5
The sun drifted teasingly toward the Norwegian Sea, an amber ball suspended as if from a string. It touched down gently on a low peninsula as the Richard With turned to starboard. The finger of land threatened to obstruct the view from those of us standing on a high deck astern, but we checked by our watches. For the second time on our cruise north along Norway’s western coast, we had viewed the sun at midnight. Nods and words of agreement rose in Norwegian, English and other languages.
My primary purpose was to sail the fjords—the long, glacier-formed inlets that jut into Norway’s expansive western coastline. Along the route north, the fjords shelter harbor towns over which verdant mountains rise like castle walls. In front of many, a modest lighthouse stands sentry.
On board with the locals
Two years earlier in Oslo, I had struggled to find things that were uniquely Norwegian, so cosmopolitan and diverse had the nation’s capital become. [The cruise line] Hurtigruten’s six-night Northern Express would now give me the chance to see Norway among Norwegians. The Richard With is a cruise ship but also a ferry, taking locals to ports of call up and down the coastline. At mealtimes, and on shore excursions, I had the chance to meet families from homes nearby.
The biggest thrill
A group of us donned protective suits in the port of Bode and boarded inflatable boats. Our captain steered us up the Salstraumen, a small strait that quickly led us into one of the world’s strongest tidal currents.
Our boat pitched and rocked, our motor seeming at times to wrestle with the strait for control of our destiny as we poured in at high speed under a gray dome of unmoving cloud. We slowed to a swimmer’s pace, and around us seagulls climbed and then dove onto broad whirlpools—the maelstroms—famous vortices of such mythical strength that writers from Edgar Allen Poe to Jules Verne promised that to sail as close to any as we did was to risk being sucked into the depths.
...
Visit Tribune News Service online.
