Our visit to Stavanger had seen us looking around its old town, several museums, and the colourful buildings of Fargegaten, and you know all that already because you’ve been reading every single cruise travelogue post in chronological order – what a strange person you are – but the time had come to leave this Norwegian city and port so we boarded Britannia and made our way to our balcony to make use of it and enjoy the views as we sailed away.
Directly opposite our balcony was the part of Stavanger in which we’d seen the street art and had a drink in the bar just prior to walking back to the ship.
There’s not a lot to be said about the cruise away from Stavanger. While it’s a port that’s often listed on cruises claiming that they’re visiting the Norwegian fjords, it isn’t down a long one with stunning landscapes and towering rock faces to take the breath away. It’s actually a very short journey to get out to the open sea and that mostly involves passing a few low-lying islands. The low-lying islands are very nice, of course, and if you’re at all interested in geology then that adds something else to just the aesthetics, but a sail away or into Stavanger is one of the less memorable, let’s say.
I’m always interested in seeing other ships when we’re cruising around the world, and not just because I’m a fan of being on the sea or because I was born and raised and still live on an island city with strong naval connections, although there might be something to that too. As a keen inhabitant of the Fediverse I like to take part in some of the regular themes of posts that crop up across the various communities, one of which is a German one that posts ships each weekends. It’s nice to find interesting-looking vessels or ones with history to share.
The platform supply vessel Coey Viking stood out for all the obvious reasons you can see in the photo below. Eye-achingly bright yellow. Shaped like a truck without a shipping container to transport. It’s actually a hybrid ship, making use of its battery when operating close to shore to reduce environmental impact, which all sounds grand until you realise that the platforms it supplies are oil and gas ones at sea. I suppose every little helps, and I can’t go into too much about environmental impacts when I like to cruise, after all.
Of course, I won’t engage in any argument from someone trying to talk to me about how damaging all this is while using an expensive device made with rare earth metals, transported at great cost from the other side of the world. We’re all hypocrites, but falling out with those above your own personal line of this much hypocrisy is okay but that much is bad is how religions and cults form, and I’m an atheist.
You’re dying to know what it was we had to eat in the main dining room on Britannia that evening after our sail away from Stavanger, and fortunately I was there to take photos. Cruise food can be very hit-and-miss but I made notes at the time that this was actually very nice which suggests it was actually very nice indeed.
Entertainment on cruise ships is something we often steer away from and that was the case here too as we bought a bottle of wine and retired to our room early to watch a movie in the quiet comfort of our cabin.
In the next post in this Britannia cruise travelogue series we’ll be arriving at a new port for us in the form of Nordfjordeid. Unfortunately, though, arriving is all we end up doing and the day is spent cruising along the Nordfjord instead.