Well, welcome to Norway! A quick recap... we came up the North Sea quite slowly the last two days, probably only 12 knots. The weather was very calm and we really felt no ship movement until last night. At the bottom of the North Sea, where it funnels into the English Channel, we saw a lot of shipping and a couple of oil rigs, but by yesterday we saw very little.
We woke up to grey skies and a temperature of about 12℃. Haugesund is a large town or small city, on the important channel of Karmsund which offers sheltered shipping between the mainland and the long island of Karmoy. While some of it is very industrial, the residential bits are pretty, with lots of coloured wooden two-story buildings with steep, fishscale-tile roofs.
We got tickets for the hop-on, hop-off bus and toured around for a while. We passed a copper mining town and got off at the old St Olaf's Church. This was beautiful and austere, overlooking the strait.
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| Near Visnes |
Next to the church is a heritage centre. Most of the signage was in Norwegian but with English audioguides. It was a little hard to follow but related to the viking kings who united Norway and later brought Christianity and who were based around here for a couple of hundred years.
Later we took the bus back through town, past the monumen to Harald Fairhair, the first king, then got out in town where we wandered the shopping streets then walked back to the ship.
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