WHAT an amazing autumn! It’s warm still, the colour has been amazing and up here in Yorkshire at least we had a bumper harvest of chestnuts. They were not big perhaps but sweet and entirely pest free and could be scooped up by the handfull as they were so plentiful.
Bending down to the ground to collect chestnuts meant I was able to notice all the fungi pushing up everywhere through the leaf litter.
I spotted plenty of new ones again this year including “common” strap fungus, Helvella Crispa, punching up through the bracken with small, pugnacious fists. There was also an almost transparent,veined grey toadstool trembling on a delicate stem.
I discovered a beautiful crop of edible honey fungus which are apparently good eating. Unfortunately by the time I had gone back home for my camera, someone had smashed them flat.
I hate this kind of ignorance and stupidity and one day perhaps I should see if the people who look after the woods would be interested in creating a fungi trail with information about them.
I think people should be told that fungi have been round for so much longer than we have and (I desperately hope) they may survive us. In the meantime, they deserve respect because without them this planet would not be the green and beautiful place it was before humans really started to get it wrong.
Without them we possibly wouldn’t even exist.
So, here is my annual tribute to an amazing lifeform.
(I wrote this for a friend, having just come back from a 22 day Hurtigruten cruise from Dover to Svalbard. I hadn’t known what to expect from it and had struggled to find useful advice before hand. This means it is perhaps less a review than tips for dealing with the things that slip through the cracks)
I HAD never had a three week holiday before so found packing difficult, especially as I had to get all my luggage down to Dover on the train and so had to realistically be able to carry it all!
The good thing with Hurtigruten though, is that while the food is excellent, there is no dressing up for dinner so only take practical clothing you know you will need.
If you pack light layers you can also wash them in the cabin (there is a laundry service too) and dry them on the line in the shower and on the heated floor of the bathroom (did your parents ever tell you not to hang things on the floor? Well, turns out they were wrong 🙂)
This means you can have space for a decent camera and really good binoculars because those animals are not going to just come up for their pictures to be taken!
I took tiny binoculars and my phone and really regretted not having proper gear.
For me the arctic fox, the polar bear and many of the reindeer were just tiny spots in the distance. I’m not even sure the dot I was looking at was a polar bear or a rock.
Many of the passengers on board had travelled with Hurtigruten before and I got the idea that if you want really good pics of animals then perhaps the Antarctic is better. There were tales of massive penguin colonies and baby elephant seals chewing boots.
We saw a selection of whales and dolphins and they were lovely to see but they did not lead to iconic images of massive tail flukes towering above one. They were all pretty distant.
Norway is of course, amazingly beautiful, with a rocky coastline that extends for a hundred thousand kilometers and fjords whose scale is hard to imagine before you go there.
Anyone should count themselves lucky to see such a place, so perhaps that is enough… but if you go wanting to see animals up close or even the Northern Lights in all their glory, then perhaps you might be disappointed.
Our first fjord of the trip, heading t
In three weeks, I would say we had one amazing week of experiences surrounded by plenty of days that were alright or slightly dull.
This is mostly unavoidable as on the trip to Svalbard from Dover there were six days of sailing where we barely saw land.
You might have thought those days would be boring but the expedition team produces lectures and talks on everything from plastic in the seas to Sami culture and the great Arctic explorers. There are little art sessions, knot tying lessons and there is always a small gym (although why they don’t have hexagonal weights that don’t roll absolutely boggles me!), sauna with a view and two hot tubs whose cold showers put most people off from indulging.
They do warn guests in advance that the WiFi is pretty weak so don’t think you will be seeing any movies while you are away.
Then there is the challenge of the unexpected; Our itinerary changed repeatedly in the months prior to departure and in the end was almost completely different as storm avoidance meant all the stops were changed around.
The logistics must be incredibly challenging for the expedition crew and in general I think they handle it well.
Sadly though, this can lead to problems like a Sunday in sleepy Krisitansund where everything was shut followed by an afternoon in Bergen on Monday when all the museums are shut. This can be very frustrating!
So, keep flexible and don’t hang the holiday on absolutely having to see one particular place.
I think my major criticism of Hurtigruten is around the trips.
The included outtings can be frustrating and boring. We had a coach ride round the very lovely island of Senja but there was nowhere for the bus to stop so we just drove past amazing views which we couldn’t really take in or take photographs of. I suppose that might suit some people but I was frustrated and unimpressed by the two stops, one at a little beach (where most of the people spent their time queueing for the loo) and one at the island’s most boring hamlet.Â
Another trip saw us killing two hours at the North Cape. After you have taken the obligatory photograph of Europe’s most northerly point, there is really nothing there unless you can eek some pleasure from a tourist shop, four stuffed birds and three bad little dioramas of famous visitors to the cape.
To get to the North cape however we scooted past reindeer herder camps, whisked past some really close sea eagles as well as frames of stock fish drying in the sun in picturesque ways. It seemed a bit of a waste.
Also, a word of warning. To get on the “included” trips….you have to sign on for them all, with very little information, on day two and day 10 of the holiday.
If a trip is over-subscribed then there is a lottery and you might just miss out.
This could be designed to drive people towards the paid extra trips which included a £190 RHIB ride to see sea eagles being fed and £90 hikes that were quite short in length though seemed to take hours and would mean you couldn’t then have time to see a village or do the included trip as well.
So, having prepared for lots of hill climbing, I didn’t end up doing one single hike as I was either not lucky enough to get on the included ones or didn’t want to spend the time and money on the optional extra ones.
I don’t for one second regret, however, the pretty reasonable £60 I spent on kayaking in Sabo though. It was my one luxury and it was fun and beautiful, though getting into all the gear takes ages!
And so on to gear. The red Hurtigruten jackets they give every guest are a way of making us easily identifiable during evacuations from shore in the event of a polar bear. Big rubber boots are also provided for the trips to Svalbard for biosecurity reasons and because stepping ankle deep into the Arctic is not fun in normal hiking boots. So I think they do look after everyone extremely well in terms of safety and dealing with the conditions.
There is an option to swim in the Arctic if you fancy it. I’d really recommend packing light swimming shoes for this as my feet immediately became numb and I kept falling over on the sharp stones. They’ll even give you a certificate (but since they gave my mother a certificate for surviving an aquavit tasting session I’d not place too much value on them! 🤣 )
Smooth sailing along the Norwegian coast
All the staff are lovely. The house keeping staff are all Philippino and amazing. The expedition teams are from all over and are very well educated.
Don’t take too much Norwegian currency with you. Most places, post covid have gone over to cards and small communities have embraced card transactions because it can take them hours to get to the nearest bank. I brought a load back and am not sure what to do with it.
In conclusion, the Hurtigruten is a great way to reach places that are not readily accessible any other way but being on a slow boat with a load of other people (on on a fleet of busses, unable to stop where you want) does carry its own stresses.
I don’t want to patronise the retired and depict them as people with nothing to do with their time since many will say they are busier than ever in “retirement”…but perhaps a holiday that contains days of sailing or sitting quietly in a bus while amazing views go by, is less frustrating to somene who has not had to use their entire holiday allowance for the year on this one trip.
And with that final statement, I realise that my review of Hurtigruten is superfluous. I was one of the youngest guest on the ship at the age of 46 and perhaps it is not really aimed at me.
If I am lucky enough to be able to afford it, maybe I will come back to Hurtigruten in 10 or 20 years and have one more bucket list experience and I am sure it will be amazing.
SOMETIMES I get an idea into my head for a project and then I just have to make it so that I can get it out of the way and get on with other, bigger projects.
These small plumbing pipe and brake tubing cannisters are topped with old halfpenny coins so I decided to call them Pennies For Your Thoughts.
Perhaps they can be used for storing notes, aide memoire, small poems that make you smile….it doesn’t matter really. I have made them and can now move on to something else.
Erica Madelin 