July 12 Hammerfest Norway

After a day at sea we berthed at the northernmost town in the world, Hammerfest.  And it was a bright sunny day.  A good day to walk around.

We docked across the harbor from the city center.  At 70 degrees north, the sun is low on the horizon all day long.  This is the Hammerfest Lutheran Church.

 We took the shuttle bus to the Tourist Information Center downtown.  Hammerfest proudly displays its claim to fame.

 For those long, long winter nights there's bowling.

 A caravan parking lot right near city center.

 Inside the Lutheran Church, where they were preparing for a funeral. 

 Nearby is the old church, which is the only building in Hammerfest that survived WW2. Between Allied bombings and the German scorched earth retreat everything else was destroyed.

 There's a large a large hill behind the city center (and most of the residents live on the far side of this hill) and a walking path up the hillside.  We climbed partway up and took some pictures.

 This panorama expands.

 Back in town center...

 This world explorer is not well known because he was just the cook.  But he was the cook on many different explorations, and is most well traveled explorer of all.

 We walked back to our ship, about 1.5miles along the harbor.  It was a nice day, it was good to get out.  This is the Catholic church. St. Michael's.

 As we neared the ship we saw a research vessel feeding the town's adopted Beluga Whale, Hvaldimir.  He showed up in May and they have been feeding him 200kg of fish every day.  Sort of like a cruise ship passenger.

 Hammerfest was the terminus of a geographic earth study.  This memorial was built in 1856 to commemorate the first project to measure the exact size and shape of the earth.  Measurements were made in the form of a chain of triangulation along the meridian stretching from Ismail on the Black
Sea in the South to Fuglenes in Hammerfest in the North. It determined that the earth is not round, but oblate, projecting out at the equator. Since we had docked across from town, the Meridian Column was only 200 meters from the ship.

 There was a scheduled feeding of Hvaldimir after we had returned to the ship.  A big crowd at Pier 7, but we had seen the more intimate feeding earlier that morning.

Not pictured -- a couple of Norwegian F-16s came zooming past the ship at about 11am.  The airport was just a kilometer away, up on the hillside. Impressive display, no doubt arranged by our Cruise Director Shawn.

Also, at these high latitudes internet satellite coverage is spotty.  The intersection of free time to blog and satellites overhead may become vanishingly small.  But I'll catch up later if necessary.