The main reason we chose this particular day’s excursion when in Oslo was because it included a visit to the Holmenkollen Ski Jump, which sounded a bit different from your typical cruise ship tours, and at the conclusion of our walk around the excellent Vigeland Park it’s to the hill where the ski jump is located – Holmenkollbakken – that we next headed. We like doing things a little different when we take trips, although we’re certainly not averse to doing the very popular tourist trips too simply because there’s usually a good reason why they’ve become that way. But on a cruise it’s sometimes nice to know that you’re going to be one of the small number going somewhere that most of the other cruisers aren’t. It still surprises me when I see fellow cruise bloggers and vloggers doing the exact same thing, time after time, in some weird race to feature more highly in (increasingly low quality) search rankings, when they could be standing out from the very crowded space. Not me, though. Always ready to corner that market of things nobody is interested in in the first place.
Now, I’m going to be brutally honest here – but I’m always brutally honest, so I don’t know why I’ve mentioned that – but a short visit as part of a larger excursion is probably not the best way to see Holmenkollbakken. It didn’t help that we had light but persistent drizzle accompany us on this visit to the ski jump and its hill, but the main issue was one of time. As with many organised tours, you either get too much time in places or too little, and this fell into that latter category. Holmenkollbakken includes a ski museum that’s the oldest in the world (relocated to this location in 1951, but originally built in 1923) and is exactly the sort of thing we’d normally do but we could tell immediately that we’d have to jog through it to have a chance of meeting back at our bus at the appointed time, and we don’t do jogging. There was also a ski jumping simulator that looked interesting but we couldn’t tell how long it lasted or whether it was in operation on the day of our visit so we had to give that a miss too. In fact, the limited stay was more-or-less only enough to use the loo and grab a coffee, which is exactly what almost everyone did. We braved the drizzle and snapped some photos, and that’s what you’ll get to see here.
We had known that Holmenkollbakken had been one of the locations for the 1952 Winter Olympics, and while we hadn’t known that it had also hosted several world championships over the decades too, that didn’t surprise us. However, the structure you see when you visit the Holmenkollen Ski Jump only dates to 2010 when it was last rebuilt. It’s been rebuilt nineteen times in total since the first ski festivals took place in this region in the late nineteenth century.
I did a little bit of clambering down the seating area simply because I could. The almost-amphitheatre-like venue apparently holds seventy thousand spectators.
A couple of sculptures caught our eyes and they’re worth a mention.
Firstly, there’s Bikkja I Bakken, or the Dog on the Hill. Apparently, it’s been a tradition for some time that at the interval at Holmenkollen a dog runs out on the hill. This tradition was eventually memorialised by the sculptor Elena Engelsen.
The second sculpture is of Fridjtof Nansen, and its his polar travel and exploration exploits, and the cross country skiing that he did, that are the reasons for it. However, it’s very worth reading up about him from that link if, like me, you hadn’t heard of him before. An absolutely fascinating person, a worthy winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and somewhat influential in Norway’s independence from Sweden.
A mildly disappointing trip to Holmenkollbakken for us as we’d have liked more time, but that’s one of the downsides to fleeting visits to places when you cruise and we accept that. We’d rather enjoy the experiences of many little things than one thing in-depth so we were satisfied in that respect, and we also accept that this isn’t a view that’s universally shared by other travellers too. Wouldn’t it be terrible if it were?
In the next part of this cruise travelogue series we’ll be heading down to the Bygdøy peninsula where quite a number of interesting museums are situated, and we do like a good museum or two. We’ll be starting with the Norwegian Maritime Museum.