Neither I nor my fellow traveller had been on a cruise before, but suddenly we were sailing from London to Bergen, retracing the steps of the ancient Vikings. When we were in Scotland in 2017, we became entranced by the centuries of exchange and movement between Northern England and Scotland and Norway. We saw a cruise that travelled from Edinburgh to Bergen and became quite excited about the idea. Before you knew it, we were booked to sail from London to Edinburgh, then across the Norwegian Sea far above the Arctic Circle to the Northern-most tip of Norway before working out way down through the fjords and passages of the Norway coast to Bergen, the second largest city in Norway. We hadn't even been discouraged by the fact that earlier that year another Viking cruise ship was nearly wrecked when one of its engines failed in a huge storm and passengers had to be lifted off by helicopter above raging seas.
‘How’, I asked myself, ‘ did I find myself on the deck of a Viking ship at midnight cruising silently through the night between the towering cliffs of Norwegian fjords? I am still amazed that my fellow traveller and I sailed on our first (hopefully not last) cruise only two years ago – in a very different world to the one we inhabit today, just before world cruising shut down indefinitely. Ironically our first ever cruise was barely six months before the whole cruising universe was turned on its head by the global coronavirus pandemic. Overnight the holiday ships of the cruise industry were transformed into refugee boats that were no longer welcome anywhere.
