The Boeing 777 heads eastward from San Francisco on a Great Circle route that takes us across cold northern latitudes towards London. On the tv screen on the seatback ahead, in between showings of movies, is a relief map of the areas over which we are flying, and a tiny image of our plane as it passes over places with names like Kuujjuaq and Godthab and Keflavik. The screen also informs us that we are at an altitude of 35,000 feet, some 6,000 feet higher than Mt Everest, and that the temperature outside this cosy aluminum envelope that surrounds us is minus 65 degrees Fahrenheit. On Channel 9, if we are interested, we can hear the cockpit voice transmissions as the pilot talks to Iceland Radio, then to a controller with a Scottish burr.
Ten and a half hours later, after three movies, two decent meals, and uncounted visits to the tail-end lavatories, the rattle of seatbelt buckles being released is a sign that we have arrived at London's Heathrow airport. We are met there by representatives of Holland America Line, who steer us and our luggage to a bus that takes us northeast through the Essex countryside to the port of Harwich, there to meet the MS Amsterdam. We're accustomed to such clichés as 'floating cities' and 'oceangoing hotels' used to describe big cruise ships, but the sight of this massive white-and-navy-blue hull with its nine decks and twin smokestacks is still pretty awe-inspiring. The check-in process goes quickly, even with the continuous flow of passengers (totaling over 1300) that come in by the busload. It is sunny and warm, and we are grateful finally to enter the air-conditioned comfort of our staterooms.
A shower, a nap, and a change of clothes, and we go to the 'La Fontaine' dining room for our first of many meals aboard. The food is excellent and the service impeccable, as we have come to expect from Holland America Line.
Cruise Impressions
Sunrise over Oslo fjord – muted mauve, rose, green, yellow and gold. The sea is calm, its surface barely broken by ripples, and the great ship's wake fans out from her sides in a wide vee. The city of Oslo is pretty, but of all the cities we will subsequently visit, it is perhaps the least memorable. It has the look and feel of a small provincial town in North America. Our tour guide makes no mention of Edvard Grieg at all, which is strange. We will find later that the Swedes hold the Norwegians in less than high regard (they consider them country bumpkins).
Helsingborg, Sweden – At the wharf at 7:00AM, below three flagpoles atop which flutter the Swedish flag (gold cross on a blue field), the Stars and Stripes, and the Dutch tricolor, is a high school marching band in uniform with baton twirlers and fifes and drums. Early-rising passengers line the starboard rail on the lower promenade deck, applauding these rosy-cheeked Swedish boys and girls who have come to greet the 'Amsterdam'.
We hop on the shuttle bus into the heart of town. The main square is faintly reminiscent of the one in Nice, France. We hike up to the Kanän, the medieval castle and keep dominating the city center. Helsingborg is separated from Denmark by the Øresund, at this point only a mile wide. The afternoon bus tour brings us back to the castle, but there is no time to visit the keep that had been padlocked during our earlier visit. Our guide is the prettiest young woman, a recent graduate from a teachers' college. We drive by the seaside villas, visit the Sofiero gardens with their rhododendrons, and sample the Rämlosa spring water, which tastes rusty. An oompah band is playing in the arcade; the place is obviously set up for visiting cruise passengers.
Warnemunde, Germany – My wife and I are up at 4:30AM to take the train from Warnemunde to Berlin. The ride in an old corridor car is long, hot, and uneventful. Of the ship’s 1300 passengers, about 900 have signed on for this Berlin tour. The train could not accommodate them all, so some had to make the trip by bus. The guide, a cheerfully chubby girl, provides us with box lunches on the train. The countryside here on the North German Plain is flat and undistinguished. Though I am a railroad aficionado, this train ride is not one for the memory-book. We arrive at a station in the former East Berlin and are herded into waiting tour buses.
Our guide in Berlin is a Jewish, and possibly gay, man in his forties, well-versed in Berlin's history. We drive along Unter den Linden, pass Alexanderplatz, and end up at the Charlottenburg Palace, where, marvel of marvels, I see Watteau's famous 'Shopsign of Gersaint', easily his masterpiece. The other masterpiece is Chardin's 'Market Kitchen'. Seeing both of these in the original made my day. One sour note: an incident with a museum security guard and a member of our tour group (an attractive dark-haired woman traveling with a teenage boy, probably her son). She was carrying a light jacket draped over her arm, and the officious guard motioned to her to put the jacket on, implying no doubt that she could be stealing a work by hiding it under her jacket. Seems some Germans have not yet shed that old Teutonic arrogance.
The Berlin Story is a sound and light show in a shopping arcade – just so-so. Excellent lunch at the 5-star Kempinsky Hotel on the famous Kurfürstendamm (called Ku-damm for short).
Rønne, Bornholm, Denmark – After picking up a pilot outside the breakwater, the Amsterdam makes a 180o turn and backs – actually BACKS – into the snug harbor and its berth. At 7:00AM there is a band on the pier welcoming us. One of its members is a pretty blonde tuba player, the only member of the band wearing high heels. At every port so far our ship's arrival has been welcomed by a band, and now here in Rønne there is this group of musicians, most of them middle-aged and in street clothes, except for this attractive, slender, blonde woman with nice legs holding her tuba against her bosom like a baby.
Rønne is a small, neat, pretty town with more bicycles than cars. The picturesque houses are of brick and tile; there is a small church off the main square, and even a Chinese restaurant. We have limited time there. After a visit in the local supermarket, where we buy some caviar and beer, and then walk back to the ship from the main square.
Stockholm, Sweden – slight overcast and a drop or two of rain. The Royal Palace is quite work-a-day in appearance. Not a big deal except for the Gobelin tapestries, the Don Quixote room, the 'White Sea' room, and the Bernadotte quarters. The Swedes are a practical people, and their royal palace reflects their no-nonsense approach to life. Our tour guide, a short pudgy middle-aged woman in a black dress with a white collar, has a nunnish look and manner. Our time in Stockholm is again limited, so all we do there (at least for the men) is to people-watch in the Drottninggatan, while the women shop for souvenirs.
Helsinki, Finland – another early-morning arrival. We stay aboard ship the entire morning, and only join the land tour at 2:00PM. It takes us through the clean and well-kept town, letting us off at the Senate Square, where atop a rise sits the three-domed white church, the Lutheran Tuomiokirkko. Next we visit two other tourist attractions, the Church of the Rock, and the Sibelius monument in Sibelius park, where we take pictures alongside the composer's sculpted steel head. Back on the bus, the guide plays 'Finlandia' through the speakers. I ask her whether she has the 'Karelia Suite', she says yes, but there's not enough time.
That evening we have a Dutch-theme dinner, the women wearing white bonnets and the men Hans Brinker caps, all of cheap cloth and made in China. Kitschy enough to make you think of sticking a finger in the dike.
St. Petersburg, Russia – We sail slowly into the port at daybreak. An uninviting flat landscape of rusty cranes and gantries, corrugated iron sheds, greets the early promenaders. Smoke rises into the still morning air from campfires on the shore away from the pier. A female Russian immigration or customs official, austere in brown uniform with peaked cap, strikes an odd note with her sexy backless high-heeled slippers. A note here about young Russian women – their clothing takes on the most incongruous combinations of styles and taste. One museum guard at the Peterhof wears a sleeveless silver lamé cocktail blouse with workaday denim jeans and platform-soled slip-ons.
The Peterhof palace (Petrodvorets in Russian) is a long, hot bus ride outside of St. Petersburg over bumpy roads, past unprepossessing Soviet-era apartment blocks and green areas on which families picnic and sunbathe. Beat-up old Ladas and Volgas overtake our bus on the right – some looking ready to fall apart at any moment. At the palace we wait in line at the entrance, with the sun beating down. A five-piece ensemble dressed – in this heat – in 18th century costume, and bewigged, plays tunes for the benefit of the Americans. Since arriving at the Peterhof, several bands and groups have struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner", trusting to the generosity of the tourists with their hard currency. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tourists, both foreign and local, and the tourist guides inside the palace have to shout each other down in order to be heard.
The Peterhof itself is well-restored, but when you have seen dozens of palaces, any new one, no matter how unique it is claimed to be, begins to look like any of the others. To preserve the exquisite inlaid-wood floors of the palace, visitors must wear felt-soled slippers over their shoes. The damn things won't stay put; they keep slipping off to one side.
After dozens of rooms and corridors, we are happy to be outside again, overlooking the amazing fountains and waters of the Peterhof, with the garish gilt statues flanking them. Milling throngs of holiday-making Russians and cruise ship tourists fill the gardens. Our guide has a hard time rounding up all her charges.
At these high latitudes so soon after the summer solstice, the days are long. There is enough light at 11:00PM outside to read by and to take photos without using a flash.
The 'STOP' signs at intersections here are in English. A busload of teenagers, probably on a school outing, passes our bus, and then we in turn pass it, and at each encounter through the bus windows, the kids wave and smile, a friendly, cheerful bunch of youngsters. We wave and smile back.
St. Petersburg (Day Two) – An early get-up again, and it's dull and drizzly outside. The Hermitage (Winter Palace) tour begins but first a visit to St Isaac's Square. There must be a dozen buses around the square spewing forth tourists, from the Amsterdam and from other cruise ships, including the Crystal Symphony. Our guide is Talia, a slender pretty girl almost my height. Bad luck on the bus as we arrive at the Hermitage: my camcorder jams.
At the entrance to the Hermitage Museum, just at the foot of the steps, is a kind of shallow pit filled with debris (cigarette butts mostly) over which is a metal grille. It dawns on me that that's for scraping the snow off one's shoes in the wintertime.
The Museum is worth the entire trip – a true gem to rival the great art museums of the world – the Prado, the Louvre, the MOMA in New York. Its collection is vast, and in the short time we are there we barely see the smallest fraction of it. Just the Impressionist galleries alone would require a whole day to survey, and we only had twenty-five minutes to rush through all of them.
Surprise of surprises, friends from the MS "Crystal Symphony" find us in the room with the malachite urns – they had kept an eye out for us. Considering the crowds in the place it is nothing short of a miracle that we made contact.
At Tintoretto's "Conversion of St Paul" a lady from our group hovers near and says to me: "I thought the guide said 'Conversion of the Soul'." I reply that I had heard her say Saul, which was Paul's name before the conversion. The lady says happily: "Are you a believer? Oh, I am too."
After a box lunch in a park, we go to the Peter and Paul Fortress on an island on the Neva River. Again, scores of tour groups, each one getting into another's way. It's no way to sightsee.
In the evening we take another tour, many but not all in formal wear, this time to the Yusupov Palace, where the 'mad monk' Rasputin met his end. Champagne, caviar, and operatic arias made for an impressive cultural, though very unusually warm, evening.
Leaving St Petersburg we pass slowly by the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, a vast installation, but the only submarines we see are older diesel-engine jobs, as the big Russian nuclear subs are up north in Murmansk.
Tallinn, Estonia – the brass band on the pier is the largest one yet – I counted 23 musicians. Our lanky guide Andres is (as one elderly Southern couple asserts when they are left behind at the main square) the 'worst one yet'. Fact that the guide has B.O. and looks like the character Lurch from the old Addams Family sitcom does not help at all. Estonia is interesting for having been a former Soviet Republic, and still has many ethnic Russians living there. The country and its inhabitants look somewhat better off than what we saw in St Petersburg. The Estonian language is closely related to Finnish.
Two nights at sea before we finally arrive in Copenhagen. We celebrate July 4th aboard. The Baltic Sea is a very busy waterway. Being almost landlocked, it is ninety percent fresh water from the snows melting into it.
Amazing number of old people in wheelchairs on this cruise.
On the TV news we learn that western Europe from Wales to the Mediterranean have been battered by storms, and here in the north it's lovely blue skies with hardly a cloud.
Copenhagen
Debarkation at Copenhagen is very well-organized, as has been every phase of this Holland America cruise. They seem to think of everything. Our rooms at the Sophie Amalie Hotel in Sankt Annae Plads (St Anne's Square) are not yet ready, so we stow our luggage, and head to the main pedestrian street, the Strøget, about ten blocks from the hotel. Crowds of people on the street. Sunny and quite hot. A visit to the famous Tivoli Gardens shows us the Danes at play.
In the evening we walk from our hotel to see the Little Mermaid – Copenhagen's symbol – and from there we take the sightseeing bus (A hundred kroner for a two-day pass) to see a bit of the City.
The following day, our last, we again sightsee on the upper deck of the open-top bus, then lunch at No 27 Strøget, a wood-panelled restaurant bar. Afternoon we visit the Fisketovet Shopping Center and have dinner at the Cap Horn Restaurant in the heart of bustling Nyhavn, the former seamen’s neighborhood, now a trendy meeting place for the crowds of young people sitting all over the cobbled streets, drinking beer and wine. All the open-air restaurants are full.
We visit a fabulous photography exhibition on Køngens Nytorv Square. The whole square has been set up with kiosks and stelae on which the giant photographs are displayed, lit by a network of overhead lights. The photos were taken from the air in many parts of the world by photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The show is titled "Jorden set fra Himmelen" (Scenes from the sky). And all round the square the floodlit buildings give the evening an extra sparkle.
