DAY 14 – OSLO, NORWAY – SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

(Blogger's note:  Due to the agonizingly slow bandwidth on the ship, I regret to say that I will not be uploading any pictures.  I regret to say that because now you have to be entertained by text only, an infinitely more difficult task.  However, when I get home I will edit the post and add pictures, so then you can go back and read everything over again!) :-)

The second part of our cruise has begun, which takes us back to Oslo, then another stop in Norway, the port city of Kristiansand on the western coast. From there we cross the North Sea to Glasgow, Scotland, thence to Dublin, Belfast, Iceland, Greenland, and New York City. Although we are on the same ship, this is considered a separate cruise, so we are now on our second Princess cruise: Trans-Atlantic. That makes us Gold members of the Captain's Circle with so many benefits. Let me count them: 1. We get to attend the Captain's reception, along with a thousand or so of our closest friends, 2. We might get a discount on our next cruise.

After 15 cruises, we reach Platinum, for which we get the additional benefit of free laundry. Wow!

But enough of the cynicism. Upon disembarking from the ship in Oslo, we hopped on a Hop-On/Hop-Off bus. We eschewed (there's that word again) the center city stops in favor of seeing again the Vigeland Park which I described in an earlier blog (see Aug. 31). Since we were not on a guided tour this time, we could take our time and admire these incredible statues by Gustav Vigeland. We took our time until it started pouring down rain and we ran for the entrance. The only disadvantage of the HO/HO busses is that if you just missed one, as we did, then there is another half hour wait. So we went to the cafe in the park to use the WC. Oops, they are pay toilets! Need 5 kroner coins! Not very tourist friendly, I say. But the cashier in the restaurant was kind enough to exchange two dollars for two coins. Yep, a buck to pee!

Finally back on the bus and on to the Kon-Tiki museum, where we saw the boats of the famed explorer and scientist Thor Heyerdahl. You readers who are nearly as ancient as I am will remember his amazing voyages. . The Ra II was a boat of reeds, basically, that sailed 3,000 miles from Morocco across the Atlantic to Barbados in 1970. (It was the Ra II because the Ra I didn't make it.) The point of the journey was to prove that Africans of several millenia ago could have made that journey.

Even more fantastic was the voyage of the Kon-Tiki from the west coast of South America to the Polynesian Islands in 1947. They built a raft of balsa logs, which were light enough to float, but support a superstructure of essentially a large hut and a large sail. Instead of a keel it had four vertical boards that provided stability in the water. They had to cut the logs in the interior of Ecuador, construct a temporary raft to take them down the river to the sea and navigate south along the coast to their starting point in Peru, where they constructed the Kon-Tiki (the name taken from an ancient god). The voyage was 4,300 miles across the Pacific, which isn't always pacific, if you catch my drift. (See what I did there – drift, heh, heh.) The voyage established that the Pacific islands could well have be settled by Incans of South America (although anthropologists doubt that they did). For both voyages, nothing was used in the construction of the boats nor in the navigation which would not have been available to the natives of the time.

We watched a good portion of the Kon-Tiki movie, narrated by Heyerdahl, which actually won an Oscar in the documentary category in 1951. I will get a copy of the movie when I get home, for about half the price of the version being sold in the gift shop, I'm sure!

We also visited the Maritime Museum, which showed a wonderful movie about the western coastline of Norway on a 180 degree screen, a la a mini Imax. What an incredibly beautiful country! And what a hardy populace to live, farm (a little), and fish (a lot). No wonder they were, and are, such a sea-faring people, exploring all over the world, including the North and South poles, especially Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen in the early 20^th century. I may wax philosophic about the Viking spirit on our day at sea coming up.