Today we start to visit some of the towns that we only called at in the middle of the night on the way up and also re-enter what we think of as Fjords, smaller causeways rather than the open sea we have been experiencing. On the way into our first stop of Hammerfest we passed Melkoya which is where a lot of the Gas from this region is mined. We had an organised tour in Hammerfest which took us to the towns main sights. The first stop was the UNESCO site on the Struve Geodetic Arc, this represents the measurements that were made in the form of a chain of triangulation along the meridian stretching from Ismail on the Black Sea in the South to Fuglenes in Hammerfest in the North. The meridian is an imaginary line on the Earths surface running from Pole to Pole and celebrates the work of the Russian astronomer Freidrich Georg Wilhelm Struve who wanted to confirm Sir Isaac Newtons proclamation that the earth is not exactly spherical. Friedrich spent 39 years between 1816 to 1855 triangulating his way through Europe. The Struve Geodetic Arc was the longest Arc measured until the 1900s and considering the circumstances under which it was measured was remarkably accurate. At the time of the measurement it ran through 3 countries, Norway, Sweden and Russia across 34 stations, these stations are now in ten countries Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and the Ukraine. We had a walk round this then got back on the coach and went to the viewpoint which has fantastic views across the bay, where we got some more information on the town. It was established as a town on 17 July 1789 when it was known for Pomor trade , hunting and fishing, Pomor is the name given to the tradespeople of northwest Russia and northern Norway, the area in now more widely known for energy and petroleum. It was occupied during the war but as the Germans retreated they adopted a scorched earth policy where everything was burnt to the ground. Our final stop was at a slightly strange museum dedicated to the post war reconstruction of Hammerfest. Towards the end of the war the Germans forced the 75,000 inhabitants of Finmark to move south. Of this number 50,000 actually moved and 25,000 hid in the hills or caves over the winter, as soon as the war was over they started to move back but unfortunately no buildings were left standing so they built a series of prefabs that people lived in. During the occupation schooling for the children of the area was suspended which meant that many of the Sami children – the northern tribes couldn’t actually speak Norwegian when they returned to school at the end of the way, unfortunately this had the effect of causing an entire generation to be classed as inferior and in an effort to integrate they lost a lot of their traditions and culture. After this whistle stop tour it was time to head back to the boat. There is a beluga whale called Vladimir that has escaped from somewhere that comes into the harbour to be fed everyday and as we arrived back at the boat he was being fed, they are very white and would be almost impossible to spot in open sea but it was quite obvious in the harbour. We stood and watched him for a while then went into lunch. After doing some more washing we went up to the observation deck to watch the world go by literally. We called in at a really small cute town called Oksfjord then continued our journey but unfortunately the weather is clouding over rather than it being sunny as we head south but at least we can still see the scenery.
