The very first time we’d set foot in Norway was back in 2013 when we took our second ever cruise, that being aboard Crown Princess. Our first port of call on that cruise had been Norway’s second largest city, Bergen, and with us effectively being complete newbies at the whole cruising malarkey – it had been five years since our honeymoon cruise and everything had been a bit of a blur at the time since it had been so spectacular and different – we’d done no research about what to do, hadn’t seen any organised trips that interested us, and had ended up walking around the place without any plan at all. We didn’t even know where the ship had docked on that cruise and, because Princess had laid on free shuttle buses in this city we were unfamiliar with and it was raining, the route taken to drop us off near the lake, Lille Lungegårdsvannet, was all a mystery.
Bergen would also be the first Norwegian port of call for our 2025 Ambassador Ambience cruise in search of the Northern Lights, but only because we’d not been able to dock at Haugesund as planned for the day before and had been treated instead to a lovely bit of scenic cruising along Hardangerfjord instead.
We still hadn’t seen any excursions that really grabbed us by the neck and said “Do us!” so we’d decided we were going to tackle the city on foot once more, only this time with more of an idea about what to see and with modern technology in the palm of our hands allowing us to track where we were. It’s weird to think about those early cruises when something as simple as opening a map on the phone wasn’t actually possible and when you relied far more heavily on printed material and a general sense of direction.
We decided to stay aboard Ambience for a late, quieter breakfast and the early morning trivia, and with the ship being emptier and there being less competition this allowed us win a coveted Ambassador Cruise Line stress ball. If you’re feeling envious about this then you may borrow the ball to squeeze it a few times and return to something approaching your normal temperament.
While I don’t know for sure where Crown Princess had docked back in 2013, I suspect it was to the south west of the city centre. Ambience, however, was docked on the northern side of Vågen, the bay that enters the central part of Bergen and around which the oldest buildings can be found. Our loose not-much-of-a-plan for the day was to walk around, pay a bit more attention to the sights and architecture, and to make our way to the city’s aquarium which was on the southern side of the bay. The first sight we came to was that of Bergenhus Fortress and the Rosenkrantz Tower nearer the road. The fortress, built to protect the harbour entrance, dates to the middle of the thirteenth century when Bergen served as the capital of Norway before Oslo supplanted it.
A statue of Sigurd Asserson was initially a bit of a puzzle as this particular civil servant’s history didn’t seem to connect him to Bergen at all, but he did serve as director of the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries from 1918 to 1937 and that entity’s headquarters are in the city. Understandable, really, given the easy access to the North Sea and the large number of fishing vessels in Bergen’s harbour.
As we were passing the area we popped into Bryggen, the old Hanseatic quarter of the city and popular tourist spot. We’d explored here on our previous visit to Bergen and my wife had bought a ring there that she’s wearing now even as I type this. It’s an attractive part of the city with distinctive, tall, wooden-boarded architecture, but there wasn’t a whole lot of places of interest to us within its narrow alleys on this particular trip.
The building with the distinctive stepped and crenellated gable below looks like it is or was a church but the religion in this case was meat, as the structure, Kjøttbasaren, built around 1874, was originally a bazaar dedicated to controlling food fraud and hygiene. These days those inside or out will still be worshipping food and drink as the building hosts a restaurant, bar, and global coffee brand.
As we reached the innermost point of Vågen we passed another building familiar to us from our first visit to Bergen. The prominent, white-boarded building promoting its restaurant and microbrewery was something I photographed over a decade before so I had to do so again from about the same position, this time taking advantage of the sunshine and bright blue sky to really make the structure pop. We do like microbreweries but from reading online it looked like this was a place you could only visit as part of a group tour and tasting experience rather than just arrive and sample some beers. Possibly true, possibly not. I guess if you were to eat there then you could order drinks too, but none of the online information was very clear and as it was still quite early in the morning we didn’t pop in to verify one way or the other. It was in the back of our minds that we might visit it on the way back to the ship later in the day although we wouldn’t end up doing so.
We continued our walk on the southern side of the harbour, looking across the cool and inviting water to the parts of the city we’d already passed by.
Probably my favourite piece of architecture on this side of the water was Skur 14 Øvningslokaler For Musikk, a repurposed space for musicians to rent out rehearsal spaces and put on small concerts. I couldn’t find anything about the building history but it has a blend of late 1930s Art Deco Streamline Moderne with the sci-fi feel of Googie architecture that emerged from it in America in the 1940s.
Despite being surrounded by hills, Bergen is generally pretty flat, but as we neared our destination on the Nordnes peninsula we did need to head up a relatively short slope and it was here that my wife aggravated an old injury. We would end up curtailing several other vague plans for the day as a result, not wanting to make an irritation into something worse with the promise of snowy destinations later in the cruise, but for now we pressed on towards the aquarium.
For reasons I can’t remember we couldn’t get in to see the fish tanks but the rest of the aquarium was open and with penguins, otters, seals, tortoises, lizards, and frogs featuring highly in my wife’s list of favourite animals (everyone’s got one) this wasn’t too much of a disappointment. We spent a lot of time in particular around the penguins. Coloured tags on them could be matched up to a list of names around the enclosure and we were thoroughly entertained by the occasional inelegant diving off the rocks into the water.
With the aforementioned aggravated injury to my wife on our minds we decided we’d make a slow loop back around to the ship via one other identified target to hit. First up, we passed another fortress – Fredriksberg – which didn’t provide any option to explore inside although a statue outside it dedicated to mothers and children in war made for a decent framing device for a photo.
The place we’d aimed for, and eventually found after a few wrong turns, was Apollon Platebar, which the website may lead you to suspect is just a vinyl record store. It is one of those, and a very nice one too if you want to find something a little different, but it’s also a craft ale bar with a great list of beers to try. Did you know that we like local ales and ciders when we travel? Well, now you do. We stayed for two and, with no need (or desire) to rush back to the ship, we would have stayed for more but we’d come dressed for the conditions outside – surprisingly warm and sunny – while the interior was apparently kept at “just above fridge levels”. The locals possibly found it toasty but we got cold enough to cut our planned drinking session short. A bit of a shame but we’d definitely come back, albeit with more layers.
We started now on the bimble back towards the cruise ship and this took us past several sights we remembered from visiting Bergen in 2013: the pavilion, the Sailors Monument, the Grieg statue, and Sæverudmonumentet, which appears to be a deconstructed Stargate. The person with gull on his head represented in the statue atop the tall pillar is Christian Michelsen, involved in the dissolution between Norway and Sweden, and the first prime minister of an independent Norway in 1905.
We’d been informed that Ambassador Ambience would be staying in port overnight so there was some discussion between me and my wife about whether we would head back out after getting on board, showering, and having some dinner, just to see what Bergen’s night life was like, keeping an eye out for places that wouldn’t be too far from the ship as we headed towards it, but in the end we decided not to risk any more strain on already injured limbs. We took our time retracing our route along the harbour waterfront as the sun got lower in the sky with an occasional halt to do some souvenir shopping.
To finish off this day spent in Norway’s second city here’s a look at the view from our balcony and some food and drink we enjoyed on the ship.
It was good to be back in Bergen and there are more things there that we’d like to see whenever we next get around to visiting it. Hopefully, less than a decade between trips this time. The aquarium would be worth a return just to see the tanks we’d missed out on viewing on this occasion, and we certainly wouldn’t be averse to revisiting the bar too in order to see how many other beers we could check off.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series my wife gets the chance to rest her injured leg on a sea day after a morning sail away from Bergen.