Fire and Ice: Stavanger, Norway

Monday 31 July 2017. After leaving the Port of Tyne, we spent Sunday at sea, crossing the North Sea. It was a little overcast and we spent the day inside the ship apart from a spell of walking round and round the Promenade Deck wrapped in warm hoodies, to make up for all the scrummy food that was available!

By the time we get up on Monday, however, we have docked in Stavanger, Norway. It's a little drizzly, but we get off of the ship anyway to have a look round Gamle, the Old Town.

Fran, showing that the drizzle had just about stopped so we were in hoodies rather than raincoats. Her hoodie matches the blue bit on the flag of Norway! Respectful, that's us...

The old town has around 173 wooden buildings dating from the 18th and early 19th centuries. They are all painted white and with the cobbled streets and lack of cars it makes an appealing community.

Once at risk of demolition they were saved as an, albeit run-down, conservation area after the second World War by the efforts of the City Architect, Einar Hedén. Now spruced up, the area has since had a reversal of fortune, now being a desirable area for the trendy or historically-minded.

The view down to Vågen, one of many harbour inlets of Stavanger. Our ship's distinctive blue funnel shows just how close to the old town we are moored.

A little further along towards town and the rooftops of Stavanger's shopping streets and business centre can be seen. We will wander through there before returning to the ship. It takes just half an hour to cover the Old Town area and as we come to the edge of the wooden buildings we can see that someone has a birthday as a bunch of balloons has been tied outside one house! Apart from the cottages the area houses craft shops and museums including a canning factory museum.

Vågen and a view of Thomson Celebration moored on the very edge of the Gamle Old Town. The Fisketorget (left) is the fish market. Behind us are other market stalls selling some of those chunky Norwegian sweaters. Lovely, but I'd be sweltering even in Blackpool's winter winds!

There are a few other ships and boats moored in the Vågen. The Sandnes is a training ship of 1432 tons and was built in 1950.

The Rogaland was built in 1929. Badly damaged by a mine in Oslofjord in September 1941, the ship had to be towed to Oslo for repairs. Back in commission, in 1944 she was caught in a huge explosion on April 20 whilst moored in Bergen. The Dutch ship Voorbode, carrying 120 tons of explosives blew up causing the deaths of some 150 people including 50 German soldiers and around 5000 wounded. Nearby houses were set alight and the Rogaland sank due to the damage. The Germans naturally assumed sabotage but an investigation proved the explosion to be accidental.

Our cruise ship Thomson Celebration. This is the sixth cruise we have taken on this ship, which was built in 1984 as MS Noordam and operated as such until 2005 when it was leased to Thomson and became Thomson Celebration.

Since leaving Gamle we have walked through the shopping area to another harbour and are now walking back and around Vågen back to the ship. The sky is starting to get a little dark and we decide to get back to the ship before we get a soaking. But the Vågen harbour has something else to show us yet...

It's a jellyfish. Sheesh, but these are hard to identify even using the Internet. A lion's mane jellyfish seemed to be the nearest description but on this specimen the mantle is around 24 inches in diameter and it has long tentacles below with lots of filaments floating around it. The lion's mane jellyfish was described as being up to 6 feet in diameter and as being found in somewhat warmer waters. So if anyone knows what this is please let me know via the comments section below!

This monster of a ship was quite a way away and I had to swap to the telephoto lens for this shot.

It rained a bit during the afternoon and we sat in the Showbar, which had huge windows overlooking Gamle whilst I did this sketch. Lots of nice comments from people who passed and came to look. The figure is a statue of Admiral Thore Horve, who in 1940 captured a German ship loaded with troops about to attack Norway.

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Scarborough With A Hint Of Bridlington.

We had a weekend away this week, travelling to Bridlington on Friday for two nights. We stayed at a nice enough B&B which was just a bit let down by the shower unit in our room. This was plumbed straight into the water supply. This meant that there were separate hot and cold taps and the room was at the end of a long corridor so no matter where or how you set the taps, the water falling on you alternated every few seconds between freezing cold and scalding hot... Ah well, it was cheap and cheerful - if you don't count the owner's Dad who answered the door at night by saying "I hope you haven't woken our granddaughter up!!!"

I had a camera free day on Friday which is when we took advantage of some bright sunny weather in Bridlington. I had the sketch pad with me but I didn't get round to doing anything with it all weekend - Brid was crowded and seating by the harbour was at a premium and there were hundreds of people trying to eat fish and chips before the somewhat aggressive seagulls got them first. Not everyone succeeded... I didn't fancy spending an hour sketching only for a blob of unmentionable to obscure the page, so I apologetically offer this effort from 1994.

If you want to eat fish and chips then Bridlington is your place. There is probably one fish and chip shop for every seagull. This is actually necessary as the amount of repeat trade they get must be incredible from people who have had (helpful hint on seagull fave method coming) a seagull fly down over their shoulder and land in the tray of fish and chips, snatching a beakful and taking off with the probable spilling of the rest of the tray for other seagulls to fight over.

We found an Italian restaurant called Leoz. Highly recommended! I had the chicken stroganoff and it was delicious.

On Saturday we decided to leave the car and take a bus to Scarborough. Between the two bus stations of Bridlington and Scarborough it is 17.1 miles. This should take around 30 minutes or less, but the bus does not exactly go straight there. The timetable suggested an hour and 25 minutes, but it took quite a bit longer than that in the event. We missed out on the front seats going, but managed to get them coming back. Some of the roads it turned aside onto to reach holiday camps were better than a ride on the roller coaster!

When we reached Scarborough the first building of note that I saw as we walked down from the bus station was this theatre. The original Stephen Joseph Theatre was Britain's first theatre in the round and was built on the first floor of the public library. It moved to a former boys' high school and subsequently in 1988 following the closure of the Odeon Cinema it moved here, opening in 1996.

We walked downhill past the theatre and along a shopping street, cutting off down a side road and finding ourselves near the Grand Hotel. There was a funicular railway going down the cliff to the beach but we opted to take the strenuous route - this being much less strenuous going down than coming up - where we did take the funicular!

So we set off down these steps, admiring the litter and the way that, at the bottom, the handrail stopped being black and instead was seagull-poo coloured to the encrusted state that the end of the railing had corroded altogether and had dropped off.

Scarborough has a South Bay and a North Bay. To someone who lives on the west coast like me, directions on the east coast always seem the wrong way round. Between the two bays is a huge but ruinous 12th century castle high on its hill which was once a hillfort from the Iron Age, a Roman signal point and the home of Norse invaders. A busy spot. In fact all of Scarborough seems a busy spot. There was hardly room on the beach for all the families, couples, and sunbathers to swing a bucket and spade. People lean on each side of a windbreak, at least half of them having underpaid for the privilege.

Amusement arcades line the other side of the road, facing the beach and harbour. They look like Blackpool of yesterday - modern fronts on the ground floor of old buildings. Yet sadly, the amusements are the modern boring collection of cranes and two pence piece pushers with the occasional video shoot-out or racing game. Where did all those pinballs go, which I so loved as a boy and which required skill of reflexes and knowledge of the laws of physics rather than mastery of a remembered past sequence?

The harbour holds a collection of boats from working fishing boats to day trip or half-hour trips round the bays. A marina serves those rich folks who like to boast they "have a boat at the seaside" but rarely can be bothered to move them.

It all makes for a very picturesque scene. In fact multitudes of scenes of water, old buildings, modern amusements, the inevitable fish and chips, and families relaxing.

There are so many architectural styles within a short stretch of road that it is hard to make sense of it. Odd little bits strike you as either pleasing or incongruous. Some manage both at the same time.

On the whole I quite liked it. There were plenty of benches to sit on without having to pay to hire a deck chair - though they were well over-subscribed and finding an empty one was usually the precursor to turning away again as some other foot-weary person or group dived upon the few inches of bare wooden slats.

In the harbour, a single formidable chunk of membrane and tentacles was pulsating and moving slowly round in circles, its progress impeded by the strength of the incoming tide matching its ability to swim against it. It may have been somewhat mollified by the steady and continuing chorus of exclamations and excited shouts of "Oh! Look!" that it caused.

We bought a drink at a cafe and sat on the harbour wall whilst we cooled off and rested our feet. Well... rested our feet anyway. There was no shade on the harbour wall and I was turning a splendid shade of bright red on this, our second day in the sun.

Just after the harbour is this delightful Coastguards' Hut. Do a search and you will find lots of photos of it but finding any textual references will take longer than I cared to spend. Very strange - you'd have thought someone would have thought it worthwhile to say something about it...

Crammed into the smallish space between the harbour and Coast Guard Station is a small funfair with a handful of rides mainly aimed at children.

We retraced our steps until we reached the flight of steps and then we stepped smartly on until we reached the funicular railway - known as the Central Tramway Company. The car was full, I wasn't able to get to the window to take a photo of the other car coming down towards us. There's something about funiculars that always appeals to me. The theory is that the weight of the descending car matches as near as possible the weight of the ascending car and therefore the power needed to operate is not as great as might be required for a single lift.

We had lunch and a quick look round the shops (not my idea...) and then caught the bus back to Bridlington. This time we managed to get the front seat upstairs and it was a fun ride back via all the side roads and holiday parks until we arrived back at Bridlington bus station.

We got back to find a collection of classic cars parked near the harbour, their owners sitting by them, listening to a karaoke set-up. Unfortunately as we got there we were "treated" to a man and woman singing Those Were The Days as a duet. It certainly wasn't how I remembered those days... We decided on an ice cream and the young girl serving laughed out loud when I asked for two cones and two pairs of ear plugs. We sat on the harbour wall for a while until a seagull, sated with a surfeit of fish and chips decided to splatter all over Miss Franny's hand... "Ooh, that's lucky!" I said, a second before the backhander...

A Day in Cyprus

Sunday 25 April 2010. The Ocean Village docked at Limassol in Cyprus and we had a lazy start to the day, waiting until all the excursions had left before heading for the gangway ourselves to go exploring. We found a mass of taxis and buses waiting outside the port entrance and hopped on a bus with several other cruisers for the trip into town. It was quite a way, I have to say. We'd been told it would be a 40 minute walk but we were on the bus for a good quarter hour!

Anyway the bus driver dropped us on a roundabout and pointed out the way to a castle, the way to the beach and offered to take us up into the mountains if we wanted. Only a few said they wanted to go and he arranged to meet them back at the roundabout in a couple of hours and - as we were looking round the nearby market at the time - he turned up and waited and none of the ones who had asked him to come back bothered to turn up.

We walked up to the castle and had a brief look around. There was a museum inside the castle, but we were too hot to think about it. Also an interesting snippet - this castle was where King Richard the Lionheart got married in 1191.

There was an old olive or lemon press in the grounds of the castle - I wasn't too sure which. There was a huge stone pit to collect the juice - you could have swum in it... We couldn't as it was empty... Come on pay attention - if it had been full it would have been obvious whether the press was for olives or lemons!

See! Lemon trees! That settles it then...

We went back to the roundabout - it being a sort of focal point - and headed for the beach area. After a wrong turning led us to the old port we found a pleasant Promenade along the sea front. An ice cream van was parked at the entrance to a wooden decked pier but for the moment our thoughts were more on walking than ice cream.

The sea was crystal clear. I love watching the sea flow over rocks and plants like this - I can do it for hours, totally hypnotised by it.

We had a stroll along the pier and sat down on one of the many benches. After a while a couple sat on the bench behind us, out of breath and speaking English. It turned out that they had walked from the ship, the "40 minutes" walk having taken them a gruelling two hours... We went back to the roundabout, bought some drinks and sat there to see if a bus would turn up to take us back to the ship. None did except for the go-it-alone excursion bus that the ship had laid on and we had no tickets for that.

We sat drinking our pop and watched several near misses on the roundabout until from the opposite side down the road off which we had found the seafront there came a loud crash. A van had ploughed into a couple of cars which had (correctly) stopped at a pedestrian crossing. One of our fellow passengers from the cruise went to have a look and related in great detail the damage, what had happened, that there were no injuries etc. I think it was the most exciting thing he'd seen in a while...

No buses were in evidence and in the end we grabbed a taxi back to the port which was a good move after seeing how far it would have been to walk!

We had a late lunch next to a window in the restaurant onboard the ship, watching a jellyfish in the harbour which was making heavy weather of the current. We watched it for a good half hour until the current had brought it right up under our window and then we realised the poor thing only looked to be pulsating because of the optical effect of the waves. It wasn't alive. In fact, it was a plastic carrier bag...

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