Our boat Kong Harald in the fjord.
Hjorundfjord is 35 kms long and 2 kms wide. At the point where we anchored to go into Urke on smaller tender boats, the depth is 440m. But further out at Alesund it goes down to approximately 600m. We stopped at the small town of Urke at the end of the fjord. This stunning view is of the mountains and the tip of the fjord which is not unlike Milford Sound in New Zealand. What they call fjords in Norway, they call sounds in NZ. The big difference between this fjord and Milford Sound is the lack of habitation at the NZ end.
A climb up one of the mountains in Urke was offered as part of an excursion. These excursions on the Hurtigruten cruise are very expensive, something like Euro150 per person. We will choose our excursions very carefully as mostly you can also explore on your own. Andrew of course braved the climb on his own and he overtook the official group on the way up and went further. He was back in time to catch the second to last tender boat taking people back to Kong Harald.
These are colourful and shaggy Norwegian sheep.
This chap found a sheep with a broken leg somewhere on the mountain and he brought it down on his shoulders to deliver it by boat to its owners across the fjord.
Here is a closer view of the kind man and the photogenic sheep.
Another stunning shot of the mountain with a house in the forefront.
We sailed past quite towering mountains with small green hamlets at the foot of each. The fjord is full of small hamlets like these all along the shores. It is not an isolated remote area but part of the land where people live and farm wherever possible. The sheep go wandering up the mountains and probably get brought in before winter sets in.
Alesund (popluation 40,000) was our next port of call and we docked here for a couple of hours, allowing people to wander along the streets. The town is set out over a hook-shaped peninsula and is now home base for Norway's largest cod-fishing fleet and it is an attractive, lively town with very nice and some colourful buildings.
The city's unique architectural heritage is documented in a former pharmacy, the first listed Jugendstil (art nouveau) monument in Alesund. The building is now the Jugendstil Museum which was unfortunately closed, it being Sunday. I took a photograph through the window of what is still set up as the original pharmacy. Sadly, the photo is blurred due to being taken through glass.
Jugendstil is a type of architecture that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It modernised design of houses from the eclectic historical styles of the earlier centuries. We first came across Jugendstil style houses in Helsinki last year. There too Jugendstil architecture was common.
Here in Alesund this art nouveau architectural style is the legacy of a devastating fire (reminiscent of what happened much the same time in Chicago) in 1904. But in Chicago the result was quite different - no Jugendstil but skyscrapers.
Two dwarf statues. Norwegians seem to like statues a lot and some are quite bizarre and often amusing.
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