Posted by Seth on July 8, 2009 under Uncategorized | 
It should hardly be surprising that travel between the Scandinavian countries is very much a nautical affair. The coastlines are enormous and water is truly integrated into the daily life of the vast majority of folks in the region. And so getting between Copenhagen and Oslo can be done either by hopping on one of the many daily flights between the two capital cities or by cruising with DFDS Seaways on one of their ships plying the waters between the two countries. There is a daily sailing in each direction that takes about 16.5 hours. It is certainly not the fastest way to get between Copenhagen and Oslo, nor is it necessarily the cheapest or the most luxurious. But it is probably the most relaxing and certainly it is an enjoyable way to cover the distance.
The amenities on board the ship are typical of most cruise liners, albeit not quite as involved as the mega-ships of the Caribbean. Yes, there is a sun deck, duty-free shopping, a night club, a discotheque and a few restaurants. But there are no swimming pools, ice skating rinks, rock climbing walls or midnight buffets. The ship carries cars in addition to people which limits the number of passengers a bit but there are still about a thousand folks on board enjoying the crossing. And they seem to be a typical distribution that you’d find on any cruise (at least the few I’ve been on). There are families, a slightly higher percentage of older folks and the random collection of guys that seem to be straight out of central casting as “Jersey Guidos” though I’m not entirely sure where they find those guys in Denmark. There was even the random guy who just walked by at 8am with one open beer and about four more rolled up in his shirt; I hope he realizes that they won’t go bad if he doesn’t drink them all this morning.
The ship sets off at 5pm from the ferry terminal in Copenhagen, plenty late that you get a full day for your last day in Denmark. And it arrives in Oslo at 9:30am, just after the morning rush. In between the coastlines of Denmark, Sweden and Norway are the views off the deck of the ship, scrolling by at about 20 miles/hour. Yes, it is a much slower means of transportation than flying, but it is worth it to take a bit of pause in a hurried life of travel.
The arrival onto the coast of Norway is a rather stark change from the Danish coastline. Sure, most of Denmark that you see is part of the capital city area while the Norwegian coast is decidedly unpopulated a a similar distance from Oslo. And that is also part of the allure of this region of the country. Shrouded in a morning fog there are small islands and towns with a few dozen homes carved into the wooded hills of the coast. Truly rather beautiful.
We’ll arrive in port in another hour or so, back to the hustle and bustle of city life for a few hours before heading back out of town and off to the west coast of Norway and the centerpiece of this trip – the fjords.
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A decidedly craptacular photo of the moon and its reflection on the sea.
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Hmmm…interesting juxtaposition.
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Note: This post is showing up a couple days later than it actually happened because I’m off in the middle of nowhere enjoying the fjords but didn’t want to leave the blog empty all week.
Posted by Seth on July 3, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Our trip to Scandinavia was supposed to only really cover two countries – Denmark and Norway. Still, when I learned that we were going to be visiting a friend of my wife’s up in Helsingør, Denmark – just a 20 minute ferry ride across the way from Helsingbor, Sweden – I became somewhat hopeful of adding that to the trip. That hope was realized yesterday as we headed over to Sweden on the ferry for lunch and to wander around for a couple hours.
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| One of the many ferries serving the Helsingborg/Helsingor route. |
The ferry ride between Helsingør and Helsingbor is quick, cheap and easy, with three different companies plying the route and ferries running several times per hour. And at less than $10 for a return ticket the ferry is actually one of the more affordable things in Denmark. We hopped on Scandlines’s ship Hamlet (cute, right?) and cruised across the sunny calm waters and docked in Sweden about 20 minutes later.
Entry into Sweden consisted of just walking off the boat. No immigration checks. No customs. Nothing. Even if we had wanted someone to check out our passports or if we had taxable items on which we needed to pay duty that would not have been possible as those desks were not manned at the terminal. So we successfully invaded Sweden. We then set off to wander about downtown Helsingborg and grab some lunch.
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Locals enjoying the beach near the ferry terminal in Helsingborg, Sweden.
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Helsingborg, Sweden is a much prettier town than Helsingør, Denmark so wandering around was rather more enjoyable. The shopping areas seemed to be a bit more upscale rather than focusing entirely on selling alcohol to Swedes who cross over to Denmark to avoid taxes on their booze (truly the backbone of Helsingr’s economy). There are also the typical tourist sites, including the 500 year old church and remnants from an old castle. Both are quite well done, actually, and worth wandering over to see.
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The only remaining bit from the castle at Helsingborg.
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A rose out in front of the medieval church. Lots of roses all over the region.
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| One of the many shops in the shopping area of Helsingborg |
We also dropped in to the local Italian restaurant for a surprisingly good lunch. My preferred choice was not available and so I ended up with a curried shrimp over pasta, decidedly un-Italian but still rather delicious. And the carbonara was pretty delicious. As an added bonus, I also got to sample the local beer, a lager by the name of Spendrups. Nothing to write home about, but it certainly qualified as cold, wet and beer, three things that I needed at that point.
Overall I must say that Helsingborg is definitely worth the visit. It is a fun, quaint town and has more to offer than Helsingør, assuming that you’re not looking for Hamlet’s castle. Plus it meant that I got another new country on this trip which is always a good thing!
Posted by Seth on June 1, 2009 under Uncategorized |
As crazy as the act of flying for no particular reason other than to collect the miles may be, at least it is reasonably easy to try to explain to people. Elite status and miles to redeem for a reward ticket are relatively easy to explain, even if the other person doesn’t really believe that there is any value in those things. And lots of free drinks and riding in the pointy end of the plane are also relatively well understood. But what about a trip where there aren’t really any miles to be gained, status to be had or – gasp – free drinks on board?? I recently took one such flight and thoroughly loved every minute of it, even with little concrete to gain from the trip.
No miles. No status. Nothing, except the opportunity to fly to a new (to me) airport on a new (to me) airline. And so it was that on a sunny Belizean afternoon I walked to the San Pedro airport (air strip is probably a more accurate description), walked in to the Maya Island Air ticket office and requested a seat on the next available flight from San Pedro to Caye Caulker. Fortunately for me the next flight was leaving in a scant 15 minutes. The agent at the counter made a call on the walkie-talkie to the operations center to inform them that an additional stop would be necessary on the flight – my stop. I handed over USD$25 in cash (how often do you buy an airline ticket in cash??), took my boarding pass (a laminated color-coded piece of paper) and waited out on the shaded deck for them to call our departure.
Ten sweaty despite the shade minutes later the “red boarding pass” flight was called and we walked out onto the grass, around one plane and up to the side of our Britten Norman BN-2. What great luck for me! Not just a new line on the map and a new airline, but I also got my first flight on this particular type of airplane. This was just the icing on the cake. We were assigned seats by the airline employee collecting our passes (I think it was by passenger size but I’m really not sure) and a couple minutes later we were flying at 2,500 feet over the reefs of Belize.
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| Looking down, shortly after takeoff from San Pedro |
A boat crossing the flats between the Cayes |
The flight from San Pedro to Caye Caulker is all of 13 miles long, a distance that the Britten Norman BN-2 covered in a scant 8 minutes. Actually that seems a bit slow, but neither they nor I were in much of a hurry. The flight and the landing at Caye Caulker were both uneventful and shortly after the plane pulled up to the end of the runway I was out the door and staring at the airport:
Just a hundred yards or so past the end of the runway along a sandy path and I was back on the beach, meandering my way towards the downtown area, and I use the term “downtown” loosely. There are a couple bars and restaurants and a few hotels and guest houses. And that is it. It was incredibly quiet there, which is either really nice or downright spooky, depending on your point of view.
The walk from the airport to downtown took about 20 minutes, just enough time to see what there was to see and head over to the ferry dock where I was able to purchase my return ticket to San Pedro on the local boat service. Another 20 minutes or so on the boat and I was back on Ambergris Caye.
Thus ended my 90 minute “mileage run” that had nothing to do with miles and everything to do with being just plane crazy.
Posted by Seth on September 12, 2008 under Uncategorized |
The traffic in Istanbul sucks. There is no two ways about it. The city is on the water, with the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus major impediments to travel there, funneling all traffic through a couple of bridges that are woefully undersized to handle the loads. They are apparently planning on adding an additional bridge on the Bosphorus, but that is still a ways out, as it has only just been approved by the government and the final site hasn’t yet been selected yet. A taksi from the airport to downtown is easily a 45 minute endeavor, at a rate of something around YTL30, which isn’t horrible, but also certainly isn’t cheap by any stretch. The roads are just ridiculously crowded. Not quite as bad as Delhi or Saigon, but close.
Fortunately, they have a pretty solid mass transit system in place. And we rode a lot of it. We didn’t take a bus in Istanbul, but there are plenty of them and it seems there is pretty reliable route coverage and frequencies. Similarly, the ferries cover the water crossings way better than a car possibly could; as busy as the waterways are they are still way better than the bridges. There is even an aerial cable car that operates just below the Hilton Hotel near Taksim Square, crossing over a park for those who don’t want to walk or drive around to the other side. Those are the pieces we didn’t get to try, but there are plenty that we did.
There is a Metro system – actually a few light rail systems that connect at transfer points – that cover the city, from the airport in the West to the Sultanhamet to the Beygolu area across the Golden Horn. There’s another tram system that runs on the Asian side as well, with easy ferry connections. With trains running about every 10 minutes and air conditioned, modern cars the light rail was truly phenomenal. From the airport to the Sultanhamet area was about a 45 minute trip, the same as a taksi, and the cost was two tokens – YTL 2.80 – per person. The one thing that is a bit annoying is that transfer between the various lines requires a new token and fare to be paid, but that’s a minor inconvenience considering how convenient the trams are to the vast majority of the areas that most folks want to visit.
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| The engine that drives the funicular. |
There are also a couple funiculars (inclined trains) that run in the Beygolu area. One of them is almost brand new (~10 years old) and the other is actually the third oldest mass transit system in the world (behind London and a now defunct Brooklyn route), over 130 years old. We tried to ride on both one day and managed to find the new one pretty easily, but the older one was elusive. As we departed Istanbul for Cappadocia we actually still hadn’t found it. As we had a 7 hour connection on our return through Istanbul, however, we had a second chance to find the old one and ride a piece of history.
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| The tunnel for the older funicular route. |
The older funicular was more fun, with the tunnel looking its age and the tram car somewhat newer, but not a ton. And we managed to take the Metro in from the airport, ride the funicular up to the Tunel Square area, have a very long and relaxing brunch and repeat the trip in reverse in about 5 hours. Plus the old funicular has a different fare, YTL 0.90, so we had to buy a different token and that meant another fun souvenir for me. I’ve now ridden on at least the three oldest, so I need to find out what the rest of the old ones are and start planning some new trips.
They also seem to have a “tap-and-go” system where you can put money on a card/pass of some sort rather than buying individual tokens. I certainly don’t speak enough Turkish to try to figure out how that works, but it seems like an easier option if you don’t want to mess with tokens during a visit, though I have no idea if there is a charge for the card and/or a discount for using it.
I’m a big fan of mass transit in general, and even more so when it goes to/from the airport. This wasn’t as easy as the Metro in Washington, DC or BART in San Francisco, but it was pretty darn close, and it was way cheaper and mostly easier than a taksi in from the airport. It will definitely be my transit choice next time I’m in Istanbul.
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| The view inside the car of the newer funicular. |
The platform for the newer run. |
It should hardly be surprising that travel between the Scandinavian countries is very much a nautical affair. The coastlines are enormous and water is truly integrated into the daily life of the vast majority of folks in the region. And so getting between Copenhagen and Oslo can be done either by hopping on one of the many daily flights between the two capital cities or by cruising with DFDS Seaways on one of their ships plying the waters between the two countries. There is a daily sailing in each direction that takes about 16.5 hours. It is certainly not the fastest way to get between Copenhagen and Oslo, nor is it necessarily the cheapest or the most luxurious. But it is probably the most relaxing and certainly it is an enjoyable way to cover the distance.
The ship sets off at 5pm from the ferry terminal in Copenhagen, plenty late that you get a full day for your last day in Denmark. And it arrives in Oslo at 9:30am, just after the morning rush. In between the coastlines of Denmark, Sweden and Norway are the views off the deck of the ship, scrolling by at about 20 miles/hour. Yes, it is a much slower means of transportation than flying, but it is worth it to take a bit of pause in a hurried life of travel.
We’ll arrive in port in another hour or so, back to the hustle and bustle of city life for a few hours before heading back out of town and off to the west coast of Norway and the centerpiece of this trip – the fjords.
