Steve and Cathy's Blog

We get a surprising welcome when we arrive in Kristiansund harbor around 8:45am. A cannon on the hill of the town is fired three times to mark our arrival, an auspicious and delightful start to our day. It’s a beautiful summer day, with just a few clouds and little wind. Our ship docks right in the town next to a shopping area. Quick factoid: Kristiansund is believed to have been the first location of human habitation in Norway. Remains believed to be from around 8000BC have been found here.

Kristiansund is both the name of a town and a municipality. The town, where we are docked, is only 2,040 acres, and there are 18,292 residents, making it one of the most densely populated towns in the country. It is located on three islands. The municipality in which the town is located has a population of 24,300 people occupying 34 square miles, so you can see that once you leave town, it is very rural.

Our excursion, Atlantic Ocean Road and Berglatt Marble Cave, begins promptly at 9:30.  The first thing we experience as we leave the town is a trip under the water in the Freifjord Tunnel that descends 430 feet under the Freifjorden (fjord). It is 3.2 miles in length, was opened in 1992, and replaced the ferry that had operated there for many decades. We travel along for about twenty minutes and arrive at the Atlantic Ocean Road.

Here is a Wikipedia description of this famous engineering project: “The Atlantic Ocean Road or the Atlantic Road (Norwegian: Atlanterhavsvegen / Atlanterhavsveien) is an 8.3-kilometer (5.2 mi) long section of County Road 64 that runs through an archipelago in Eide and Averøy in Møre og Romsdal, Norway. It passes by Hustadvika, an unsheltered part of the Norwegian Sea, connecting the island of Averøy with the mainland and Romsdalshalvøya peninsula. It runs between the villages of Kårvåg on Averøy and Vevang in Eida. It is built on several small islands and skerries, which are connected by several causeways, viaducts and eight bridges—the most prominent being Storseisundet Bridge.

The route was originally proposed as a railway line in the early 20th century, but this was abandoned. Serious planning of the road started in the 1970s, and construction started on 1 August 1983. During construction the area was hit by 12 European windstorms. The road was opened on 7 July 1989, having cost 122 million Norwegian krone(NOK), of which 25 percent was financed with tolls and the rest from public grants. Collection of tolls was scheduled to run for 15 years, but by June 1999 the road was paid off and the toll removed. The road is preserved as a cultural heritage site and is classified as a National Tourist Route. It is a popular site to film automotive commercials, has been declared the world’s best road trip,^[1] and been awarded the title as “Norwegian Construction of the Century”. 

The Storseisundet Bridge is the most prominent feature of the road, and a photo of it heads up this post. It is a beautifully designed piece of infrastructure, and there is a lovely rest area with a walking path surrounded by wild flowers that was built there several years after the bridge was built because so many cars stopped to photograph this bridge that it became a traffic hazard.

We leave the bridge to complete the Atlantic Ocean Road and, in about a half hour, arrive the the Bergtatt Marble Cave. The fact of the matter is this: this is a mine, and has been since operations began in 1938. It is a mine built into the side of a mountain, and most of the operations are hundreds of feet above the road below. In the process of mining this mountain, enormous caves have been produced, and water that has been dripping down from the top of the mountain filled many of the “rooms” where the marble had been removed, forming a lake.

The mine has always been owned by one family, and the grandson, who looks to be in his fifties, now heads up the company. Being the very clever and creative entrepreneur that he is, he and his family saw an opportunity to take this industrial entity into another commercial operation: tourism. Cathy and I became quick admirers of his in a fast few minutes after arriving.

The marble that is mined here is not for statues, tabletops or building material. The entire production is and always has been used in the paper industry. Formerly it was used to reduce the acidity in paper. Since the 1980s, it is used in the paper itself. If you buy a high-end magazine or read a glossy brochure, there is likely marble in that paper. The stuff is mined like coal, blasted out of seams, crushed into powder and shipped to paper mills.

Now, as we all know, the paper industry isn’t all that it once was, with much communication being electronic instead of printed. Back in the 1990s, this mine shipped 500,000 tons every year. Today it ships half that amount, which is still a lotof marble. 

After eighty years of blasting away and then hauling away all that marble, what now exists are twenty-five miles of man-made caverns, tunnels and a big underground lake. There is a very sophisticated air handling system, of course, and a place that is 43 degrees Fahrenheit all year long. So the owners have created a fascinating and unique tourist attraction.

There are two buses on our excursion. They turn off the mountain at the sign Marble Cave Tours that is mounted on the bed of a 1940s-era Volvo pickup truck. We climb the mountain slowly up a narrow quarry road, passing examples of the machinery used in the mine. In about ten minutes, the buses enter a huge tunnel, and in a couple of hundred yards, we are parked in an enormous room. 

We are at the entrance to the cave. It is brightly lit with a huge chandelier – made out of the marble they mine. We walk through a door through an entrance that looks like we are going into a modern two-story building. We are in the hall where the tour will begin. There are round tables with chairs around them, a huge stage (they hold concerts here too), and buffet tables. 

We help ourselves to coffee, tea and a delicious bakery product whose Norwegian name we never do learn. They are actually pancakes folded in half, stuffed with either goat cheese or a confection made of sugar and cream. Whatever it is, both taste delicious. As we eat, the owner of the company welcomes us, explains the origins of the company, basically how the operation works, and the market they serve. To our amazement, he also explains that the entire mining operation is done with eight employees – brothers, cousins, an uncle and a couple of people outside the family.

We then watch a 17-minute video that explains the operation in detail. It really is interesting – and efficient. They show the entire process, from blasting to the powdered marble being loaded onto trucks heading for the paper mill. 

After that video, our host introduces a second video that concerns the next idea for use of the mine that the company has come up with: hosting server farms. Here’s how Wikipedia describes a server farm: “A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers – usually maintained by an organization to supply server functionality far beyond the capability of a single machine. Server farms often consist of thousands of computers which require a large amount of power to run and to keep cool. At the optimum performance level, a server farm has enormous costs (both financial and environmental) associated with it.^[1] Server farms often have backup servers, which can take over the function of primary servers in the event of a primary-server failure. Server farms are typically collocated with the network switches and/or routers which enable communication between the different parts of the cluster and the users of the cluster. Server farmers typically mount the computers, routers, power supplies, and related electronics on 19-inch racks in a server room or data center.”

The video runs about ten minutes and explains the reasons that this mine is an ideal location for such highly sophisticated equipment. Essentially, these operations require three things: security, constant temperature control, and lots of electrical power. 

• The mine being only accessible through manmade entrances only provides the security. The equipment is inside a mountain! 

• The mine has a constant 43-degree temperature year-round. And the cavernous rooms are not at all affected by outside weather.

• Norway produces so much low-cost, highly reliable hydroelectric power that it exports power to its neighbors.

As we hear about this company’s plans, having formed a new company they named Trollstorige, Cathy and I are saying to each other: This guy is brilliant. He has an asset whose market is changing, so he changes his company to take advantage of the new economy. And the mine will keep operating, with enough marble to keep producing at today’s rate for another one hundred years.

Well, we are led to another room by the edge of the ‘lake.’ We are given life vests and hard hats and board one of two wooden rafts powered by small electric outboard motors. We quietly motor through the cave, lit with colored LED lights with the quiet strains of Celtic music in the air. In ten minutes, we arrive at another room and disembark. Our host explains how the lake was formed and how the water is ultra-pure. We are each given a small cup to sample it. Then it’s back into the rafts to go back. It’s back on the bus, which maneuvers to turn around in this enormous room. It’s down the mountain we go.

For the next forty-five minutes, we travel through more gorgeous Norwegian countryside. Back under the tunnel and over a long bridge to our ship. It’s only around 2:15, so we decide to browse in the brand new shopping arcade across from the ship. We don’t find what we’re looking for – more postcards – and wander down the street and find a souvenir shop that had just what we wanted. It’s a beautiful afternoon in a harbor full of interesting boats and ships. We start on our way back and see an ambulance – a marine ambulance – coming in to dock. Reminds us of the fireboat in Portland, Maine.

We also pass by a statue of the Clipfish Woman. Kristiansund is another town with a large fishing industry, and the statue of a woman from perhaps a century ago is a reminder of the earlier industry. Cod was the big catch, and it was the job of fishermen’s wives to lay out the fish to dry on rocks around the harbor. The cod is not in such abundance today, and the fish is processed in drying houses, but fishing is still synonymous with Kristiansund.

We return to the ship around 3:30 and relax, preparing for the 5pm sail away. We see a large ferry come into the harbor with horn blasting. We see it on the way out an hour later. We will see it again after we leave, heading into another small town. There is an astounding amount of marine activity here.

We have a tranquil sail out of the harbor, passing by some very nice condos, people watching and/or waving to our ship goes by, a yard full of oil drilling pipe (reminding us of the new Norwegian economy), and a lighthouse that speaks to the similarity of this country to the Maine we know. What a nice day we’ve had.