Hurtigruten is the best Gruten
February 14, 2018 3:05 PM   Subscribe

All aboard! Hurtigruten (advert with pronounciation) is a Norwegian cruise, ferry and cargo operator. Their most famous route, the Norwegian Coastal Express, is the 1,200 mile service (in 5 minutes) between Bergen and Kirkenes, stopping at 34 ports including Ålesund, Brønnøysund, Svolvær, Harstad, Tromsø, Hammerfest and Vardo - and then back again. The round trip takes 12 days. Passengers can watch the passing scenery, northern lights, deckhands, or (soon) underwater drone footage. Using 11 cameras, the 134 hour trip was shown in 2011 as a continuous live nationally popular "slow television" broadcast (in 37 minutes, part 1 of 30). Though bridges and tunnels and (soon) tunnels for boats have made coastal Norway more accessible, the route is still popular with locals and tourists.
posted by Wordshore (25 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
(Darn; I missed a link to include a MetaFilter Previously which is about the broadcast, from seven years ago)
posted by Wordshore at 3:16 PM on February 14, 2018


For my fellow slow TV fans, the Bergensbanen 7-hour trip and the Hurtigruten 134-hour trip are both also available on your local friendly torrent tracker (not just Youtube), and worth every gigabyte.
posted by tclark at 3:26 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


I love this kind of thing. I like to throw it on my second monitor and pretend I'm working while on a trip.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 3:29 PM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


As to not abuse the edit window, is "slow TV" what I'd look for to find more of this kind of thing? I really do love having a video of, I don't know, a freighter on the Atlantic or whatever when I'm not using my other monitor.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 3:32 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Previous Slow TV on MetaFilter:
- A steam train chugs and tootles through the Worcestershire countryside
- Lambing season in the north of Iceland
- BBC 4 TV Goes Slow - fancy watching a 2 hour uninterrupted canal trip?

The Bergen train ride one I like, as have done it in real life. But my favorite is the Sleigh Ride one, which is now repeated on the BBC every Christmas as it was so popular the first time around. It's two hours of bliss. A two minute snippet, and you may have to hunt down a good quality version as they keep moving/getting deleted; here's a not great quality one: [1][2].
posted by Wordshore at 3:39 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


For the 7h 14m trip between Oslo and Bergen, this one appears to have not many ads, most near the start.
posted by Wordshore at 3:46 PM on February 14, 2018


Headed there in June!
posted by Chrysostom at 3:50 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


The 7h 14m trip between Oslo and Bergen was seatback TV on BA last time I flew with them. Sadly, I only had a 3 hour flight, so couldn't take advantage.
posted by ambrosen at 3:56 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


And not to mention, while we're discussing the Norwegian coast, the tunnel that's being built which is both deeper and longer than what you'd need to go from Northern Ireland to Scotland, including going under Beaufort's Dyke.
posted by ambrosen at 4:00 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


This leaves me pining for the fjords...
posted by PhineasGage at 4:09 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Netflix has the 11 hour Telemark canal, with subtitles as well as the Bergen train ride. Search for slow to find it.
posted by zabuni at 4:33 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yes, searching for Slow TV gets you several options on Netflix. I liked the Telemark Canal one - the train one made me a little motion sick.

I wanted to do a Hurtigruten when I was in Bergen but I just had no time, it was a very quick trip. I hope to do one next time I go, some ladies I ran into raved about the cruise they’d just come in in and it was the only time on my trip that I felt a pang of “Oh no, I missed out.”
posted by angeline at 4:42 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Please feel free to join the extremely drawn-out discussion of Bergensbanen minutt for minutt on FanFare!
posted by roger ackroyd at 4:43 PM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


A great daydream! That last stop is where the arctic railroad from China and Russia will deliver goods.
posted by Oyéah at 6:27 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


And not a single cruise goes to Stavanger or Haugesund. Boo! I need to do my research in Trondheim and a place 120km equidistant from Stavanger and Haugesund.

(I don't care, I'd still love to do it. I could fly into Stavanger, rent a car and do my research thing, fly from Haugesund to Bergen, cruise a bit, and then ditch the boat in Trondheim where I do even more research. Oh my kingdom for disposable income and a reliable catsitter.)

Also my favorite Norwegian SlowTV involves trains. But I'm like Janet and Derek when it comes to trains.
posted by elsietheeel at 7:16 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Your title jests, but I literally only realized recently, after two decades in Scandyland, that it’s not that! (Hurtig = fast, ruten = route, if thats not spoiling the joke).
posted by Iteki at 9:39 PM on February 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


rent a car and do my research thing, fly from Haugesund to Bergen

Just drive from Haugesund to Bergen, its less than 3 hours
posted by biffa at 2:08 AM on February 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


Your title jests, but I literally only realized recently, after two decades in Scandyland, that it’s not that! (Hurtig = fast, ruten = route, if thats not spoiling the joke).

Did notice, playing with Google Translate, that:

* Hur tigruten -> How the tigruten
* Hurt igruten -> Hurt the gutter
* Hurti gruten -> Hurried the grid
* Hurtigr uten -> Quickly without
* Hurtigrut en -> Quick check one
* Hurtigrute n -> Fast route n

Your suggestion seems the most likely.
posted by Wordshore at 5:40 AM on February 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


As a devoted fan of ferries in general (and locally to me, the Alaska Marine Highway System, which seems like it might share some similarities) I am going to have to add this to my list.
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:05 AM on February 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Just drive from Haugesund to Bergen, its less than 3 hours.

I think I may have been thinking about the distance between Stavanger and Bergen and not Haugesund. And I don't even need to go to Haugesund, so I'll just drive straight from Marvik and call it good...

...for this imaginary trip to Norway that I will never be able to afford to take.
posted by elsietheeel at 7:21 AM on February 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Thanks for adding something to my "bucket list." The only dilemma is would I rather go in winter and see the Northern Lights (but could I handle the cold and little daylight), or summer for the Midnight Sun...
posted by dnash at 7:58 AM on February 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


Hurtig = fast, ruten = route

So it's like an analogue of Shinkansen (“new main line” in Japanese), only for an area of crinkly coastline.
posted by acb at 3:24 AM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


The crinkly fjords are difficult to cross but the other side of that is that the mountains are pretty substantial too, and so historically it was difficult to get from A to B to C very easily. So for anyone living up the coast who needed anything it was easier to send by ship instead of going overland. Over time it has become more touristy, as Norway now has lots more roads, rail and place services.
posted by biffa at 8:34 AM on February 16, 2018


A few decades of oil surpluses make a huge difference. As Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People suggests, Norway has been using part of its oil largesse to allow its people to live broadly dispersed, rather than having to move to population centres for economy; as such, there are expensive and elaborate railway lines, roads and tunnels spanning huge areas of rugged countryside. And also, even sparsely populated areas far from elsewhere get decent mobile phone coverage.

Though one of the main railway lines in the north of Norway dates back to before independence, crosses the Swedish border and is still run by the Swedish national railway.
posted by acb at 9:09 AM on February 16, 2018


I nearly went into that. Its pretty fascinating to see some of the infrastructure projects around Norway. We were up in the Lofotens a few years ago and they had dug a tunnel through a mountain for over 1km so that kids in a small village wouldn't be cut off from school in the winter. Then there's the tunnels that run for miles under the sea, and the bridges.
posted by biffa at 10:12 AM on February 16, 2018


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