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ARIADNE VAN ZANDBERGEN / ALAMY
O
Clockwise from top: Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth. Trondheim’s colorful warehouses and Nidaros Cathedral in the background. Little auk colony at Magdalene ord, Norway.
ON DAY 7, THE MIDWAY MARK in Queen Elizabeth’s mid-summer voyage to Norway, the captain’s announcement sent a thrill of expectation through the ship: “We have clearance to sail further north than our original destination – to rarely-visited Magdalenefjord.” And the next morning, we refugees from heat stricken Toronto and our – mainly British – fellow travelers peered from our staterooms to find ourselves in a world of snow covered mountains, sweeping glaciers, icefields and flawless snow bowls perfect enough to make a skier drool. Our voyage was taking us from the ship’s rain-swept UK home port in Southampton northwards along the awe-inspiring west coast of Norway – surely one of the world’s most beautiful countries—to the fogs and chills of the Svalbard Islands, 400 miles north of the mainland. We rushed on deck that day to get our first stunned look at the breathtaking scenery into which Queen Elizabeth had unexpectedly sailed. Magdalene is called a fjord, but it’s not the long, narrow type normally associated with Norway, instead it’s a wide and lovely bay surrounded by dozens and dozens of close-packed peaked mountains topped with snow with the Gullybreen Glacier sweeping down from massive icefields inland.
Magdalenefjord is located in the far north of Spitsbergen, the largest island of this barren archipelago and for a couple of hours the ship remained there, spinning slowly on its axis to give everyone time and opportunity to soak-in one of the great vistas of the Arctic world. It was an entrancing interlude in our trip and one to be cherished since concerns over this so-fragile environment are threatening to result in a ban on ships. We moved on, back south to Ny Alesund, one of the few tiny communities on these ice-bound islands, some of the loneliest and most northerly outposts in the world. Those of us who elected to tender ashore spent an hour or so wandering through the wooden buildings that house a community of 180 during the summer months of 24-hour daylight; once a whaling station and coal mining village, now only 35 hardy souls remain working in scientific research. Svalbard is the size of Ireland and the total population is around 3,000 in the summer … the locals are quick to tell you there are more polar bears on the islands than people. The bears are that common and in the absence of winter pack-ice are ashore in the summer so the few visitors are warned not to leave the boundaries of the settlements without a properly armed escort. This is surely the most remote corner that Queen Elizabeth has visited in her year-round wanderings across the globe. In fact, the ship’s master, Commodore of the Cunard fleet Christopher Rynd, told us we had reached a point on the globe 79 degrees 35 minutes north, only some 700 miles from the North Pole. We returned south to the Norwegian fjords, for a time always in sight of the glorious Svalbard coastline, peak after peak of snow-covered mountains reaching down to the ocean with not a sign of human habitation.
28 CRUISE HOLIDAYS
RYAN RODRICK BEILER / SHUTTERSTOCK
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