Hurtigruten

Hurtigruten is a company which runs a fleet of boats along what used to be the Norwegian postal service route, up the coast of the country from the bottom to the top and back. It's always taken passengers too, but in recent years tourism has become its main source of business. A little earlier this year there was a reality TV show in Norway which showed Hurtigruten staff and passengers 24 hours a day for five days in real time. It pulled in record viewing figures and attracted some overseas interest. Last month, or the month before, a foreign broadcast of the same programme was due to go out somewhere in South America, when one of the Hurtigruten ships caught fire off the coast of Norway. If I recall rightly it didn't actually sink, but it was touch and go for a while and I think a few people died.

Still, we've been on here nearly three days and have seen neither TV cameras nor flames. Our cabin has a window, which is not far above the water, and last night when there was a storm we could see the waves breaking beneath us into the darkness. 

Although the older boats are still pretty functional, the newer ones are essentially small cruise ships. Our boat is called MS Midnattsol (Midnight Sun) and it's one of the newer ones. You can tell this from flawless contemporary-retro decor and the twin Jacuzzis it has on the top deck, separated by a sculptural glass water feature doubling as a shower block. There is also a sauna, from which you can look out across the ocean or coast. We decided to take the boat because we needed to transport a car to our new home and it was actually less expensive and far less stressful than it would have been for Marthe to drive us all the way up (at thirty years of age I still can't even start a car, let alone operate one), but sitting in the Jacuzzi outside on our first night on the boat, looking out at the dimly perceptible passing mountains, I had a distinct feeling of guilty luxury. Like this really wasn't what I was supposed to be doing. It reminded me of my favourite moment in a documentary I once saw about Andrei Tarkovsky. He is scouting locations in Italy in the 1970s. After spending several days travelling around, viewing beautiful Italian countryside, Tarkovsky turns to his guide, an Italian poet, and says, "I'm uncomfortable because I have the feeling I am on holiday, and it is not a sensation I'm used to."  

All this being said, the main attraction of this route is the landscape. It is so beautiful as to defy description. In the middle of our first day we passed through a series of tiny islands dotted across an area of water almost as calm as a lake. In amongst the islands there was a little red lighthouse standing on a piece of land no bigger that its base. Apparently, before it was mechanised two families actually lived there.

 

That same first evening, after the sun had set but before its influence had totally disappeared, I was standing on the deck as we moved through a fjord. I watched the moon line up with a blue-lit mountain above a kind of inland cove. It looked for all the world like an imaginary landscape, something that would only appear in a painting. I wanted so badly to be able to remember how it looked and not forget the details, as I have forgotten the details of every other incredible view I've ever seen.

Last night at around 12am we passed through Trollfjord, thought to be one of Norway's most spectacular areas of coast. Despite a force nine gale, the staff of the boat invited us up on to the deck and gave everyone free fishcakes. They played a recording of Peer Gynt and lit up sections of the Fjord with the boat's fog lights. It wasn't really possible to make out much more that the circular sections of lit-up rock, but mountains and Fjords do stand out blacker than the sky, even at midnight.

We're well into the arctic circle now. Not too much longer and we'll be disembarking. We stopped for dinner tonight in Tromsø. That's where you can find the polar institute, which houses the photos Marthe has been writing her MA thesis about. In a record shop there I bought the new Tom Waits record, although I'll have to wait some weeks for my turntable to arrive before I can play it. Marthe and I agreed that we would come back to Tromsø for Christmas shopping, either drive down and spend the night or go by plane, so I'll write more about the town then. It's the place where the first English person I knew who moved to Norway went. John from my evening course. He moved there a couple of years ago. He had a job lined up in the bike shop. We all told him he was mad.

Marthe working on board

Me in Midnattsol's Knut Hamsun room