Not All Viewpoints Are The Same
Alesund – 15th June
Alesund basically has two main tourist attractions, that’s if you’re not into museums, art galleries, and boat trips. For the uncultured tourist like us you can view some old colourful buildings on the harbour or climb the 418 steps to the Kniven Viewpoint. The Kniven viewpoint is on Aksla Hill, along with the Fjellstua viewpoint and a few others. As we were staying at the opposite end of the Aksla Hill than the steps we thought it made sense to climb to the summit, walk along the ridge line and then descend by the steps to town, collecting a few geocaches along the way. We discovered all the geocaches and also discovered that we were in fact staying at the bottom of the hill so we didn’t save any energy by not climbing the steps. For the non-fit you can drive up, catch the Hop-on Hop-off bus or catch the little tourist train, much smarter idea. These photos are views of the Alesund area from the Fjellstua viewpoint.
This photo is from the Kniven viewpoint looking down onto Alesund City. You have to jostle for position as there are two cruise ships in port, plus other tourists, a gay pride parade and a children’s festival.
A lot of effort went into posing for this photo on the cantilevered lookout platform. I had to get all the up and down streams of foot traffic to get out of Roger’s way for a clear photo, as well as I had to walk back up the steps leaving Roger down at the bottom to take the picture.
We also had to evacuate the area to do a stealth-mode geocache find while 6000 tourists filed past.
Some nation’s tourists need quite clear instructions when climbing steps, you can hear people asking “are these the stairs to the top?”. The other photo shows one of the cruise ships leaving so we knew it was slightly safer to go into town with 6,000 less Covid spreaders. There were very few hand rails as it was to assist a safe journey down without the coughers and nose blowers constantly touching the rails and reducing my desire to use them.
We went into the city centre to find lunch, avoiding the children’s outdoor theatre and the stragglers of the Gay pride parade and found some rowers on the harbour. Their coach had bought them all an ice cream in a tub; they had to back up to him, grab the ice cream, row away and then pose for a photo. Roger thought that this was a balancing exercise, whatever it was the rowers looked chuffed with the ice cream.
Today’s lunch: a ham, cheese and salad (minus the cucumber) roll, brown-cheese pikelet, and a Dammsugare with a white chocolate Norwegian flag.
A Dammsugare is a Scandinavian marzipan sweet treat and translated from Swedish means vacuum cleaner because it is shaped like an old hoover and is filled with ‘sucked up’ cake crumbs, nuts, spices and left over rum from Christmas.
These are the colourful old buildings you can see from the Kniven viewpoint, they are called Brosundet and aren’t actually that old. Fire destroyed most of Alesund’s buildings and history in 1904 and the city had to be rebuilt.
Today's Random Photos
Today’s ABBA tribute is ‘Hey Hey Helen’ (1975) for the resistance groups who operated in Alesund during WWII. A number of groups used fishing vessels to get people out of the city when Nazi Germany occupied the area. They risked their lives as the seas were rough and from the death penalty imposed by the Nazi’s.
So you’re free at last
And beginning to forget the past
Does it make you sad
When you think about the life you ha-ha-had?
But you’re right, you had to take a second chance
So you fight to find your freedom!
The statute is called Englandsfarten, translates to England shipping, which is misleading because most of the boats took the freedom seekers to Scotland, the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands, not England.
On the subject of misleading information the second photo is of a recycled wooden beam with a plaque to indicate how environmentally conscious they are by turning it into a seat. They don’t draw on the point that they created a carbon footprint because they shipped the beam from Denmark.
