Choose Fjord Cruises Over Rugged Routes: Inspired by Martin Compston's Norwegian Fling
You needn't take the rugged route through Norway like Martin Compston - why not cruise in comfort through the spectacular scenery?
Ed Grenby - 27 February 2024
A holiday in Norway doesn’t have to involve catching your own cod. In fact, despite the adventures Martin Compston lets himself in for on his BBC2 Norwegian Fling travelogue – and trawling the fjords for his fish supper is just one of them – the country’s best bits can be explored in utter ease aboard one of the many cruise ships that ply its crinkly coast. Unlike the Line of Duty star, I wanted all the rugged good looks of the fjords but without any of the hard living. So I poured myself onto Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas at Copenhagen, set off north – and enjoyed a week of brute, bruising natural beauty from the decadently cosseting decks of my luxury liner. In fact, even getting out into the landscape was fairly effortless. The beefiest of our excursions was a hike up to Pulpit Rock, a biblically dramatic ledge a couple of hours’ hike above the brooding fjord – but it’s a well-signposted, neatly kept path, and at its start is a nice café where I went to buy a beer to complement the smoked salmon picnic I pocketed from the ship’s vast breakfast spread. “Licensing laws. I’ll have to open it for you now,” explained the woman behind the counter, pretty blonde pigtails bouncing off her tattooed shoulders. I demurred – it was 9.34am after all – but the two 50-something Norwegian women behind me in the queue shrugged, ordered their own and asked, “Why not? It’s Norway.”
As things turned out, such fortification was needed because Pulpit Rock delivered a brimstone sermon that day, a stern Scandinavian god sending an Old Testament storm against us. What started as heavy rain with the occasional break in the pillowy cloud to reveal tantalising glimpses of serene, aquamarine Lysefjord soon turned serious enough for mountain rescue to mobilise, knights in shining yellow Gore-Tex dispensing furry hats and carrying kids over the bits where path had become river.
All week Royal Caribbean left no lobster unbisqued in its pursuit of our comfort and pleasure, but those considering a fjords cruise as an alternative to, say, the Med, should bear in mind there’s very little any company can do to temper the weather. (That said, they refunded the cost of the excursion and reassured us that they’d reported the incident to head office in Miami, as if that would stop the weather.)
But for all the ship’s lobster, cocktails, casinos, karaoke, quizzes and impressive song-and dance shows, my favourite thing was simply to gaze out the window to where the natural spectacular was playing out. Every morning the curtains opened on a new scene from Norway’s widescreen epic: dizzying, impregnable Game of Thrones mountains; infinite, enigmatic, blue steel Vikings waters; a 10,000-strong force of pines clothed in the velvetiest dark green, marching down the mountains to meet an equal army seeming to rise from the perfectly reflecting fjord; and, incongruously, piebald patches in the forests where pretty grass green meadows promised a slender livelihood to a few families and their cows among faded-red wooden farmhouses. My favourite excursion was at Geiranger, where we hiked to the toe of a glacier, neon blue beneath its icing-sugar dusting of snow. And every evening, with the summer sun slinking below the horizon at nearly 11pm in these latitudes, the cinematic fade to black was exquisitely slow.
Despite the call to head office in Miami, the weather remained bleak all week. Those to whom that mattered found a home around the Serenade’s indoor pool; those to whom it didn’t, got various lovely port towns almost to themselves. Bergen, for instance, was as pretty as a picture – with its multi-coloured, centuries-old trading houses on the waterfront – but it was a picture painted by Turner, all tumultuous battleship-grey skies and seas. The normally bustling fish market was battened down, the warren of lanes behind those ancient houses empty. In the city’s elegant squares and avenues the brave few were blown from shopfront to shopfront like tumbleweed across the deserted streets of a spaghetti western, and the rain stung like hail as those North Sea winds whipped it horizontally into my face. It was my highlight of the trip, though, because it made real – as only travel can – something that was previously just a dry old fact in a history book.
In a Bergen square is a monument to Norway’s generations of seafarers, from the Vikings onward, life-sized sculpted figures standing stoic in the storm while I cowered from it. They, of course, navigated the same rough waters as me in my ship – but in open boats, under oar power, for weeks on end, in this weather. And not even Martin Compston could make that look fun.
A holiday in Norway doesn’t have to involve catching your own cod. In fact, despite the adventures Martin Compston lets himself in for on his BBC2 Norwegian Fling travelogue – and trawling the fjords for his fish supper is just one of them – the country’s best bits can be explored in utter ease aboard one of the many cruise ships that ply its crinkly coast. Unlike the Line of Duty star, I wanted all the rugged good looks of the fjords but without any of the hard living. So I poured myself onto Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas at Copenhagen, set off north – and enjoyed a week of brute, bruising natural beauty from the decadently cosseting decks of my luxury liner. In fact, even getting out into the landscape was fairly effortless. The beefiest of our excursions was a hike up to Pulpit Rock, a biblically dramatic ledge a couple of hours’ hike above the brooding fjord – but it’s a well-signposted, neatly kept path, and at its start is a nice café where I went to buy a beer to complement the smoked salmon picnic I pocketed from the ship’s vast breakfast spread. “Licensing laws. I’ll have to open it for you now,” explained the woman behind the counter, pretty blonde pigtails bouncing off her tattooed shoulders. I demurred – it was 9.34am after all – but the two 50-something Norwegian women behind me in the queue shrugged, ordered their own and asked, “Why not? It’s Norway.”
As things turned out, such fortification was needed because Pulpit Rock delivered a brimstone sermon that day, a stern Scandinavian god sending an Old Testament storm against us. What started as heavy rain with the occasional break in the pillowy cloud to reveal tantalising glimpses of serene, aquamarine Lysefjord soon turned serious enough for mountain rescue to mobilise, knights in shining yellow Gore-Tex dispensing furry hats and carrying kids over the bits where path had become river.
All week Royal Caribbean left no lobster unbisqued in its pursuit of our comfort and pleasure, but those considering a fjords cruise as an alternative to, say, the Med, should bear in mind there’s very little any company can do to temper the weather. (That said, they refunded the cost of the excursion and reassured us that they’d reported the incident to head office in Miami, as if that would stop the weather.)
But for all the ship’s lobster, cocktails, casinos, karaoke, quizzes and impressive song-and dance shows, my favourite thing was simply to gaze out the window to where the natural spectacular was playing out. Every morning the curtains opened on a new scene from Norway’s widescreen epic: dizzying, impregnable Game of Thrones mountains; infinite, enigmatic, blue steel Vikings waters; a 10,000-strong force of pines clothed in the velvetiest dark green, marching down the mountains to meet an equal army seeming to rise from the perfectly reflecting fjord; and, incongruously, piebald patches in the forests where pretty grass green meadows promised a slender livelihood to a few families and their cows among faded-red wooden farmhouses. My favourite excursion was at Geiranger, where we hiked to the toe of a glacier, neon blue beneath its icing-sugar dusting of snow. And every evening, with the summer sun slinking below the horizon at nearly 11pm in these latitudes, the cinematic fade to black was exquisitely slow.
Despite the call to head office in Miami, the weather remained bleak all week. Those to whom that mattered found a home around the Serenade’s indoor pool; those to whom it didn’t, got various lovely port towns almost to themselves. Bergen, for instance, was as pretty as a picture – with its multi-coloured, centuries-old trading houses on the waterfront – but it was a picture painted by Turner, all tumultuous battleship-grey skies and seas. The normally bustling fish market was battened down, the warren of lanes behind those ancient houses empty. In the city’s elegant squares and avenues the brave few were blown from shopfront to shopfront like tumbleweed across the deserted streets of a spaghetti western, and the rain stung like hail as those North Sea winds whipped it horizontally into my face. It was my highlight of the trip, though, because it made real – as only travel can – something that was previously just a dry old fact in a history book.
In a Bergen square is a monument to Norway’s generations of seafarers, from the Vikings onward, life-sized sculpted figures standing stoic in the storm while I cowered from it. They, of course, navigated the same rough waters as me in my ship – but in open boats, under oar power, for weeks on end, in this weather. And not even Martin Compston could make that look fun.
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