Onboard Polaris

We passed the day back in Bergen until we boarded our night and day ferry to Ålesund (pronounced Oh-less-und). It rained most of the day so we had hot Vietnamese soup for lunch and dinner at the Saigon Restaurant at the top of one of Bergen's many hills. Below we could see the Polaris, our Havila ferry waiting for our evening departure.

We would only be on the ship about 24 hours so we took an interior room for the remarkably low price of $102 for both of us.

Havila Voyages has gone head to head with Hurtigruten so has brought a new fleet of ships to the battle and massively reduced their prices to break in. It has its work cut out for it. Hurtigruten has been running these ferries and cruises for a century and a half and they have it down to a science. But they are expensive, and, as we discovered, a little complacent.

It was raining steadily, but we walked the half mile to the Hurtigruten terminal where the Havila ferry was docked. Mist, rain and fog enveloped us as our GPS guided Cyn and me through Bergen's empty streets to the ship's terminal.

Once boarded, we found a brand new ship ready to go and headed to room 4232. Polaris is Havila‘s newest ship, and claims to be one of the greenest of its kind. It can hold 640 passengers, in 179 cabins, and was built in 2023. This makes the ship cozier, more intimate; nothing like the enormous cruise ships that often dock at Bergen.

By 9 pm we were on our way. Our room felt a lot like a train: two berths, one that pulled down from the ceiling, a bathroom, shower, and even a small couch. Perfect.

The farther north, we go, the smaller, the towns and cities. While it was still relatively warm, unlike the journey through Patagonia to Antarctica, we were not steaming south into into summer weather. We were heading into winter and the dark solstice that lay ahead. As we steamed out of the harbor, I stood in the fall gloom and watched the dark clouds roll across the North Atlantic. You could barely make out the lights that ran along the Floiben Funicular to my right. Across the water, I knew there was nothing between us and the bottom of Greenland to the west, except the north Atlantic’s cold and unforgiving seas.

I turned back to the city as it drifted away and wondered if John Watson and Sherlock Holmes might might not emerge from the mist at any moment to solve a mystery, but they didn’t, and so soon I drifted back to our small berths where Cyn and I fell, rocking on the ocean, into a deep sleep.

The Next Morning

As we awakened, the Polaris was taking us north as advertised, but by way of some spectacular fjords, the kind Norway likes to show off in the travel brochures. That was fine by us.

We helped ourselves in the morning to some instant, coffee and yogurt while the ship passed through cloudy skies and calm seas. We were heading into the Hjorundfjord, a real beauty; deep, with precipitous, gorges, even a glacier or two that hung high in the mountains.

We drifted past one gargantuan mountain after another, rock masses as imposing as Lord of the Ring battlements with white water thundering from glacial valleys and peaks thousands of feet high honed to serrated knife edges by millions of years of wind, snow, and rain.

I could see where Scandinavians had mythologized giants and trolls, gods and the spires of Asgard. Everything around us was humbling, powerful, irresistible, soaring, fierce and rugged. There was nothing that was of human scale and thus there must be gods and giants behind at all.

It was noon when we debarked the ship to visit the tiny village of URKE, a place that seemed dropped on the fjord like a Scandinavian gift. It sat at the cleft of the deep valley, and had dwindled to 30 souls over the years. I thought of Nova Scotia and Peggy's Cove of similar population. But unlike Peggy’s Cove, there were no restaurants, no lighthouse, no detailed explanation of the history and geography told using metal and glass kiosks, and no tourists, except for the handful of us from Polaris.

Downtown URKE consisted of a post office, a store, a tiny medical clinic, all crammed in one white clapboard building. We strolled the streets, and hiked a bit into the valley feeling Lilliputian. Everywhere it was quiet and calming, except for the rush of the wind. How could it be otherwise? We were marinated in warm sunshine, green pastures, placid waters, and massive mountains.

Four hours later, the Polaris docked in Ålesund, and we were one step closer to the Arctic. As we had sailed the fjord, all of the villages we passed that day clung like barnacles to the base of the mountains always behind them. Here and there some had cleaved a bit of pasture into the mountains with a plot of green keeping the thick forest at bay.

These mountains have been shaped by forces so powerful we can never hope to truly comprehend how they came into existence. We do not know if they’re uplifting was rapid or meandered over epochs. Once the land that rose so sharply as these enormous ridges were the beds of ancient seas. And here they were, still surrounded by water but rising from the depths a mile into the sky.

The majesty of it all was beyond me.

Bergen and Ålesund Recommendations

Consider these travel recommendations for Bergen and Ålesund and find more Norwegian Recommendations here.