Bergen to Hurtigruten - the land of the light

It has to be said, Bergen is a beautiful place. And a large place too. We landed at the airport (obvs!) and drove by coach for half an hour and were still in Bergen which sort of implies it’s a metropolis and yet, when you look at the architecture, it feels more in keeping with a town in the Alps.

I start my part of this blog at 21.45 on Friday and when it was still perfectly light, however, what was going on in the street below us, represented a typical Friday night in any town. There was some seriously good Karaoke going on somewhere below us, but it wasn’t just one person singing, it was a whole gaggle of folk singing the “rock classics”. I was half tempted to throw my clothes on again and get out there with them. However, our room had a bath…the tiniest one in the world, but a bath nonetheless, so I spent something around an hour wallowing in said shallow, tiny bath reading my book. Bergen is relieved to know that I wouldn’t be joining it for the Karaoke session.

We begrudgingly agreed that we should make an effort to go to bed. It really was hard to do when it was still light outside. Also with the constant sound of glass bottles being deposited into waste bins. Even though alcohol is seriously expensive in Norway, it appears not to have turned everyone tea-total.

Eventually, the glass smashing exercise was replaced with the increasing sound of the music from the bar below…which went on until 2.30 am. I’m only jealous that I wasn’t down there too.

The alarm woke us for our first meeting with Hurtigruten. As 8.30 felt a ridiculously early time to start the day, we threw on some clothes to just get down to reception and get this deed done. We received our cabin keys and some general information about the trip. After leisurely showers, we had the most awesome breakfast which provided an amazing array of hot and cold food to suit pretty much every taste bud. A short coach ride through a small area of Bergen and then we were at the port.

Then utter chaos ensued. As we got off the coach we naturally headed for departures. However, when welcomed to departures, no one knew what the process was. First, we were sent upstairs with our suitcases, only to be told to go back down and join a single check in desk and to check our cases in downstairs. As we were all on the escalator going up, but being told to go down, the pile-up on the escalator started to get a bit precarious.

And so we waited…in a queue. Eventually, our cases were taken and we were sent on our way, back up the escalator. However, before going I enquired about our credit card details being taken as the boarding notice said we needed our passports and credit card. No, we need to do that process at reception. So I guess that’ll be another queue then.

Off to the safety briefing given in Norwegian, English, German and French. We could have had snacks and drinks in the lounge, but given we felt we’d only just had breakfast, it didn’t exactly feel needed.

Then the queue to end all queues. 500 guests attempting to board the ship. No plan, no order, just create a queue and crack on. Well, we are British, so I guess that’s expected. To keep myself entertained (Nick wasn’t being particularly entertaining at this point), I thought I’d time this process. 35 minutes. However, we were then on the ship. Our ship is the Trollfjord, taking 500 passengers and doing a maximum of 18 knots. It feels very minimalist compared with the extravagance of the South American cruise we did with P&O.

At this point, we felt we needed “rewarding” with a welcome drink, followed by a lovely buffet lunch with wine, followed by a welcome sail away from Bergen with a lovely concoction of rhubarb wine and Prosecco, which was gorgeous. We trotted off to the welcome meeting which gave us some more detail about trips and the ship in general.

A little about our cabin. It’s small. And when I say small, I actually mean SMALL. However, we’ve been really careful with our space and, hopefully, there won’t be too many fisticuffs by the end of the trip.