Stavanger, the ‘Aberdeen of Norway’, is a city that has been transformed by North Sea oil and gas exploration and supply and along with its Old Town of preserved, detached wooden houses, was chosen as the European Capital of Culture for 2008.
Located on the Stavanger Peninsula in Southwest Norway, Stavanger was founded in 1125, the year Stavanger Cathedral was completed. The old town, Gamle Stavanger, comprises 18th and 19th century wooden houses whose protected status has enabled the town centre and inner city to retain a small-town character. Sadly our stay in Stavanger was only 4 hours and I had elected to take a boat trip to Lysefjord so I didn’t have a chance to visit Gamle Stavanger. Some fellow guests who did said it was charming so my loss.
The first signs of settlement in the Stavanger region can be traced back to when the ice retreated after the last ice age, so about 10,000 years ago. Stavanger first grew into a centre of church administration and an important southwest coast, market town between 1100–1300. The city's history thereafter is one of a continuous fluctuation between economic booms and recessions. For long periods of time its most important industries were shipping, shipbuilding and fish canning. Today the vast shoals of sardine that enter the Fjord are sent to Poland for canning!
In 1969, a new boom started as oil was first discovered in the North Sea and Stavanger was chosen to be the on-shore centre for the oil industry for the Norwegian sector of the North Sea. Today the city is often referred to as the Oil Capital of Norway, and with the high salaries paid by the oil industry is frequently listed as one of expensive places to live in the world and I can vouch for that; Wow Norway is very expensive!
My tour excursion this morning was a ‘Boat Trip to Lysefjord’, a fjord that cuts some 42 kilometres deep into mainland Norway. We set off in cloudy but relatively sunny conditions and passed through an archipelago of islands before reaching our first destination – Helleren – where a massive overhang of cliff gave shelter to the people who fished and hunted in this area. Today it is an important tourist destination and once greeted by a young Viking (See photo) was to be our source of traditional waffles - circular and the size of a small dinner plate – accompanied by lashings of cream and strawberry jam!! I have to report that even I declined a second waffle.
Refreshments completed we boarded our craft once again to follow the southern shore dominated as ever by towering cliffs of granite that are of the same make up as granite to be found in Scotland and Canada, since they were of course connected some billion years ago!! What you have to remember in sailing the fjords is that the water is a deep as the granite cliffs are high!!
The first stop was at Vagabonds Cave (See Photo) set high up in the cliffs and used by smugglers, it is said the cave was used as a refuge from which coast guards and others were driven off by stones and boulders hurled at them for above.
Next came a small community of exceptionally well-fed and fat goats – three to be precise – who of course are fed by every passing tourist boats. One was so attracted by the food that it tried to board the boat but the crew member who had gone ashore was having none of that! Maybe he had just had enough of being marooned on a small section of grass below the cliffs!!
The most famous natural feature along this fjord is the so-called Prekestolen or Pulpit Rock, a massive rock overhanging the fjord, 604 metres below. The rock is a flat toped buttress measuring 25m by 25m square to which you can climb by road and path from the mainland. It has no safety railings but no one is said to have fallen off to date. The tourist brochures always show arial photos of people enjoying the spectacular views from this vantage point but you will have to make do with a view from below.
I have in fact visited this fjord before and thought I had pictures of the Pulpit but I quickly realised this morning that my previous pictures were of the wrong rock!!
After brief search in vain for some of the 500 seals that live in this fjord we returned in gathering gloom and rain to our waiting ship and were soon on our way to our next port of call Bodo some 700 nautical miles north and inside the Arctic Circle which we will be crossing tomorrow at about 11.30pm.
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