July 21st Sognefjorden, Norway

We will have two posts on this day, and this first one is going to be mostly photographs. We are traveling almost the entire length of the Sognefjord fjord, which runs for 127 miles from the ocean eastward. We will end up in the small town of Flam.

The ship’s guest lecturer, Sherry Hutt, told us yesterday that we absolutely must be up by 6:00am, even though our arrival in Flam isn’t until 10:00am, because the scenery we will see on our journey through this fjord will be magnificent. Steve is up by 5:00am, and sees that we have already entered the fjord. The weather is, unfortunately, very cloudy, but that has its own beauty. But Sherry is dead on. It is incredible what we are seeing.

Now a few statistics about the 128-mile long fjord to give a sense of how majestic it is: 1) it reaches a maximum depth of 4,291 below sea level, and the greatest depths are in the central parts of the fjord. 2) The average depth, through 65 miles in the central parts, is 3,300 feet. 3) The width is up to 3.5 miles. 4) In most places, the cliffs rise almost straight up from the water to heights of 3,300 feet and more. The mountains near the sea average around 1,600 feet in height while the ones in the central and eastern can be a mile high or more. 5) The mountain range in the inner , southeastern end of Sognefjord rises to about 6,600 feet and many of the peaks are covered by the Jostedalsbreen, continental Europe’s largest glacier.

There are hundreds of waterfalls, some of them thousands of feet in length. There are many small villages, and some isolated houses and farms. Rarely do we see an actual road, and we surmise that much of the transportation, freight and passenger, is only by boat. But the Norwegians are master tunnel builders, so we would not be at all surprised to learn that tunnels have been bored through these mountains.

As explained in an earlier post, Internet service on this cruise has been sketchy sometimes. Part of the reason is that we are so far north that the ship’s antennae do not have the best angle to the satellite. But I cynically suspect that all of us have become so spoiled by superb Internet service that even when we are in the middle of the ocean, many people feel free to spend all day watching YouTube cat videos, soaking up all the available bandwidth. But admittedly, downloading photos from Steve’s lap[top to this blog site is certainly a contributor, so I get he has no right to whine about it.

Speaking of photos, I attempted to download a bunch of them on to this blog post. Unfortunately, the Internet speed is so slow that this task will take hours to accomplish. I have posted them all on Facebook, which loads much faster. I would appreciate it if you would look for them there in a post I made just a few hours ago (July 30th).