It was raining first thing in the morning so we waited a while for the worst of it to ease off before setting off for our day ashore. The views from the ship weren’t the best. Haugesund may feature in cruise itineraries marketed as visiting the Norwegian fjords but if you’re expecting stunning landscapes even under the best of weather conditions then you’re in for disappointment.

Haugesund’s rise to some prominence in this part of Norway is due to being located on a stretch of water between land masses that provided ships with a shortcut that avoided what could be troublesome waters in the open sea. Fishing and trade naturally grew up in the area and Norway’s first king lived near Haugesund and was reputedly buried near here too, but more on that in a bit.

Our cruise ship docked at one of two islands that group together with the mainland to form Haugesund. Getting to the town from Risøy involved a short walk past some lovely buildings to a bridge which was only completed in 1939. Prior to this point moving between Haugesund and Risøy required use of a ferry. You’ll see from the photos below that the water over which the bridge crosses isn’t too wide but you might notice that it’s quite a height. It’s a pretty steep bridge to ascend so consider that if you’re walking.

Haugesund might not have had the high rocky faces of the fjords surrounding it but it excelled in its architecture which was incredibly varied. Art nouveau façades, modernist concrete structure, and wooden buildings of indeterminate ages were around every corner as we threaded our way roughly along the coast northwards once we’d reached the mainland.

We passed by the bottom of a public area given over to some water features and a statue at the top. Unsurprisingly, the statue was of fishermen. If you travel to any port in Scandinavia you can more-or-less be assured that there will be a statue of fishermen. This particular statue was donated to Haugesund in 1920 and was sculpted by Sofus Madsen. When we’d made our very first trip to Norway back in 2013 we’d visited Bergen and one of the first things to have caught our eye in the city back then had been a statue of a crying boy which, it turns out, had also been made by Sofus Madsen. Always nice to find connections like that.

The most important figure in the history of Haugesund is Harald Fairhair, first king of Norway, and ruler from 872 to 930 CE. Allegedly. Details of the period are a little spotty and owe much to considerably later tales passed down through subsequent centuries. There’s doubt that he even existed. That’s just the way of things, and it’s not unique to Harald here. I’m sure you can think of plenty of people far more-widely-known for whom much has been written but who likely never existed at all. Rupert the Bear, for instance.

Harald’s name appears in several Norse sagas, and in the nineteenth century his name became more prominent in Norway during the country’s move towards independence from Sweden. Everyone needs a hero figure. It was around this time that the determination was made that Harald lived and died near Haugesund which was very handy for the town and future economic benefits from tourism.

Our walk was taking us towards the Haraldshaugen monument dedicated to the king but before we reached it we happened upon a statue to Harald Fairhair on the coastline that was surprisingly popular with visitors. We bided our time to grab a shot without anyone in the way. From this point we could also see our cruise ship docked nearby.

When you travel around Scandinavia a fair bit like we do then you recognise a Lutheran church when you see one. Skåre Church is a mid-nineteenth century place of worship built around an octagonal layout. Records dating back to the fourteenth century indicate older churches stood around this area but with Haugesund being fully established as a town in 1854 there was a need for a larger church for the community.

The nearby memorial statue to Haakon Storsteen is a little bit of a mystery. He appears to have been a local man, an engineer in the merchant navy, who died when the ship he was on sank in 1944. I would guess that his family or the nearby church raised funds for the sculpture since he doesn’t seem to be very noteworthy otherwise. You can’t just put up statues to everyone who dies, you know. The living wouldn’t be able to move.

More fabulously variable styles of architecture punctuated our walk as we continued towards the main memorial. I particularly liked the mid-century modern house.

We arrived at the open, grassy area that was Haraldshaugen but the first thing to catch our eye was a large, stone cross on a small hill, and because it was slightly closer and there were fewer visitors around it we took a look at it first.

This was Krosshaugen, one of the earliest symbols of Christianity in the whole of Norway, dating to around 1000 CE, and possibly erected when local farmers were flexible enough in their beliefs to switch deities to worship. It was good to be able to get up and close to a historical piece like this and the small hill provided for some nice views around the area.

The Haraldshaugen monument was erected and opened to the public in 1872, commemorating the thousand years since the formation of Norway as a single kingdom under Harald Fairhair. The site is considered to be the burial location of Harald but nobody’s really checked, and the monument consists of a seventeen metres-tall granite obelisk on a mound surrounded by twenty nine smaller stone monuments representing the historic counties of Norway. Fans of prime numbers will be pleased.

It was a cool, damp, blowy day when we visited Haugesund and walked to the national monument dedicated to the first king so we didn’t spend a lot of time there; just enough really to take some photos from a few angles, climb the steps to the obelisk, and take another look at the views across this part of Norway’s coastline. It was still possible to catch sight of our cruise ship from here.

We’d originally planned to walk further along the coast, and you can see some of that route in the photo above, but it had taken us a little longer to reach this point than we’d accounted for and we decided instead to head back to the main part of the town and see what we might be able to find of interest in it rather than simply admiring the views along the shoreline, lovely though that might have been. Had we had better weather then we might have chosen differently.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover our look around Haugesund before we’d need to return to the ship one last time and head for home.

If you’ve read the previous article in this 2023 Britannia cruise travelogue series then you’ll know that we’d already left our cruise ship Britannia and walked to the national monument Haraldshaugen, and if you’ve not read that but are interested in any of the bits in this article that reference the first post then now you know where the link to that is.

This post will take us on a walk from the monument south to Rådhusparken, the square and gardens in front of the town hall, then back to cross the bridge to Risøy, the small island at which our ship was docked, and fair warning here: there will be sculptures. Lots of them.

As mentioned in the first write-up from Haugesund, one of the things I really liked about the town and which wasn’t unduly affected by the rainy conditions of the day’s visit there was the variety of architectural styles present in the buildings. There was a lovely mix of traditional-looking houses with fish-scale roof tiles and wooden board panelling painted in a variety of muted colours as well as more modern structures. Nearer the monument it was the older style that dominated.

We had a closer look at Skåre Church on the way back. It wasn’t open, sadly, There’s a little more about its history in the previous post on this.

We next reached Byparken, a public space with grass, benches, a pavilion, and a number of sculptures dotted around. Ludolf Eide, who warrants a bust in the park, was a shipowner, merchant, chemist, bank director, and politician, perhaps owing to the small population of Haugesund in the second half of the nineteenth century and the need for locals to buckle down and take on two or three or more jobs to help out. In that lattermost occupation he served as local councillor, mayor, and vice-consul to both Britain and Denmark. Bjarne Dankel was trained in – and trained others in – church music, and after stints in other parts of Norway returned to his birthplace of Haugesund in 1971 to serve as cantor in one of its churches. Fløytespiller (“Flute Player”) was sculpted by Hanna Jessen in 1954 to celebrate the town’s centenary.

We passed more lovely examples of buildings in Haugesund before entering the more commercial area where shops and cafés were open and doing some business from the locals and tourists alike. The shops didn’t interest us, but we do like a nice sculpture and there were several animal ones here and there in the precinct area. These were by Skule Waksvik, a Norwegian sculptor who specialised in this form.

We’d been walking on a roughly straight route but I departed from it when I spotted an odd-looking sculpture off to one side. From a distance it looked like it had been adorned with garlands by the locals but this turned out to actually be part of the artwork itself. This was Gledessprederen, a 1979 piece by Fritz Røed, commissioned by Bergen Bank. It’s one of three copies of the piece. Don’t look into its eyes. That’s how it gets to you.

Our goal was to get to an open square in the town we could see on the map and the architecture started to modernise quite quickly at this point. Brutalist blocks and more abstract modernist pieces caught my eye and these not-so-historical places also served as canvases for street artists to add some splashes of colour to the place.

That square we were heading for turned out to be Rådhusparken, which had the town hall on one side, a large fountain, and a few more sculptural works of art around.

We’d noticed the name “Amanda” on several buses that had been passing us on our walk through the town. This turned out to be a sculpture by that name, named for a character in a song, and a life-size version of a far smaller award given out annually at a film festival held in Haugesund. The artist is Kristian Kvakland and this was unveiled in 1985.

City And Country is the name of the fountain that resides in Rådhusparken. Carved from red granite, this was the winning design by Nils Flakstad in a competition held just before World War II to sculpt one, but which wasn’t actually completed until 1949 for obvious war-related reasons. Imagery relating to the sea and daily life decorate the panels on the sides of the fountain’s octagonal basin.

Another shipowner got his own bust, although his wife got one too on this occasion. Knut and Elisabeth Knutsen gave back to the city in which they helped drive a lot of improvements to the infrastructure and port facilities that were also highly important to the business that gave them their wealth. The town hall in the square was built with funds from the couple in 1931 while Elisabeth later donated another large sum to improve the square itself. The Doe With Calf sculpture by Arne Vigeland (not to be confused with Gustav (see: Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway)) was purchased with some of those funds. Another of the animal sculptures by Skule Waksvig – sea lions in a small splash pool that was popular with a little boy while we were there – completed the elements in the town hall square that caught our attention.

We started to head back towards the ship at this point, catching sight of Little Arild, a boy with sailboat sculpture by Sigurd Nome, some more of Skule Waksvig’s many animal art pieces in the town, and further examples of street art.

One of the things we’d very much liked to have done would be find a local bar and have a drink, preferably something relatively locally-produced, but the only place we could find on the map that looked like it might address this desire in Haugesund only opened one hour before our ship was due to leave. That time constraint and distance we’d need to cover to get back aboard, along with our recollection of just how steep a bridge it was we would need to traverse, plus our natural aversion to not leaving things like “getting back to the ship before it sails off” to the absolute last minute all added up to us skipping out and leaving the Hauegsund mainland behind us.

That bridge was as steep and unforgiving as we remembered it from the crossing earlier in the day, and just like then I made sure to stop a couple of times to take photos and have a short break. We’re not fit people.

Those old wooden buildings in their muted colours and variations on several designs looked lovely as we reached the ground level of Risøy and made our way to the port.

In the next post in this series we’ll be back aboard Britannia when I’ll share photos of the views seen from our balcony during the sail away from Haugesund, and then it’ll be just one day at sea before this enjoyable week’s cruise to Norway comes to an end.

Haugesund is very much more an industrial port than one for cargo, fishing, or tourism, and we could see lots of buildings and dockside equipment to facilitate the manufacture and maintenance of ships large and small as Britannia pushed away from the town.

An obvious item that caught our eyes in Haugesund as Britannia departed was the Penguins FPSO. Quite what the name meant, we had no idea, and just looking at the huge structure didn’t provide any further clues.

“FPSO. First Prussian Stationery Office?”

“That seems over-the-top for lever-arch binders and coloured card supplies even for the Prussians, and I’m not sure there are any Prussians any more.”

“There was a Franco-Prussian war in the nineteenth century. This might be the place where the captured troops were interred to be never heard from again.”

“The Franco-Prussian Soldier Oubliette, you mean? It’s plausible when put alongside a stationery office, but less so on its own, and since when did you become an expert – if that is the word – on nineteenth century European conflicts?”

Thanks to the internet we’ve since discovered that FPSO is a Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading unit, and Penguins is a field in the North Sea that Shell UK will extract non-renewable resources from in order to please its shareholders. Okay, all of us who aren’t sociopathic aren’t pleased by that, but from an engineering perspective it’s an impressive piece of manufacturing, and when you further consider that it was built in China and shipped to Haugesund on the back of a vessel designed to carry things like this weighing well over 30000 tons, that vessel then semi-sinking itself to slide out from under it, and remember that the F stands for “Floating” once more, it’s quite mind-boggling.

You didn’t visit this page to look at extraordinary lumps of red metal bedecked by cranes, though, so on with the views from our balcony on Britannia as our cruise ship sailed away from Norway.

Haugesund features on lots of cruise itineraries that will market themselves as “Norwegian fjords” cruises but it’s not located along or at the end of a fjord itself so the majestic sight of sheer rock faces gliding past and nearby snow-capped mountains is not one you will experience on a ship while approaching or departing Haugesund. But, once you’re just away from the port area there are lots of low-lying islands with aesthetically-pleasing rocky coasts and an abundance of trees and grass on some, and these are lovely to see. If you’ve spent the day ashore in town, as we had, then the rocky islets make a great natural contrast to being surrounded by houses and other types of buildings for the most part.

As our ship lost the sheltered protection of some of the larger islands nearer Haugesund, so those smaller land masses we now started to pass lost the short grass, bushes, and trees. The wind, especially with the ship now able to increase speed, became more biting and it wasn’t too long before we headed in from the balcony and into the warmth of our room.

On this penultimate evening aboard P&O Cruises Britannia we’d made a reservation at one of her speciality dining venues, Epicurean. We’d had overall good experiences at this particular venue on other ships in the P&O fleet (no, not you Iona) and with this being our first cruise on Britannia it made sense to compare.

The restaurant itself was very nice and there were no complaints from us about the service or location or menu, but my notes from the day simply state “good, but not great” and that’s been a growing feeling with successive Epicurean visits on different ships. There was a sense that the food was good enough to warrant the speciality tag, but not as clearly so as it had been when we’d first tried this dining location on a P&O ship. That may be partly us, becoming older and more jaded, but looking at the menu and photos now there’s not enough difference and innovation from the main dining options to me. I do believe these speciality dining rooms on ships should maintain a core identity but they also need to evolve a little more faster.

I’m being picky to some extent, and if you’ve never cruised with P&O before or you’ve never had an Epicurean meal on a P&O ship then it’s definitely worth doing as we all have different expectations and tastes, but we’re more likely as time goes on to become more selective in choosing to pay extra for these places if they can’t entice us in with something new.

So now we reach the final day on board Britannia and as I’ve already mentioned, it was grey, cool, and not particularly inviting outside – although the pools still attracted some hardy swimmers – and there wasn’t a whole lot to interest us inside either, although there’s nothing unusual in that. We like to relax in quiet places, do quizzes, read books, and have a few drinks, and the delights of free foot assessments, seminars on the benefits of sleeping with pink quartz under your pillow, and bingo (for which the jackpot still hasn’t been won!) don’t excite us.

A few photos from the top deck during our post-breakfast wander, and the view from our balcony a little later in the day after we’d given our room steward enough time to clean our cabin.

To finish this final sea day, some cocktails – we didn’t drink many because we weren’t on the drinks package (never worth it for us with P&O) – and the last evening’s meal in the main dining room.

We ended up chatting for some of the evening with a couple consisting of a Danish husband and German wife which I only mention as it’s fairly unusual to have non-Brits cruising on a P&O ship. A lot of these more regional cruise lines mostly appeal to and are patronised by their home nations’ travellers so P&O is almost exclusively British, AIDA is German, and Costa is Italian, but there’s nothing to stop anyone else from booking a cruise if they’re prepared to jump through a few hoops to do so. We may even try something like that ourselves one day.

And that brings this cruise on Britannia to a close.

We weren’t sure we’d like Britannia ahead of this holiday for a number of reasons. Being a Royal-class derivative we knew she’d have small balconies, the lack of an affordable drinks package for cocktail drinkers is not in P&O’s favour, and cruising on ships with fellow Brits is never our first choice for getting away from it all. We also didn’t know where she’d lie on the scale that has the older, smaller, better ships (for us) at one end and the larger, more modern, awful ships (for us) at the other. As it was, closer to the better ships by far. We liked Britannia and we’d be happy to cruise on her again with the right itinerary and pricing.

We were very happy with this itinerary too, giving us a chance to head back to some ports we’d not seen for a decade on what had been at the time the cruise that really instilled the cruising bug into us, and we got to new places too; not as many as planned, but that’s the weather for you, and if you’re going to have a cruise affected by the weather then you could do a lot worse than have it happen in the stunning surroundings of the Norwegian fjords.