Ferry Tale

Sitting in our rented Ford Escort beneath the indifferent eye of Oslo’s royal palace, my wife, Anja, and I were studying our dog-eared Baedeker’s for answers.

We had a decision to make. Drive 170 miles to Goteborg, Sweden, then hop a three-hour ferry to Denmark, or take a 13-hour ferry ride from Oslo through the Skagerrak, a broad arm of the North Sea, directly to Hirtshals, Denmark.

For me--landlubber extraordinaire--a boat is like a dentist’s chair. The less time you’re there, the better. I voted for Goteborg. Anja, while more inclined to sea travel, had little desire to spend 13 hours on a car ferry, glued to a wooden bench eating snack-bar food.

We folded up the map and aimed the car south. Five minutes later we succumbed to logic (and rush-hour traffic). A long ferry trip was preferable to a nighttime drive that would wear us out for days.

Anja called the travel agent, a perky-sounding woman named Sonja who was only too happy to outline our sailing options. It turned out that there were three boats departing from Oslo that fit our schedule. The cheapest fare Sonja could find was $140 for the two of us, the car, and a sleeping compartment.

“What about without the sleeper?” I asked, eyeing the Escort’s back seat. “No go,” Anja relayed. “You have to take a sleeper.” It was a racket, to be sure, but we were too tired to fight. Anja surrendered up the credit card number. “Well, at least we’ll sleep,” she said, smiling. I said nothing, my mind already envisioning car-ferry accommodations: a large room filled with bunk beds and Finnish fishermen.

Our boat was called the Color Festival. It was part of the Oslo-based Color Line fleet and roughly the size of one of Jupiter’s moons. Anja took one look at the floating leviathan and got excited. I pointed out the huge line of trucks waiting to board and told her to calm down. Suffering awaited.

After driving onto the boat and parking in that maniacal “Closer! Closer! Closer!” manner that so typifies car ferries and their captains’ desire to maximize every inch of cargo space, we set off to find our “room.” For $20 extra we had chosen to sleep above the car park level. I couldn’t imagine the carbon monoxide dungeons that awaited those who decided to save money.

As we walked down carpeted hallways following a uniformed maid, I had to admit that things looked far better than I expected. But, then, my hopes were low. The maid inserted an electronic key, then two distinct sounds could be heard. The first was the door clicking open; the second was our jaws dropping to the floor. There before us was not just a “sleeping compartment” but a room. A real hotel room! A hotel room with a giant double bed, a bathroom with a shower, a stereo, a window the size of a small movie screen and an unrestricted private view of the passing fiords.

Anja and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. Then it hit us. We were on a cruise ship!

Now, we weren’t what you’d call cruise people. We didn’t believe in the Love Boat. We weren’t British. And we weren’t octogenarians. (All preconceptions we had regarding the cruising set.)

Furthermore, we hadn’t signed on to a cruise; we were simply in transit, going from point A to point B. What had happened? Dropping her bag, Anja immediately set off to find out. Determined to be miserable, I sulked a good 30 seconds before following in hot pursuit.

Our first stop was the elevators. With nine floors to cover--six with entertainment possibilities (not counting one’s sleeping level)--we quickly discovered that elevators are indispensable to cruising. Before too long we found ourselves in a restaurant--no difficult task because, as we would shortly learn, the Color Festival had seven of them. And this was no snack bar. Rather, it was an elegant 450-seat dining room nestled in the rear of the ship where, through a wall of windows, one could watch the sun dip behind the receding Norwegian coast.

In addition to the other restaurants, we found four bars, three nightclubs, two stores, a small casino, a couple of saunas, a live floor show, and what could only be described as a large bar mitzvah room. There seemed to be so much to see that we began to wonder if 13 hours would be enough time.

The Color Festival was a floating country club. And, as we later learned, it is the norm in ferry travel in these parts, rather than the exception. There are dozens of cruise lines offering overnight excursions through the Baltic and the North seas. And this not only includes intra-Scandinavian travel, but also trips to and from England, the Netherlands, Iceland and Russia.

*

Given the high volume of traffic, the cruise-ferry safety record seems generally good. But following the 1994 sinking of Estline’s Estonia, in which 936 passengers drowned in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland, the ferries have come under greater scrutiny. In the wake of the Estline disaster, Europe’s worst maritime disaster this century, the International Maritime Organization instituted new safety regulations and a group of European countries is planning even stricter requirements. According to B.J. Mikkelsen, owner-president of Eurocruises, a U.S. sales and marketing firm that handles many European ferry accounts, the Estonia-based Estline and others have begun frequent inspections and redesigned some of the hydraulic doors--thought to have played a role in the disaster--that allow cars on and off.

Meanwhile, for the price of a hotel room, clever travelers can get transportation, entertainment, sightseeing, a good night’s sleep and their own car at the end of it all.

They can also get drunk. Having gotten the lay of the land, Anja and I had turned our attention to our fellow boaters. Short of a regrettable spring break I spent in Fort Lauderdale 10 years ago, I couldn’t recall the last time I saw so much uninhibited imbibing. Tourists of all nationalities had staked out their little corners of the ship, settling in for a long night of midnight sun and endless drink.

On the open-air top deck, one large group was gathered around a man with a ukulele who energetically sang what must have been the only song he knew: “Lucille,” with the memorable refrain, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.” It turned out the man was a professor of languages from Iowa, and although he sang this same song at least 15 times in a row, no one seemed to mind or, indeed, even notice. Everyone just happily sang along, only stopping briefly when a German tourist in the group merrily threw up on his shoes.

*

Anja decided this was the perfect time to make her escape, and she left me sitting top deck with the probing query: “I wonder if there’s a swimming pool below?”

As the professor let loose with another mournful chorus, I struck up a conversation with a still-sober young Dane named, oddly enough, Harry. Harry was a veteran traveler on the “big boats,” as he called them. “You see, what you have to understand is that you’d spend just as much on a hotel as you would on a room at sea going some place.” Harry, it seemed, was an expert on maximizing his travel dollars. The previous summer, he told me, he had used his Eurail card 14 nights in a row in order to sleep each night on a train running back and forth between Paris and Amsterdam. “You board at 11 p.m. and you wake up in a new city at 7!” he said with a smile, and then wandered off in search of “some ladies.”

As it turned out there was no full-size pool, though Anja did discover the tax-free shop. We were now proud owners of matching Color Festival hats. If we didn’t look American before with our backpacks and faded jeans, the baseball caps were the kicker. Our fellow sailors--a melange of students, tour groups and what looked like some misplaced opera-goers--smiled that European smile at us: part condescension, part resigned acceptance.

As the night progressed, however, we focused not on each other but rather on the impenetrable mountainous landscape of the fiords that bordered us to the east and west. It was a tough country, but passing through it so easily--as over a desert in a plane--it seemed to beckon in that serene and inviting way that rugged uninhabitable land can from a distance.

Hours later, with dinner in our bellies, the sun finally out of sight behind the fiords (for all of 20 minutes on this summer night), and the last of our Norwegian kroner safely added to the blackjack dealer’s coffer, we returned to our room. We had so engrossed ourselves in the great cruising arts of seeing and doing--including a two-hour floor show that featured the ebullient rantings of a trilingual emcee and the auspicious gyrations of a Norwegian drag star--that we had left little time for rest. But no matter. Had we stuck to our original plan, we would just now be arriving in Goteborg, tired, hungry and cheated out of a unique and totally unexpected adventure.

Sleep came quickly, so quickly, in fact, that we never did find out if our cabin also came with room service. Perhaps next time, say from Hamburg to Newcastle. Or maybe from Stockholm to Helsinki. Or . . . well, frankly, it’s not the destination that matters so much as the points in between.

As Robert Louis Stevenson, himself no stranger to sea travel, so aptly put it, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. The great affair is to move.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Das Ferry Boat

Many overnight car-ferry services operate in Northern European waters. The U.S. sales and marketing firms Bergen Line and EuroCruisesrepresent a number of them. Reservations encouraged.

Represented by Bergen Line (information and reservations, [800] 323-7436):

The Color Line: Six ships, and overnight cruises between Oslo and Kiel, Germany; Kristiansand, Norway, and Hirtshals, Denmark; Bergen, Norway and Newcastle, England.

One-way rates from Oslo to Hirtshals, Denmark, during high season (mid-June to mid-August), $72-$156 per person, double occupancy, depending on class of room and day of the week. One way low-season rates, $40-$124 per person, double occupancy. Car rate, $40-$124, depending on day of week and season.

Silja Line: Eight ships, and overnight routes between Stockholm and Helsinki; Stockholm and Turku, Finland; Travemunde (on the Baltic coast of Germany) and Helsinki; Helsinki and Tallinn, Estonia, and Vassa, Finland, and Umea or Sundsvall, Sweden.

One-way rates Stockholm to Helsinki, during high season (June to end of August), $98-$204 per person, double occupancy. Low season rates, $110-$310 per person, double occupancy, depending on day of the week. Car rate, $45.

Represented by EuroCruises ([800] 688-3876):

Viking Line: Nine ships, including 2,500-passenger “superliner” cruises from Stockholm to Helsinki year round. Rates begin at $85 per person, double occupancy, including private double room, breakfast and a smorgasbord buffet dinner. Car rate, $19-$51, depending on season.

Estline: One ship; year-round, overnight trips from Stockholm to the medieval, walled city of Tallinn, Estonia. Rates from $127 per person, double occupancy. Car rate, $67.

Scandinavian Seaways: 12 ships, with various cruises, including Oslo-to-Copenhagen nightly with departures at 5 p.m., arrivals 9 a.m. Rates from $133 per person, double occupancy. Car rate, $35.