Scandinavia Cruise 2023 (Oceania Marina)

August 14, 2023

Hammerfest, Norway

From Alta the cruise itinerary was to take us to the northern most point of Norway, - North Cape/Honningsvaag but the weather did not cooperate and we needed to bypass this stop. Our final stop before Tromso was Hammerfest - the northernmost town in the world with more than 10,000 inhabitants.

Early morning calmness in port

Highlights of this stop:

1. Visited a Sami Village

2. Struve Geodetic Arc

Painting by Konstantin Korovin, inspired by the Aurora Borealis in Hammerfest (Just because I liked it)

Tour to a Sami (equivalent to Sweden and FInland's Laplanders) house and learned about some of their culture. The total population of Sami in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia is estimated to approximately 80,000, and about half of them live in Norway. The vast majority of settlements are located in Northern Norway, primarily the county of Finnmark. There are, however, Sami communities as far south as Trøndelag as well.

Reindeer have always been a central part of the Sami culture. There is almost no part of the reindeer that isn’t used: meat for cooking, fur and skin for clothes and shoes, and the horns are transformed into everything from useful tools to beautiful art.

Norwegian reindeer husbandry is practised primarily in Northern Norway, Today, about 3,000 people are involved in Sami reindeer husbandry, 2,200 of them in Finnmark alone. Each summer, hundreds of thousands of reindeer and their herders, known traditionally as bozaovazzi (reindeer walkers), start their annual migration down from higher elevations to lowland tundra in the far north of mainland Europe. The reindeer have spent the warmer months feeding on sedges, herbs and grasses, but as the weather cools they head for more sheltered climates, where there is less snowfall and they can dig for lichens and fungi with their hooves.

We entered inside of a very modern and large Sami style (grass roof, wooden frame) welcoming center where they served us reindeer cubes, smoked salmon and the delicacy cloud berries.

Small mobile sami hut - great for following the reindeer year round

(actually, the very modern sami use mobile homes and off road vehicles)

This time of the year the reindeer herd has taken themselves to the upper meadow to graze on all the lush green grass and will return themselves to this lower elevation when the winter turns harsh. The samis actually took their lead from the instinctive reindeer when to change locations. Love it. Man actually being in tune with their fellow earth dwellers.

View from the sami village looking down to the fjord where our ship was docked.

Struve Geodetic Arc
World Heritage Site

The Struve Arc is a chain of survey triangulations stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, through 10 countries and over 2,820 km. These are points of a survey, carried out between 1816 and 1855 by the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, which represented the first accurate measuring of a long segment of a meridian. This helped to establish the exact size and shape of the planet and marked an important step in the development of earth sciences and topographic mapping. It is an extraordinary example of scientific collaboration among scientists from different countries, and of collaboration between monarchs for a scientific cause. The original arc consisted of 258 main triangles with 265 main station points. The listed site includes 34 of the original station points, with different markings, i.e. a drilled hole in rock, iron cross, cairns, or built obelisks.