Copenhagen to Bergen was the budget airline experience de luxe. A stand-up crowd at the gate. Inaudible announcements in a language you don't understand, then inaudible announcements in English you don't understand. More passengers than seats, including babies on laps. A delay parked on the ground with the seat belt sign on to maintain order, to stop us seizing the plane, hoisting a pirate flag, and lurching off to found a Christiania of the skies.
The cloud cover below us was like a sheet of mashed potatoes, and we punched down through it to find a Bergen that was gloomy and wet. Bergen has a climate like Vancouver's. On one side, a warm ocean current; on the other, mountains that wring all the water out of passing clouds. It's ridiculously mild for its latitude, unfairly so from a North American point of view -- Bergen's almost as far North as Whitehorse, but has milder winters than Toronto -- and also record-settingly damp. It's apparently the home of a famous school of meteorology, which is strange, because weather prediction here should be one of the world's easier jobs. You punch in, you write down "cool and rainy", and you go home and polish your "most accurate forecaster" trophies.
Bergen's a beautiful town. A flat plain around a harbour, and, around the plain, steep mountain slopes with houses somehow stuck on them. On the wharf, a famous and ancient fish market, where Norwegians traditionally go to be shouted at in English about expensive seafood dinners. Up the road, a couple of moored cruise ships and a Turkish warship called the TCG Barbaros (a web search turns up its Facebook account, in case you want to become internet friends with a Turkish warship -- though it may only accept friend requests from other Turkish warships). Also, a fortress founded in the 13th century, and, everywhere, museums. Days in early July are long: Sunset is after 11pm.
The real reason cruise ships steam so urgently for Bergen is, of course, the Leprosy Museum. This is an antiseptic green complex that was once a leper hospital and is the site of Gerhard Hansen's discovery of the disease's cause. There are large portraits of victims and small cells with tiny bunks, amputation saws, and descriptive plaques in Norwegian that are probably very interesting. The anglophone tourist gets instead a set of laminated, ring-bound sheets that provide a history of leprosy, some forceful quotes from an early 20th century hygiene inspector, and no particular idea of what any of the exhibits are. Out back is a garden where putatively medicinal plants were grown, with information about the intricate, taxing, lengthy, and totally useless herbal regimens in which they were used. Luckily, scientific medicine eventually came along, and now no one believes in such things.
Bergenhus fortress has all the 13th century conveniences: Thick walls, murder holes, spacious undercroft, a cavernous great hall for entertaining. Rainy ramparts face the harbour. The guns were used once in anger, to fire on English ships attacking a Dutch treasure fleet, and now point temptingly at the cruise ships moored nearby. One attraction of the tower is that it has rooms with reproduction weapons lying around for tourists to mess with. The reproductions are surprisingly real-feeling. The edges are dull as Canadian politics, but the pointy parts are quite pointy. You feel like any children of spirit would get a sword-versus-halberd duel going immediately, and then someone would get run through. It's not that the idea upsets me, it's just surprising that it doesn't upset anyone else.
From downtown, there's a funicular running up the mountainside. At the top, a playground and a viewing platform that would be really nice if there weren't a funicular disgorging a new crowd of tourists every ten minutes. But the park at the top backs onto a huge mess of quiet hiking trails. I wandered out into them, trusting to my sense of direction, which I've done many times in my life, and which has never worked.
There are a couple of ways it can go wrong. There's the go-in-circles way, and there's the die-of-exposure way. I'm not too worried about any particular danger, because there are other hikers around, and some of them have dogs, and they're fluffy house dogs, not the kinds you bring along to fight off bears and pull you out of rivers. The ground is spongy and the rain is heavy, but it's beautiful. The other hikers are like ghosts in the mist, walking ghost terriers. In the end, I come out of the trail I'm walking aimlessly down to find I'm more or less back where I started.
My survival in the wild is basically down, I think, to my immense personal courage. I estimate that, at times, I was at least 500m away from a 7-11. I'm now growing a thick brown beard and shopping online for flannel shirts.
I was also lucky to meet up with my parents, who were, by chance, visiting on a cruise. They're going to hit the leprosy museum (I assume) and then head on to Shetland, Iceland, and Greenland, which sounds pretty damn interesting.
The cloud cover below us was like a sheet of mashed potatoes, and we punched down through it to find a Bergen that was gloomy and wet. Bergen has a climate like Vancouver's. On one side, a warm ocean current; on the other, mountains that wring all the water out of passing clouds. It's ridiculously mild for its latitude, unfairly so from a North American point of view -- Bergen's almost as far North as Whitehorse, but has milder winters than Toronto -- and also record-settingly damp. It's apparently the home of a famous school of meteorology, which is strange, because weather prediction here should be one of the world's easier jobs. You punch in, you write down "cool and rainy", and you go home and polish your "most accurate forecaster" trophies.
Bergen's a beautiful town. A flat plain around a harbour, and, around the plain, steep mountain slopes with houses somehow stuck on them. On the wharf, a famous and ancient fish market, where Norwegians traditionally go to be shouted at in English about expensive seafood dinners. Up the road, a couple of moored cruise ships and a Turkish warship called the TCG Barbaros (a web search turns up its Facebook account, in case you want to become internet friends with a Turkish warship -- though it may only accept friend requests from other Turkish warships). Also, a fortress founded in the 13th century, and, everywhere, museums. Days in early July are long: Sunset is after 11pm.
The real reason cruise ships steam so urgently for Bergen is, of course, the Leprosy Museum. This is an antiseptic green complex that was once a leper hospital and is the site of Gerhard Hansen's discovery of the disease's cause. There are large portraits of victims and small cells with tiny bunks, amputation saws, and descriptive plaques in Norwegian that are probably very interesting. The anglophone tourist gets instead a set of laminated, ring-bound sheets that provide a history of leprosy, some forceful quotes from an early 20th century hygiene inspector, and no particular idea of what any of the exhibits are. Out back is a garden where putatively medicinal plants were grown, with information about the intricate, taxing, lengthy, and totally useless herbal regimens in which they were used. Luckily, scientific medicine eventually came along, and now no one believes in such things.
Bergenhus fortress has all the 13th century conveniences: Thick walls, murder holes, spacious undercroft, a cavernous great hall for entertaining. Rainy ramparts face the harbour. The guns were used once in anger, to fire on English ships attacking a Dutch treasure fleet, and now point temptingly at the cruise ships moored nearby. One attraction of the tower is that it has rooms with reproduction weapons lying around for tourists to mess with. The reproductions are surprisingly real-feeling. The edges are dull as Canadian politics, but the pointy parts are quite pointy. You feel like any children of spirit would get a sword-versus-halberd duel going immediately, and then someone would get run through. It's not that the idea upsets me, it's just surprising that it doesn't upset anyone else.
From downtown, there's a funicular running up the mountainside. At the top, a playground and a viewing platform that would be really nice if there weren't a funicular disgorging a new crowd of tourists every ten minutes. But the park at the top backs onto a huge mess of quiet hiking trails. I wandered out into them, trusting to my sense of direction, which I've done many times in my life, and which has never worked.
There are a couple of ways it can go wrong. There's the go-in-circles way, and there's the die-of-exposure way. I'm not too worried about any particular danger, because there are other hikers around, and some of them have dogs, and they're fluffy house dogs, not the kinds you bring along to fight off bears and pull you out of rivers. The ground is spongy and the rain is heavy, but it's beautiful. The other hikers are like ghosts in the mist, walking ghost terriers. In the end, I come out of the trail I'm walking aimlessly down to find I'm more or less back where I started.
My survival in the wild is basically down, I think, to my immense personal courage. I estimate that, at times, I was at least 500m away from a 7-11. I'm now growing a thick brown beard and shopping online for flannel shirts.
I was also lucky to meet up with my parents, who were, by chance, visiting on a cruise. They're going to hit the leprosy museum (I assume) and then head on to Shetland, Iceland, and Greenland, which sounds pretty damn interesting.
