On Top of the World, Or at Least as Close as I Will Get

Day 39, 2023 North Atlantic Adventure

Monday, June 19, 2023; Hammerfest and North Cape, Norway.

Today I set a new personal record for northernmost travel. We cruised beneath the towering cliffs of Norway’s North Cape. My map app measured our progress to 71.15973 degrees north (and 24.74017 degrees east).

I was surprised to find that even when we went to Antarctica in early 2020, we didn’t achieve the southern counterpoint. In fact, we didn’t even cross the Antarctic Circle, reaching just 65.1 degrees south.

Today would have been t-shirt weather on deck in the bright sun but for the breeze. Captain Friso slowed the Zuiderdam and slowly turned, making sure balconies on both sides had a good view  of the giant bluffs. It’s probably the first day I’ve missed having a balcony. But there was plenty of room on Deck 10 to admire the view, and the bow was open to those who wanted to venture out there.

We could see the tourists on top of the 1,000-foot cliff, as well as dozens of campers or caravans. It’s the terminus of the E69 and the northernmost point in Europe you can drive to.

Captain Friso also played naturalist, as he called our attention to the puffins flying in formations around the bow of the ship. Unfortunately, they fly too fast for me to capture in focus on my camera.

In order to enjoy scenic cruising at the North Cape before dinner, we had to leave our last Norwegian port, Hammerfest, shortly after noon. The cruise pier is about a mile and half from the city center (or sentrum per the highway signs), and several shuttle buses made the loop.

Hammerfest offers another interesting church – not as stunning as the Northern Lights Cathedral in Alta, but also modern and Scandinavian in design.

I was glad I had a few Norwegian krona coins so I could purchase the descriptive pamphlet (too many passengers just ignored the large “pay here” sign, I’m sorry to say). The small square stained-glass windows along the sides were shimmering with the bright light coming through. When I later painted my sketch of one window, I realized I don’t have the skill to adequately portray the light streaming through.

My second stop was the Hammerfest Museum of Post-War Reconstruction. Sadly, its main exhibit appears to have been closed, and I only needed about 15 minutes there. The closed exhibit showcases the reconstruction process following the forced evacuation and destruction of the area by the Nazis in World War II. All that was open was a photographic exhibit of fishing and a study of architectural styles of the area.

Realizing this small town wouldn’t contribute many steps to my tracker, I opted to walk along the harbor back to the pier.

While enjoying the views, I totally missed stopping at the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society. It’s apparently not all that ancient (founded in 1963), but if you stop in and buy a membership, you get a lapel pin that can only be obtained by joining in person. I don’t know how much it costs to join, but I’ll have to save that for my next trip to Hammerfest (as yet unbooked).

More interesting to me was the obelisk marking the northernmost point on the Struve Geodetic Arc.

Don’t worry, I never heard of it before either. But after Sir Isaac Newton suggested that the earth might be flattened at the poles instead of exactly spherical, a Russian astronomer (Struve) conceived of a project in the 1870s involving angle measurements to prove the theory. The northernmost of the 34 measurement points was in Hammerfest (and the southernmost at Ismail on the Black Sea).

The monument is near the cruise pier, so it was a good place to sit and sketch, knowing I could get back quickly as our all-aboard time neared.

From here we have two sea days as we cross the Norwegian Sea to Iceland and our four ports there. I’ll repeat the Iceland itinerary in another couple of weeks, after we sail back to Scotland and the final of our three port calls in Rotterdam.