Norway and Iceland Cruise Having had such a good time on a cruise to Norway a couple of years ago, we thought we’d try a similar thing again. It was handy that of the nine ports we visited on this cruise, only two of them were on the itinerary last time - Stavanger and Trondheim.
Southampton Saturday - This looked rather familiar (with the exception of the much smaller balcony we had this time round). We were two decks above the suite we had on this ship, which had departed from this terminal almost exactly two years earlier.We departed the Mayflower terminal in Southampton late in the afternoon in fine weather.
Independence of the Seas The impressively large Royal Caribbean Independence of the Seas was berthed just in front of us.
Independence of the Seas The Independence of the Seas set sail almost immediately after we passed, headed for the Mediterranean. There appeared to be a party on the bow and you can just about make out the people, which gives some indication of the size of this ship. People were also lining the top decks, but they were somewhat harder to make out.
Cruise Ships It was a bit of a cruise-ship-spotter's dream today, as the P&O Ventura (on the right) and another one that I can’t remember the name of had departed Southampton docks just ahead of us.
Spinnaker Tower Shortly afterwards, heading east, we passed the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth.
Ferry The Isle of Wight ferry dodged between the cruise ships.
Sunset In the evening we decided to go to the Orchid for dinner. The staff in the Orchid were excellent, as was their food. Also, being located on the Sky Deck (deck 11), the views out to sea were excellent.It was such a nice sunset, I had to nip outside between courses to take a photo. And it was just as well that I did because this was the only time during our 15 nights at sea that I actually saw the sun set. Every other evening was cloudy or worse.
Blankenberge Sunday - We'd docked in Zeebrugge and it was overcast, cold and windy, although at least it was dry. Lots of the organised trips had headed for Brugge. However, as we'd been to Brugge loads of times before, Judith decided to spend the day in the ship's spa being pampered and generally spend a breathtakingly huge amount of cash. I decided to get the courtesy bus to Blankenberge, which is the first town west of Zeebrugge.This is a photograph looking down what I assume is their high street. Busy!
Sea Front And this was their sea front. On a warm, sunny day, I can imagine that this would be a pretty nice place to be. The beach is enormous and the sand is fine. However, today was not a warm, sunny day. So I ducked into a chocolate shop, bought a big bag of Belgian chocs and headed back to the ship.
Orchid - Again Back on Arcadia, we decided to have dinner in the Orchid again. This was my starter. Not only did the food taste fantastic, it looked fantastic too.
Amsterdam Monday - We arrived in Amsterdam in fine weather and parked up next to the Celebrity Constellation, which looked pretty a) big and b) nice.
Constellation The Celebrity Constellation has a similar configuration to Arcadia in that it's got lots of rooms and suites on the back. But look at the size of that suite on the lowest deck. It's enormous - at least four times the size of a normal room - plus it’s got that huge patio area! It also appears to have an outside bath and another bath inside with panoramic bay windows. Awesome. When our work lottery syndicate gets round to winning the jackpot, I think this is where I shall celebrate.
Arcadia We departed Arcadia and joined our tour bus. Our guide explained that Amsterdam is so-called because a long time ago some people decided to build a dam across the river Amstel here. So by my reckoning, Amsterdam should actually be called Amsteldam. She didn't explain why it's not.
Clogs First stop on the tour was a small farm on the outskirts of Amsterdam that makes clogs and cheese (it’s generally good practice to diversify). Here's a pile of clogs and the blocks of wood that clogs are made from. A short demonstration indicated that it takes about one minute to make a clog using two machines that adopt the same approach to clog making as is used to cut a key. One machine shapes the outside of the clog, the other shapes the inside. It was still quite impressive to see though and probably not nearly as easy as it looked.
Clogs There were racks of finished clogs set out to dry.
Cheese Next door they had racks of cheese maturing. They had samples of a few different types of cheese out and they were really nice. I was very tempted to buy some, except a) I still had that big bag of Belgian chocolates that I bought yesterday, and b) there was no shortage of food on the ship, so it was difficult to see where I'd make time/space for a wheel of lovely, fresh Dutch cheese. Shame.
Windmill On the way back to Arcadia, we stopped by a picturesque windmill.
Windmill View This was a view down the river in front of the windmill. According to our guide, this sort of view is reminiscent of the paintings of Rembrandt, which is presumably not too surprising since he apparently used to paint round here.
Amsterdam Having had a nice lunch on Arcadia, we decided to spend the afternoon walking around Amsterdam (or at least the bit of it that was within about half-an-hour's walk of the ship). This is a picture down Damrak (I think), looking towards Amsterdam Central Station.
Bike Parking Outside Amsterdam Central Station they had an amazing multi-storey bike park and it was absolutely rammed full of bikes.
Bikes A sign said that bikes that were left for more than 30 days would be removed. But it must be almost impossible to keep track of individual bikes in here.
Cake By the way, today was Judith's birthday. When we returned to Arcadia, someone had deposited this lovely looking (and tasting) birthday cake in our room.
Flowers They'd also left this lovely arrangement of tropical flowers. And, yes, they were at least as expensive as they look.
Amsterdam We got some nice views of Amsterdam as Arcadia left port. It was handy being on the top deck of a ship that was taller than practically everything within 50 miles (due largely to the soft, reclaimed ground that Amsterdam is built on, which does not facilitate the construction of anything more than about 15-20 floors).
Promenade Deck After dinner, we went for a walk on the Promenade Deck. It was well past 11pm but still very light out.Tuesday - We spent the entire day at sea, so I didn't take any photos.
Oslo Wednesday - We arrived in Oslo and the weather was fantastic.
Truck We parked up next to the Akershus Fortress and Castle, which was undergoing renovation/maintenance. I was watching this truck unloading soil onto the top of the fortress wall and wondering how the truck driver/crane operator could see where he was actually dropping the soil. Then I noticed that one of the blokes standing on the wall (not the one with the high-visibility vest) had a remote control for the crane, so he could see exactly where he was dropping the soil. Brilliant. Do we have that sort of technology in the UK?
Kroderbanen Railway Today we'd booked a trip on the Kroderbanen Railway. The railway is run by enthusiasts, who collect and carefully restore old engines and rolling stock and appeared to have quite an extensive collection.The line is 16 miles long and traveled through some very scenic countryside. There's one tunnel on the line, which the enthusiasts made themselves using a big pipe that they covered with earth because they felt that a proper Norwegian railway needed to have at least one tunnel.Judith asked me to mention that she took this photo.
View On the way back to Arcadia, the coach stopped for some scenic photos.
Judith Judith at the scenic photo stop.
Arcadia The waterfront in Oslo harbour was stuffed with posh shops, bars, restaurants, boats and flats. If you were sufficiently affluent, I can imagine that this would be a very nice place to live indeed.
Leaving Oslo A miscellaneous view of a marina on the way out of Oslo.
Leavign Oslo Despite the fact that it was the 23rd June, the Norwegians were celebrating some sort of mid-summer festival today. This apparently necessitated everyone with a boat going out in it, which must have been simply piles of fun for the captains of Arcadia and the Crystal Symphony, which was leaving Oslo about 15 minutes behind us.
Seagull As usual, the seagulls were following close behind. This didn't seem particularly unusual close to shore, but it seemed really weird when we picked up a half-a-dozen 200 miles out to sea. How do they live out there? What do they eat? Do they know where the land is? Do they even care? I suppose I could probably find all of this information out on the internet in half-an-hour.
Crystal Symphony The Crystal Symphony following Arcadia out of Oslo.
Stavanger Thursday - We arrived in Stavanger and the weather was much like the last time we were here - grey and damp. The MSC Orchestra was already berthed when we arrived.
Old Stavanger These are the wooden houses in Old Stavanger, which contains the largest concentration of 18th century wooden buildings in Northern Europe.We'd been to Stavanger before and had no trips arranged, so we spent a hour walking around the town until it started pouring with rain, at which point we beat a hasty retreat to Arcadia...
Spa ...and spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing in the spa. This was Judith relaxing in the hydrotherapy pool.
MSC Orchestra Later, while we were having a drink in the Orchid bar, the MSC Orchestra slipped past. Arcadia followed about half-an-hour later.
Arcadia 2 Later in the evening, we passed this cruise ship. Apart from the shape of it's funnels, it appeared to be a duplicate of Arcadia. Unfortunately we were not close enough for me to be able to make out its name.
Arcadia 3 Later still, as it was starting to get dark, we passed two more cruise ships. The one in the foreground, the MSC Poesia, looks exactly the same as the MSC Orchestra we were berthed next to in Stavanger earlier.You can just make out another cruise ship on the horizon on the right, which appears to be exactly the same as the Arcadia look-a-like we passed a couple of hours ago.I had always assumed that cruise ships were fairly unique items, but it appears that somewhere there are cruise ship production lines churning them out like Ford Mondeos.
Sognefjord Friday - We were visiting Flam, a small village at the head of the Sognefjord, which is the longest (115 miles) and deepest (up to 3,700 feet) of the Norwegian fjords. This is a picture of the cruise ship Black Watch, which had already dropped anchor in the fjord at Flam when we arrived.
Flam Railway Flam itself is tiny, with only 350 permanent residents. It appeared to be mostly known for its railway, which runs for 12 miles from sea level at Flam to an altitude of 2,845 feet at Myrdal, where it conects with the main railway line between Bergen and Oslo.We were supposed to be doing a railway/biking tour today, but it had been cancelled due to insufficient interest, which perhaps wasn't unduly surprising given the population of Arcadia. As all of the tours on the railway were already fully booked, we decided to just walk to the railway station, which was about 200 metres from where Arcadia was berthed, and buy our own ticket on the train.
View As you might expect, the scenery on the journey was fabulous. This was a miscellaneous view from the train on the way to Myrdal.
Kjosfossen About half way to Myrdal, the train stopped for a photo opportunity at the Kjosfossen waterfall. According to local legend, this is a very mystical place. To reinforce this fact there was a "show" with a number of identically dressed women popping up in various locations around the waterfall, giving the impression of someone spookily teleporting around. They were actually more useful in providing scale to the waterfall, which is over 300 feet high. You can see one of them here in the foreground, waving her arms about.
Kjosfossen Panning out a bit, you can still see her waving her arms about just above the middle of the photo. It was a big waterfall.
Myrdal After about 45 minutes, we reached Myrdal. Given that the journey up had been pretty scenic, I was expecting some sort of magnificent panorama-type view from Myrdal. However, it was just a railway station 3,000 feet up a mountain. There was not really anything to see here at all. So we switched on to this other train to travel back down to Flam.
Ships While we'd been away, the small cruise ships CMV Ocean Countess and the Swan Minerva had arrived. As Arcadia had occupied the only berth in Flam, they'd dropped anchor in the middle of the fjord and were ferrying their passengers to shore using their tenders.
Arcadia We went for a walk around the fjord, which offered some nice views of Arcadia.
Minerva HDR As the sky was still pretty overcast, it offered an excellent opportunity to try out this new fangled HDR photography thing that all of the trendy kids are doing these days. As my Sony Alpha only facilitated +/-0.7eV exposure bracketing, to get a good range of exposures, I took two sets - one at -1.0eV +/-0.7eV and another at +1.0eV +/-0.7eV. This gave me six photos over a 3.4eV range to use as input to Photomatix.Considering it was my first attempt and I took the photos hand-held, I thought the end result came out quite well. There were a lots of settings in Photomatix, so it was likely to take a while to work out which settings yielded the best results in what circumstances.Note that because I was using a trial version of the Photomatix software, it put watermarks on the photos. If I give them $100, it will take them away again. I’m waiting to see how much use I get out of it before I pay them.
Arcadia HDR Having got my eye in with the Minerva photos, I used the same approach to take six photos of Arcadia, which were combined to produce this HDR image.
Arcadia HDR This was my third HDR attempt and I think it's my favourite.
Aegir Brewery Back in Flam, we popped in to the Aegir micro-brewery to sample their tasty wares. They had six different beers on - blonde, IPA, amber, red, stout and another one I can't remember the name of. I'd have liked to try them all, but a) it was £7.50-a-pint, and b) Arcadia was leaving in an hour. So I made do with a pint (0.5 litres to be exact) of the blonde. Having said that, they did have the option of a taster set where you get to try 100ml of each one. However, I am of the opinion that beer is not meant to be sampled in such small measures.
Tree On the way back to Arcadia, having consumed a whole beer, Judith was having a rest against this tree outside the brewery. I think there must have been some significance to the tree as it had lots of carvings on it. However, I didn't notice a plaque or information board.
Kayaking As Arcadia departed Flam, Arcadia carefully picked its way past a number of people kayaking on the fjord. You can just about make out the two white kayaks in the bottom centre of the photo, giving some scale to the massive rock wall behind them.
Olden Saturday - We arrived in Olden, which sits at the end of the Nordfjord, some 65 miles from the Norwegian coast.
Briksdal Inn We were on a trip to see the Briksdal Glacier. The first leg of the trip was to get a coach from Arcadia to the Briksdal Glacier Inn, which you can see at the bottom of this photo.
Waterfall We then started walking up a hill, past this impressive waterfall...
Path ...and on up the hillside...
Briksdal Glacier ...until we reached a plateau and got our first view of the glacier in the distance. The top of the glacier was lost in the clouds.
Lake At the foot of the glacier is a small lake...
Rafting ...which we were about to go rafting on. Despite only being a few hundred feet in diameter, the lake is apparently around 150 feet deep!I did take a few photos on the lake, but they were all rubbish, so I've not bothered to inclued them.We returned to dry land and walked back to the coach to make the return trip to Arcadia.
Olden View This is a miscellaneous view in Olden.
Black Watch The Black Watch had followed us from Flam. I think the flowers in the foreground are lupins.
Black Watch HDR The sky was looking impressive again, which provided another HDR photo opportunity. It was good of the ship to align itself nicely with the background scenery.
Nordfjord View It was time to depart Olden and head back out to sea. This is a miscellaneous view on the Nordfjord.Whilst we were having dinner in the Orchid, two dolphins swim past. They were easy to see since a) they were only about 20 feet from the side of Arcadia, and b) we were 130 feet up in the restaurant, looking right down onto them swimming in crystal clear water. Didn't get a photo though. Disappointing.
RIB One of the tour options today was to go on a "fjord RIB adventure", which was basically to blast about for an hour on the fjord on one of these boats. This one is making the most of Arcadia's wake.
Sunset The weather hadn't been particularly good in the evenings, so this was only the second sunset we'd seen. And strictly speaking, this wasn't even a sunset because the sun was simply disappearing behind that enormous bank of cloud sitting on the horizon. Still looked nice though.
Trondheim Sunday - We arrived in Trondheim and the weather was still pretty nice. We'd been here before and had no trips arranged, so spent a few hours just walking around. This was the view of Trondheim from the Kristiansten Fortress.
Gun Tower This is the Gun Tower at the Kristiansten Fortress. It's not a very exciting picture, but I've included it simply because it took me ages to get it.Just as I was about to take the photo, an old woman wandered into the right side of the shot and proceeded to walk - very slowly - right across the foreground. She stopped near the rock on the left, looked about for a few seconds, then turned around and walked - very slowly again - back the way she'd come.
Waterfront We were back in the centre of Trondheim, looking at the colourful buildings on stilts in the river.
Nidaros Cathedral A view of the Nidaros Cathedral across the River Nid.
Graffiti This looked rather like a Norwegian "Banksy". It was not obvious whether the old man had simply been added to existing graffiti, or whether the graffiti is actually part of the "work". There were a few of these around the centre of Trondheim.
Sea Day Monday - We'd left Trondheim and had a whole day at sea, traversing the Norwegian Sea from Norway to Iceland. As you can see from the photo, the weather was poor, so there was no opportunity of sunbathing on deck. Still, at least it was relatively calm.
Akureyri Tuesday - We arrived in Akureyri on the northern coast of Iceland and it was good to see that the weather had turned fine again.Akureyri lies at the head of a long, narrow inlet called Eyjarfjordur. On the journey through Eyjarfjordur we saw several whales and dolphins, although none close enough to the ship to provide a photo opportunity.This is a photograph of Akureyri taken from Arcadia's Sky Deck.Because it's a pretty long journey from here to Reykjavik - tomorrow's destination - we were only spending the morning in Akureyri. So we decided to spend it simply having a bit of a walk around town.
Akureyri Church This is Akureyri Church, one of the town's most prominent features.
Glera Power Station About 20 minutes walk from the centre of town, a small gorge hides a tiny power station - the building you can see in this picture. In 1921 the locals dammed the head of the gorge to create a lake that they could use as a source of hydroelectric power. For some reason, they turned it off in 1960. But it was rebuilt in 2004 to celebrate the centenary of electricity production in Iceland and now produces 290KW of electricity.
Golf Later, back on Arcadia, Judith was practicing her golf swing.
More Golf I almost look like I know what I'm doing.
Netball/Basketball For the purposes of the story, we’ll say that this shot went in.
Oriana While we'd been walking around Akureyri, the Oriana had arrived. P&O ships get terribly excited when they see each other and there was very much tooting of horns as we passed on our way back out to sea.
Bye-bye Akureyru Bye-bye Akureyri and Oriana. The CMV Marco Polo can be seen in the background. This appeared to be exactly the same sort of ship as the CMV Minerva, which I took some photos of back in Flam.
Akureyri and Mountains Here's Akureyri seen against a background of mountains as we headed back out to sea. The colours are a bit washed out because the photo was taken into the sun.
Reykjavik Wednesday - We arrived in Reykjavik, but we were not going to get to see much of Reykjavik itself as we were booked to spend the whole day out and about in these fantastic 4x4s.
Thingvellir Our first stop was Thingvellir, which is the site of the original Icelandic Viking parliament from, oooh, ages ago. Now it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. It's also apparently the only place above sea level that you can see the meeting point (or, more accurately, parting point) of the North American and European continental plates.The rocks on the left of the path are part of the North American plate and the rocks on the right of the path are part of the European plate. To my mind, this makes the actual path itself really quite a dangerous place indeed to loiter about.Being Iceland, there were probably hardly any people here most of the time. However, there are so many people in this photo because Thingvellir was the first stop for all of the tours leaving Arcadia, so a few hundred people all turned up at more or less the same time.Note to self - must come back here independently.
Thingvellir HDR View A HDR view from Thingvellir. You can just see the “Path of Almost Certain Death” (as I like to think of it) on the left hand side.
Off Road Back into the 4x4s and we were headed proper off-road to the Langjokull glacier, which you can see here on the horizon. Actually, from this view point the glacier is the horizon. Langjokull is the second largest glacier in Iceland, covering an impressive 935 square km.
Glacier With their super-chunky tyres and massive ground clearance, the 4x4s were ideally suited to driving right out on to the glacier. It was fairly cold here - about 4C - and really windy as air over the glacier cools and falls to the lower surrounding land.
Glacier After 20 minutes taking photos on the glacier, it was time to head off again.
Hraunfossar Waterfalls The waterfalls, some of which you can just make out on the right, are created by dozens of springs that emerge from under the edge of the Hallmundarhraun lava field.
Deildartunguhver Thermal Spring Our final stop on the tour was the Deildartunguhver Thermal Spring, which is apparently the most productive thermal spring in the world, producing 180 litres of boiling water every second. A 74km pipe connects the spring to the local towns of Akranes, Borgarnes and Hvanneyri. The water is 100C when it leaves Deildartunguhver and has only cooled to 66C when it reaches the far end of the pipe.
Reykjavik So it was back to Arcadia and back to sea. When we left Reykjavic, the sky was grey, but the sea was spookily smooth.
Stormy Unfortunately the smooth seas didn’t last long and by 10pm we were at the mercy of storm force 10 winds. This picture was taken from our balcony, which was a long way above the sea and the waves still looked big. Down on the lowest passenger deck with windows, which was around 20 feet above the (normal) waterline, the waves were level with the windows.Apparently the Captain had considered heading towards the Irish Sea, or even further east back into the North Sea, but he thought this would take us into the path of the storm. So he decided to head south-west, out into the Altantic, to try to get behind the storm.
Closed Due to the wind and waves, access to all outside decks was prohibited. This situation persisted through Wednesday night, when we got pretty much no sleep, Thursday, Thursday night and Friday. You could tell it was getting pretty bad when even the crew started to complain about the ongoing miserable conditions.On Friday evening it started to calm down and by the time we entered the Channel on Saturday morning the skies were clear and the sea was smooth once again.
Southampton Our journey down the Channel was lovely and we had a fine end to the cruise. On Sunday morning we woke up back in a sunny Southampton.It had been entertaining and enjoyable (even the storms of the last couple of days were quite interesting in their own slightly stressful way) and not having a suite had turned out to be perfectly fine, which will be handy when it comes to picking our next cruise.Having cruised to Norway twice now, I think it’s likely to be quite some time before we go there again. Judith’s keen on Alaska, but I though that might be a lot like Norway, but with a ship full of Americans. And it would necessitate a long flight to get to the ship in the first place. Maybe the Canary Islands? Now that sounds promising...