Europe came farther north, it could be imagined that all the continents closed off, or almost closed off, what was then a fresh-water lake. With continental shift and climatic change, we now have Europe further away and Spitsbergen as a remnant in the north with a much colder climate.

However, it’s not as cold as you think. Since the Norwegian Sea IS now there after all, the Gulf Stream coming up from the Caribbean, which is Western Europe’s salvation, also warms Spitsbergen. However, it should be noted that, just as only Western Europe gets the warming benefit of the Gulf Stream, and Russia in the east is known for its cold winters, Spitsbergen, too, enjoys more temporate weather on its west coast only. This is where the flora and fauna thrive, and is the only part with any settlements. This is another reason why those three smaller islands on the east side are not as well known. About 2/3 of all of Svalbard is covered with glaciers.

In 1596, Willem Barents, a Dutchman (the Dutch sailed everywhere!), after whom the nearby Barents Sea is named, saw the peaked mountains on the west coast of Spitsbergen, and gave it its name (spits = pointed; berg = mountain; the plural is bergen). The name is Dutch, not German. There are many large fjords on Spitsbergen’s west coast especially, often with glaciers descending from the mountains. Since Spitsbergen is so far north, it was used as a base for polar expeditions by both Amundsen and Byrd. All of Spitsbergen has a population of about 3000. Back as far as the 1600’s whalers were active here. In the early 1900’s coal mining brought businesses and population. Only one coal mine remains active and profitable, and it supplies high-quality coal to Europe. However, primarily, Spitsbergen is a place of scientific research, and, since the 1990’s when the Norwegian government started allowing visitors, tourism is an increasingly important industry. The capital, Longyearbyen, is the world’s northernmost point with scheduled air service.

On the Norwegian mainland we picked up Andreas Umbreit, an expert on Spitsbergen who lives on-and-off half the year in Germany and half in Longyearbyen, where we’ll drop him off as we leave. Although I understand he did give private talks to the handful of the English speakers, and all public announcements were in both German and English, the information I got from him was exclusively in German, so I’m going to use a couple of terms as I learned them, which I’ll then translate.

Land ice is glaciers, consisting of layers of packed snow turned to ice, and is all fresh water. Those that work their way down from the mountains to the water’s edge show their spectacular face breaking into the seawater in the fjord.

Sea ice is from seawater, and comes in two forms, Packeis and Treibeis. Packeis (“packed-together ice”) is large-scale ice and is part of the solid ice cap that covers the North Pole. You would need to be on an Eisbrecher/ice-breaker, which the Deutschland is not, to even approach it. Treibeis is, however, small-scale drift ice. It’s broken-off pieces of ice that float south. On a tiny scale, you could say that it looks like a mass of ice cubes covering the surface of punch in a punch bowl. There can be larger pieces such as icebergs mixed in, but as long as you don’t ram one in darkness as the Titanic did, you’re OK. Ramming an iceberg is like ramming another ship. Just go slowly, in daylight or at least with radar, and you won’t do it. [Note: what I call “half-translations” are curious things. The German word Eisberg was never fully translated into English as “ice mountain”. Only the first part was translated, so we’re left with “iceberg”, a half-English, half-German hybrid. If it had been half-translated the other way, we would today say eismountain instead of iceberg.]

This Spitsbergen trip on the Deutschland had promised to go to the Eisgrenze, which translates as “ice border”, not of course referring to the ice cap, but to the drift ice. I think that phrase makes complete sense, but it isn’t a standard English phrase. I think English calls it something like “the southernmost extent of drift ice”. I’ll stick to “Eisgrenze/ice border”. Umbreit warned that last winter was strange in Spitsbergen. As a matter of fact, they almost didn’t have a winter. For much of the time, Germany was colder than Spitsbergen. For this reason, he said the ice patterns were different this year. We were supposed to go up the west coast and find the Eisgrenze just north of it. Instead, it had been checked by helicopter, and was far too north to go chasing after. However, the helicopter had found that drift ice had come down from the colder eastern side of Spitsbergen, and the Eisgrenze/ice border had reached the southmost tip of Spitsbergen, but off to the east, so we rearranged plans and hoped to arrive at the drift ice at around 11 AM that day, south of Spitsbergen.

Talking recently about the theatricality of the Huldra presentation, I said Shakespeare had said all the world’s a stage. What happened in reality that day doesn’t get more theatrical. We were listening to Umbreit telling about ice in the darkened Kaisersaal, the main theater/ballroom on the Deutschland. All the curtains on the windows on the sides were pulled to see the slide show. Just as he was finishing, you heard a clunk or two. He finished what he had to say and commented that, if those sounds were right, we should have a surprise. All the window drapes on the sides of the room were electically raised, and outside we were suddenly surrounded by drift ice, right after he had just been talking about it. It just does not get more theatrical than that. Everyone grabbed hats and coats and went out on deck, and the ship, in a slight fog, was surrounded on three sides by ice floes, some the size of dining room tables, some the size of dining rooms. A hot, spiked punch (heisser Punsch) was served on deck, as everyone was oohing and aahing. After a while, the ship pulled back, and you could clearly see the empty space on the water’s surface that the ship had left in the Eisgrenze. It was a great experience, but we were then ready to go investigate the west coast of Spitsbergen.

The weather we had in our four days in Spitsbergen waters was in the 40’s, sometimes mid-30’s, Fahrenheit. Not terribly cold, not windy, often sunny, but I was glad I had bought my blue Sino-Norwegian wool sweater and my blue wool Norwegian cylinder-hat, both of which I got a lot of use of. I suppose I looked like Blåmannen, as in the funicular car in Bergen, except that my jacket usually covered most of the sweater. In any case, just imagine Blåmannen popping up all around Spitsbergen.

That same first day in Spitsbergen, we turned into the first fjord in the southern end of Spitsbergen’s west coast, Hornsund. The name is a misnomer, since a sound is a passage and this was a fjord. As its name implies, there are mid-level mountains all over Spitsbergen, and the view is always the same. The mountains are brown-gray to black, and regularly have long white strips of snow down their sides, giving all the mountains a most definite zebra-striped look. Maintain that image including the occasional glacier sliding into the fjord under either sunny, slightly cloudy, or overcast skies, and you’ll have the correct image of Spitsbergen. In the Hornsund we took a look at two glaciers coming down to the water, and the ship pulled up slowly to one. We pulled closer and closer, until the bow of the ship was about 5 meters/yards from the ice, which was several stories tall, taller than the ship. After that, we proceeded all the way up to the top of the west coast, and would see everything else we were supposed to see as we worked our way south.

Moffen Island is tiny, and lies just north of the top of the west coast. We reached it the second morning. There are three special things about Moffen Island.

First, it’s an atoll. Usually you expect atolls in a tropical area like the South Pacific, such as Bora Bora, where you find a crescent-shaped low beach surrounding a central lagoon. Moffen Island was indeed a circular gravel beach surrounding a central fresh-water lagoon—which was, however, white, since it was a snow-covered, frozen glacier.

Second, Moffen Island is a gathering place for walrus. Sometimes none are present. Also, the Deutschland has in the past found that drift ice blocked access to approach the island. Neither problem arose on this trip. In the morning haze, with overcast and a slight drizzle, from the required distance of about a kilometer, so as not to bother the animals, we saw two groups of walrus, each with maybe a half-dozen animals. Even when someone lent blåmannen binoculars, they still looked like a bunch of fat people sitting in a group, but walrus they were. Each male adult weighs two tons (!!!), and has a thick enough hide that even polar bears usually respect them and keep their distance. During the period of whale and walrus hunting, almost all the walrus were exterminated, but starting in 1953 they were declared a protected species and have been recovering nicely.

The final point about Moffen Island is that it is just far enough north that it lies right on the 80° North parallel. I had made it, at 9 AM on June 19, 2006. If the drift ice or weather had been a problem, not only would we have missed Moffen Island, but we would have fallen short of this goal. I asked Umbreit to find out the exact coordinates of our northernmost point. We had passed it by a hair: 80° 00’ 04”, in other words, zero minutes and four seconds beyond 80°. But that’s quite enough. We had reached this point at 14° 28’ 09” E of Greenwich. Up in the Arctic, all the meridians come so close together to converge at the North Pole that it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re north of. The 14° line drops down through central Sweden and is close to the border between Germany and Poland, in other words, quite a bit east of the Norwegian coast “down south” where we had been traveling.

Going around South America I tried to show the latitudes rising to the south, and I’d like to show them rising to the north now, in rounded degrees North.

Here are comparitive starting points in North America and Europe: New York and Naples are both 41; Halifax and Milan are both 45. My ‘round-the-world-by-rail trip was in the 40’s and 50’s, with Saint Petersburg being the northernmost point squeezing in under 60° at 59° 55’ N.

Western North America: Vancouver 49, Sitka 57, Skagway 59, Whitehorse & Anchorage 61, Fairbanks 65.

Europe (places from this trip): Bremen 53, Hamburg, Lübeck, Kiel 54, Copenhagen 56, Göteborg 58, Stockholm 59, Oslo, Bergen, Helsinki, Turku 60, Flåm 61, Tromsø 70, Honningsvåg & Nordkapp 71, Longyearbyen 78, Ny-Ålesund 79, Moffen Island 80.

The North Cape is 79% of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Moffen Island is 89%. I’ve said in the past that, barring polar expeditions, it’s easier to go further north than south. Sailing around South America’s southernmost point, Cape Horn, was the southernmost point we’ve reached on the surface, 56° S, which is 62% of the distance from the equator to the South Pole. Flying over the Antarctic Peninsula and slightly to the east of it, at Seymour Island we reached 64° 30’ S, which is 72%, not as far south as even the North Cape is north. As I’ve said earlier, 2006 is my “North-South” year, or my “Polar” year. In late November I expect to reach the Antarctic Peninsula on the surface this time by ship, most likely to the west of the peninsula this time, and we’ll see what numbers come up. I doubt, though, that they will be any further south. I just hope they’ll equal the numbers reached while flying.

After Moffen Island that second day we entered the Magdalenefjord in upper Spitsbergen to reach the arm called Trinityhavn. I never found out the reason why it has the English name Trinity, and it most definitely is no harbor (havn). It is the first of two actual stops on land we made in the wilderness. The landscape in Trinityhavn is the usual, described above, except that there is a peninsula coming out into the water, which is where we were to stop. We were warned that everything is protected, and although the only plant life was the occasional little cluster of flowers, or otherwise patches of moss, we were to avoid stepping on any of them. We were also told that annually, an amazing 15,000 visitors stop on this peninsula off of ships (20,000 in Langyearbyen), so that the fragility of the environment has to be respected. You’re going to like the next point. Umbreit set up an Eisbärwache—a polar bear watch. He had a rifle, and he had other guys posted around the peninsula. He said he never had to use the rifle, and didn’t want to start now, but you had to be protected. Fun, huh?

I’ve been intentionally mixing in Norwegian throughout for atmosphere, and since all this happened in German, and since this is both a travel and language website, I’m going to continue mixing in German as well, since everything happened in German. Where we stopped was referred to as the Gräberhalbinsel. “Halbinsel” (half-island) is “peninsula” (pen+insula also means half+island), and the Norwegian word is similar to the German word. Gräber are graves, and once we got on land, there was a cordoned-off landmarked area where, in the 1600’s whalers were buried, who had regularly come here to work on processing the whale meat they had harvested. To make the Landgang (going ashore) by tender easier, they were going to set up a Steg (small dock), pronounced SHTEK [E as in cafE]. It was cleverly done. When you stepped off the tender, there were two wooden blocks floating in the water with gangways connecting them with the tender and the land. Then came a pleasant surprise that only a nice ship like the Deutschland would set up. Here in the middle of nowhere, with the North Pole around the corner, so to speak, a few steps from the Steg was a snack bar. The weather was nice, but cool, and they were serving once again hot punch or juice, and hot dogs. Not only did the service table have a tablecloth, there were a half dozen stand-up (no chairs) high dining tables around with tablecloths. Walking around the area after having a snack was very enjoyable.

Back on the ship was a second tender service that day: you could go across to see the glacier up close. Being very close to the glacier in a small tender was even more impressive than from the ship a couple of days earlier. It was also easy to see from up close how the glacier “rots” away, with what looks from the distance as a solid surface of ice actually having huge holes and crevasses.

More on language: go back to the Norwegian word Ishavet, since that is where we were. By isolating the first word, you should be able to tell what country “Island” is (and don’t think that’s the English word “island”—it’s two separate words). One step further: the man’s name Björn/Bjørn might be familiar if you’ve heard of Björn Borg, the tennis player. Be aware that that’s also the Scandinavian word for “bear”. You should now also be able to figure out what an “isbjørn” is. You will have seen above that the German word works the same way: Eisbär. There are throughout Spitsbergen an estimated 3000 isbjørner/Eisbären. In the two towns we later visited, locals leaving the town always go armed. In one town I also saw three polarhunder/Polarhunde outside a house. You might guess that those are huskies. There was hope we would eventually spot some isbjørner/Eisbären, but we never did.

The third day started with a stop further south down the west coast at Möllerhavn, also in the wilderness. The view was very similar as earlier, and included the setting up of a Steg and also a snack bar. Since this was during the morning, in addition to the hot punch, juice, and hot dogs, there were two kinds of cake, including the classic, honeyed, Bienenstich (“Bee Sting” cake). Just imagine: Bienenstich in the Spitsbergen wilderness.

We stopped in two towns on this trip working our way south, and passed a third not worth visiting. This same third day we later stopped in Ny-Ålesund (New-Ålesund), named after a town down on the mainland Norwegian coast. It had been founded as a coal-mine town, but they were all closed down now. The business of the town now is almost exclusively research. There are all sorts of geodetic, geographic, atmospheric, and similar studies being done here, some in modern buildings and some in attractively recycled buildings from the early 20th century. The ship docked here at a regular pier, and you could walk into town.

The town capitalized on being the northernmost town in the world with postal service, and you could have your postcards stamped here, although they would really be mailed in Langyearbyen, a bit further south. Ny-Ålesund is posted at the dock at 78° 56’ N, but but 79° on their t-shirts. I won’t begrudge them the four seconds’ difference.

They warn you about the arctic tern, which is numerous here and which will attack you if it feels you are disturbing it. Apparently, it’s no fun having that beak hit your head, so they tell you that, since the bird will attack the highest point it sees, you should raise one finger above your head, and move it in a circle, so it can’t be attacked. We all thought this to be an idle warning, but walking around in town, there was apparently a female bird nesting on the side of the road, and a male sitting nearby. You should have seen the people doing the Arctic Tern boogie in order to continue down the road without being pecked, including Blåmannen. It was like a scene out of “The Birds”, except here there was only one excited bird.

One building in town had been converted to tourist use, and was optimistically named “Nordpol Hotellet”.

I had noticed on the map before leaving home that Spitsbergen is pretty much across from Nome, Alaska, as you trace a line across the North Pole. When in Ny-Ålesund there was a monument to Roald Amundsen’s flight across the North Pole, and that was exactly the route he took, from Ny-Ålesund at 79° N to Nome at 65° N. On the edge of town is the mooring mast for the dirigible he used. At the monument it says it was the first transpolar flight from Europe (??) to North America, on May 11-14, 1926. See how much you can understand of the main plaque on the monument before reading my translation. After “Roald Amundsen, 1872-1928” it said:

The largest fjord cutting into Spitsbergen’s west coast is called Isfjorden, which you should now be able to translate. On occasion in the past, Isfjorden has lived up to its name, and the Deutschland was not able to reach Langyearbyen at all, and Andreas Umbreit had to ride back to mainland Norway and fly back up. But this time, all went well. On the way into Isfjorden to Langyearbyen, you pass Barentsburg, which is a Russian settlement named after Willem Barents, established to mine coal in Soviet times. It is not doing well. After the change in the Russian government, there has been a huge amount of corruption in Barentsburg, the population dwindled from 1400 to 500, and they are cannibalizing buildings and machinery to repair others. Yet on sailing past, there is the optimistic sign: Вас приветствует Баренцбург (Vas privyetstvuyet Barentsburg) “Barentsburg Greets You”.

[Note: We’ve said that the ending –burg used to form place names like Williamsburg or Barentsburg is related to the Scandinavian –borg as in Göteborg. I’ve also indicated that –borg is pronounced BORY in Scandinavian. That may strike you as odd, yet that pronunciation has also worked its way into English place names due to the Viking settlements in the northeast British isles in the Middle Ages. This change in pronunciation appears as –bury in names like Roxbury, Danbury, Tilbury, and Shrewsbury, showing that –burg, -borg, and -bury are all variations of the same thing.]

Because of treaty rules, all nations and nationals are welcome in Spitsbergen without restructions or visas. That’s why the third largest ethnic group in Spitsbergen after Norwegians and Russians are Thais. A few years ago, someone brought in a Thai bride, she brought in her relatives, and there are now some 60 Thais in Langyearbyen.

The peculiar name Longyearbyen has struck me as strange since the sixth grade, and it needs some explanation. They never did explain it on the ship, but I had checked it out before leaving. The last part first, involving both “bo” and “by”.

Bo is the Scandinavian word meaning “to live, to dwell”. Yes, it’s pronounced BOO, and once you stop laughing, note that bor means “lives, dwells”, and appears at the end of the English word neighbor (similarly in German Nachbar). A neighbor is a near-dweller. (It’s also strange how the word nigh, which has almost disappeared in favor of near, appears in an even stranger form in neighbor as neigh-.)

One place that people live (bo) is a village: by, pronounced BÜ. The plural is byer. “The village” is byen, which explains the end of Longyearbyen.

-by appears as an ending in place names, such as Visby (VISS.bü) in Sweden. However, the Vikings also brought that ending to English place names, where it is now pronounced –BEE, as in Hornby, Rugby, Digby, and many others. –by is then a suffix parallel in English with –ville, -burg, and all the others.

But I always thought the first part of Longyearbyen looked awfully English-language, and it certainly seemed to me that the word had something to do with the midnight sun, which it does not. It is an English name, and more specifically, it’s American. John Monroe Longyear came from Boston to Spitsbergen to open the first coal mines in the early 20th century. He was the principal owner of the Arctic Coal Company, and Longyearbyen was named after him.

We docked at the pier in Langyearbyen in the morning and a shuttle bus kept bringing passengers back and forth. With 1700 people, it’s the local metropolis. It’s contemporary looking, most houses are multiple dwellings, and each house is one color, such as deep red, lime, navy and gold. I understand you are required to use these colors to give the town a standardized, yet colorful look, but there is a plainness, partially caused by the unadorned, bare ground separating the buildings. There are a number of back streets and the main street was a pedestrian zone, with supermarkets and shops. It reminded me a bit of Skagway, in Alaska, which was also founded at about the same time. There was Svalbardbutikken (The Svalbard Boutique), also Isbjørnbutikken. Most of these were selling suvenirer. Of course, there just had to be a place called in English “Classic Pizza”. I particularly liked the shop name “Isrosen” (remember that ros is ROOSS). There was a white stretch limo for hire called Svalbard Limmo (spelled that way). T-shirts were for sale saying 78° 14’ 43”, which was just a bit further south than Ny-Ålesund, but still worth boasting about. In the middle of the road was a statue of a miner, headlamp on his helmet and pickax in hand. It said below it: Vi bygde [built] Longyearbyen.

You have to go out of town to actually see the famous polar bear warning signs, but that’s not really necessary, since every souvenir (or suvenir) shop has pins and key chains showing it. It’s a triangular sign, edged in red with a white polar bear silhouetted on a black background. Below it reads: Gjelder hele Svalbard, which means “Valid for all (of) Svalbard”. Then, as you walk down the street, there’s a tiny pond, where some local joker has put up a diamond-shaped yellow warning sign in English: Danger Crocodiles—No Swimming, with the appropriate picture.

I have further proof that it was Huldra the Wood Nymph that knocked out my power cord in Oslo. Once I couldn’t write any more in the Oslo hotel, I went down to the lobby and looked at a magazine. There was a tiny article in it about Longyearbyen (which was odd enough to begin with), but which then said that on 10 June 2006 Longyearbyen would be 100 years old. That day in Oslo happened to be 10 June 2006. If that isn’t Huldra’s doing, I don’t know what is. Sure enough, later on in Langyearbyen there were banners all over mentioning the centennial. Here are excerpts from the article in Oslo:

Longyearbyen 100 år I år [This year] er det hundre år siden [since] Longyearbyen ble grunnlagt [was founded] av amerikaneren John Munroe Longyear.... 10. juni 2006 regnes some selve [counts as the exact] jubileumsdagen.... I Longyearbyen finner du [you’ll find] gode restauranter, puber, butikker, gallerier, kirke og museum som alle er verdt et besøk [all of which are worth a visit (???)].

Spitsbergen counts for me as destination # 104 for the Travelers’ Century Club. I will add one more new destination later on during this trip. I get the feeling Mrs. Lindner might be smiling right now.

On the Deutschland there was a party the other night in the Bar zum Alten Fritz. There was a Fischbuffet and free vodka. An accordeonist played all kinds of songs all evening. I knew some (but far from all), and learned a new one. I was surprised to note that, just as many Americans can sing the lines in French to Frère Jacques, everyone here seemed to know the words in English to “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”, as well as a few other English-language songs.

A Dämmerschoppen is an Evening Happy Hour (Dämmer implies the “dimming” sun). This morning after leaving Longyearbyen, up on the top deck around the pool there was at 11 AM a Frühschoppen, which is an Early Happy Hour. This was billed as a Skandinavischer Frühschoppen mit Freibier. If you didn’t want the free beer, there was wine punch, and there was also a Scandinavian buffet table. It was sunny, but still a bit chilly. Blåmannen was fourth in the conga line. The band played songs like “Wochenend’ und Sonnenschein (Weekend and Sunshine)”, which is the same as “Happy Days are Here Again” and other favorites like Mambo Number Five. They also played John Denver’s “Take me Home, Country Roads”, and most people seemed to know the words in English to this one, too. It was a curious mixture when the line came up about “West Virginia, mountain momma” sung by Germans in Norwegian Spitsbergen.

A professor from Austria has given two lectures on the Vikings, and their voyages of discovery between 800 and 1100 to the east, southwest, and northwest. It was mostly Swedish Vikings who traveled east to what is now the Baltic states and Russia, and who were fundamental in founding the Russian state. It’s odd to think of a Germanic foundation of a Slavic country, but as I knew, Helga developed into Russian Olga and Ingvar into Russian Igor. I also found out that Swedish Helge became Russian Oleg. The Vikings going southwest were the ones who settled northeastern Britain, where Jorvik became York, and where Scandinavian words were introduced into Scottish, such as barn (child) becoming Scottish bairn and kirke (church) becoming Scottish kirk. These Danish and Norwegian Vikings also went up the Rhine, settled Normandy, and went into the Mediterranean to attack Byzantium (Constantinople). Finally, Norwegian Vikings went northwest to found Iceland, Greenland, and to reach as far as Newfoundland.

On the afternoon of the day at sea going back south to the European mainland, there was a Wiener Kaffeehaus in the Kaisersaal, with white-gloved coffee service. In the lobby was a buffet selection of all sorts of Viennese pastries, including warm Apfelstrudel and Sachertorte, as well as Schwarzwälder Kirschkuchen (Black Forest Cherry Cake) and an endless additional selection.

Having now caught up on website writing and having finished my book, I’ve been searching through the library in the Adlon Lounge. I came across a book called Die glanzvolle Ära der Luxusschiffe (The Glittering Era of Luxury Ships), telling first about the difficult crossings in the early 1800’s by sail, and the improvement after 1840 with the introduction of more reliable steam ships. It illustrated the luxury era from the late 1800’s through the 1940’s very well. and then the downturn and current revival. It pointed out quite correctlly that the introduction of planes caused the most dramatic reversal ever in travel history. As I learned from Bill Miller as he has lectured on ships repeatedly, at the turn of the 20th century it was always a contest between the English and the Germans as to who would have the most luxurious and fastest ships crossing the Atlantic. England and Germany were the regular contenders for the Blue Ribbon record for speed.

I found three quotes in that book that I liked particularly, which I’ll present with my own translations and comments.

„Die See ist die Hochstrasse des Erdballs. Die See ist der Paradeplatz der Nationen.“

“The sea is the Main Street of the globe. The sea is the paradeground of nations.”

I think the latter part was much truer when there was the French Line, the Italian Line, the Swedish-American Line, and all the others. Sea travel is more international today.

„Mitten auf dem Ozean, dort ist der Platz, wo die Welt sich trifft.“

“In the middle of the ocean, that’s the place where the world gets together.”

I think this quote illustrates the spirit of meeting different people, everybody being contained in the same space, living together as it were, all headed in the same direction. It is equally true on shipboard as on long-distance trains. Just think of all the stories written and movies made that take place in these self-contained environments, seemingly cut off from the outside world.

The last one is a quote from none other than Friedrich von Schiller.

If an appropriate image doesn’t come immediately to mind when reading that, then I’ll supply one: the two figures riding at the prow of the ship in the film “Titanic”.

We stopped in the Lofoten Islands, which project right off the coast in northern Norway. Their fisheries have been active for centuries. In the morning there was a shuttle bus into Leknes, the local town. As nice a town as it may be, especially in the sun that decided to come out for us, there was nothing at all to do or see. That means to me that it’s time to go and read signs in Norwegian. The florist was selling Dekorasjoner in general, and if you had a wedding coming up, Brudebuketter. Ernst Hansens Bakeri had a sign saying Brød-Kaker. A shop boasted that it had “Et hav av delikatesser”. You could get gas at any hour since the gas station was “Åpen til 24”. While most languages shorten “automobile” to the first part, “auto”, Scandinavian uses the end, “bil”. A dealership may sell biler, or you may go somewhere på bilen. Therefore, behind the service station, you could drive your dirty car into the “Bilvask”.

I stopped in the supermarket. In the candy department you could get Melksjokolade, either plain or “med hasselnøtter”. For the first time ever in Scandinavia I saw for sale—in the frozen foods department no less—lutefisk. The Minnesotans reading this need no further explanation. For the others I’ll quickly describe it as a plague that Scandinavians descend upon themselves and the rest of us, especially at Christmastime, no less. It’s dried codfish that gets soaked in lye (yes, that’s poisonous), then carefully cleaned, and cooked. The smell alone will keep burglars out of the house (and most everyone else). Later on a tour we saw the drying racks in the fishing villages where the stockfish (cod) are airdried, some of which goes to prepare lutefisk.

Elsewhere in the supermarket I looked for, and finally found lefse. I know it as a type of thin pancake made from potatoes that you heat up, spread with butter, sugar and cinnamon, and roll up, to have with coffee. On the package it did say that you could do that, but—to my surprise--you could also wrap cold cuts in it as we would use wheat tortillas to make wraps, or also use them as hot dog buns!

In the produce department I saw the usual signs, but here Scandinavian language came full cycle for me, 1961-2006. Above a huge pile of fruit I was happy to actually see the sign: bananer.

Once again here in the Lofoten islands, contemporary Norwegian wealth has been able to extend the infrastructure to the extent that all the major islands in the string are connected by tunnels, with the exception of one ferry break, which they hope to replace soon. The last town in the string, down at the southwestern end, was once a major fishing village, but is now largely an open-air museum. But it’s its name that gets to me. The name of this village is Å. That’s it. Not only that it’s one letter long, not only that it’s just one single vowel, but of all the possible vowels, it’s Å. (Actually, “å” is a word, meaning river, but even so, this name is odd.) The E10 highway runs throughout the Lofotens and ends at--Å. Near Leknes, I enjoyed seeing the highway signs pointing to Å. One of the signs, possibly considering that people might not recognize that Å is actually the name of a place, said instead “Å i Lofoten”, as if to justify the reality of its existance. I love it.

We had a tour to the Vikingmuseet nearby. In the 1980’s they had discovered the underground remains of the most spectacular and largest Viking communal dwelling, dating from the Iron Age, 500 BCE to 1050 CE. Next to it, they’ve reconstructed the Viking long house, including the banquet hall in the center, the living and working quarters on one end (crafts), and the byre (sort of a tiny barn) for the animals on the other. It had gotten a bit blustery out, and coming in to the fire in the center of the banquet hall was enjoyable. The fire had no chimney and vented through an opening in the roof. The was a weaving display of the period. It was explained that it was difficult and expensive to make certain colors, particularly red and blue, so it was a sign of wealth to wear those colors. In the vats, once the red dye began to lose its potency, orange colors were made from the remainder for the poorer people. The same was for the blue dye; yellow was added to make green. The guides were all dressed in period clothes, that had been made onsite. He showed a Viking helmet, which was round, pointed at the top, and had a nose protector sticking down the front. He asked what we felt was missing from the helmet. Only when he said it was a sterotypical piece that was “missing” did I venture that it could be horns, which was right. It is totally false that these helmets had horns, which would have been dangerous, since they would have given an enemy something to grab onto. It seems that the whole concept of Viking horns was made up, yes made up out of thin air, just at the point in the 1800’s when Richard Wagner’s operas were popularizing the old Germanic mythology, which is ironic in itself. It seems the costume designers had no easy way to indicate which warriors were which, so they decided to put a set of wings on the helmets of the Frankish warriors—the cartoon character Astérix still wears such a helmet—and the made up horns for the Nordic warriors. Talk about mixing up theater and reality. To this day, horned helmet stereotype continues to be the most “obvious” indicator that you’re dealing with Siegfried or Brünnhilde—and it’s all a theatrical trick.

The second of the two Norwegian fjords on the Unesco World Heritage List is the Geiranger fjord, which is north of Bergen. As with many of the smaller, narrower fjords, it’s a side fjord at the end of a series of several larger ones. From where the ship docked for transfer to shore by tender, you could see that there was not too much more of the valley left beyond the end of the fjord. As a matter of fact, there was what I call a triple water view in the town: as you looked beyond the town, you could see the back wall of the valley up to Dalsnibba mountain with a good-sized high waterfall cascading over the cliff; continuing after that, in the very middle of town that same river formed a substantial series of waterfalls; and from the fjord you could see the river exiting at water’s edge. We had a tour that went up to the very top of Dalsnibba at 1500 meters/ 4920 feet. When the clouds shifted, you could see right down the valley to the town and fjord. There was a mountain restaurant near the top where we stopped, as part of the tour, for coffee and pastries, a very Scandinavian thing to do. Much closer to town was another viewpoint over the town and fjord with a closer view. Sailing away down the Geiranger Fjord again, we passed the Sju Søstre/Seven Sisters, which is a set of seven waterfalls falling down from the cliffs into the fjord. The next day we went up the Hardangerfjord to Eidfjord in perfect weather, where we took a tour to see Vøringsfossen, Norway’s highest waterfall at 182 meters/597 feet plunging down into a gorge. It’s particularly unusual in that you view it from above from a plateau (spelled platå in Norwegian).

At every meal on the Deutschland you have access to the cheese board, with a good selection of international cheeses, both in the Berlin restaurant, where I only go for dinner, since conversation is good in the evening around a table for eight, and also in the Lido Gourmet, where I go for other meals and which has open seating. I’ve often taken advantage of the cheese selection, accompanied by tiny rounds of pumpernickel bread. Beverly and I had become enamored of Limburger cheese some years ago. All jokes aside, when ripe it can be somewhat pungent, but is an excellent cheese. I had noticed Limburger was available among the selections just once, so on the day before our last full day (at sea), I asked the Oberstewardessin/Head Stewardess if it might appear on our last day, and she said she’d check if any more were available.

On the morning of that last full day, I checked the cheese board, and none was out, so I assumed that was that. Then, just to show the level of service that’s normal on the Deutschland, while I was waiting at the grill for my fried eggs, the other Oberstewardessin came up to me and said the Limburger was served. I went over to the cheese board and it wasn’t there, so she came up to me and said it was at my seat. She somehow had figured out where I had decided to sit and served it directly. Later, the first Oberstewardessin came by to ask how it was. This is a level of individualized service that you most definitely do not find, even on the QM2.

I always go over and add some diced onion to my cheese plate, which I thought was just a personal preference. Someone sitting near me commented that they too liked their cheese “mit Musik” (moo.ZIK, I as in skI). Only then did I think back to Mainz, where we were once served the traditional Mainzer Handkäse, mit Musik. Why the Mainz specialty is called “hand cheese” I do not know, but I do remember that it was always served “with music”, meaning with diced onion. I didn’t realize that what I considered my personal preference was something I had learned about in Mainz years ago.

In the early afternoon, we passed Skagen, the northernmost tip of Denmark. Passing it on the Color Fantasy out of Oslo to Kiel, and northbound on the Deutschland out of Kiel, we were too far away, and it was hazy, but this time we were quite close, and I used someone’s binoculars to spot the lighthouse at the end of the spit, as well as people walking on the beach.

Having passed Polarsirkelen and now continuing south, a bit of nighttime started to appear again just after midnight, and has gradually increased. The night before the end of the cruise, I asked when we were to cross under the Storebæltsbron between the Danish islands; they checked and it was about 1 AM. So, just as I was just finishing up with things, I went onto the top deck just as we approached the illuminated bridge. Both large towers were illuminated, as well as the anchorages at either end. It was enjoyable to watch us sail under the bridge, although, as you may guess, I was the only one on deck at that hour. Then, the following morning we docked again in Kiel, from where I headed by train to Copenhagen.