With our visits to Vigeland Park and Holmenkollbakken out of the way, we headed for the last part of this organised excursion we took with Princess Cruises during our Sky Princess stop at Oslo. This would be a couple of hours on the Bygdøy Peninsula because it was home to a number of museums popular with locals and tourists alike. The first of the two museums we visited was the Norwegian Maritime Museum. We’re fond of a museum, as you’ll be able to tell from looking around this site, and we’re fond of anything to do with the sea, as you’ll be able to tell from looking around this site too. I thought I’d mention it, though, because “looking around this site” is an old term from the early days of the internet when people searched for things and browsed through those things to see what else might interest them, and it seems to be going out of style these days. Oh, me! I am such an old fuddy-duddy global hypernet curmudgeon.
Our visit to the Norwegian Maritime Museum was split into two parts: a short, accompanied tour to point out a few things that the guide wanted to show us, then a little free time to look around or go to the café. The accompanied part of this tour – to me – wasn’t very interesting, but each to their own. We were shown an area with remnants of old vessels followed by a look at some maritime artwork.
Given we like all things nautical, and given we like a lot of art (again, this site is a testament to that, if only you knew how to look) it might come as a surprise to you to learn that maritime artwork rarely if ever does anything for us. I find paintings of the sea flat and uninspiring more often than not, far preferring photography. I understand people being drawn to try to capture a seascape on canvas but I can’t recall an instance when I even thought “Ooh, that’s quite nice!” let alone be wowed by the image. But, again, each to their own. The museum housed a number of pieces of art, some of importance, we were told, but this wasn’t something I was massively interested in and gave the area little more than a fleeting glance. If you like paintings of the sea or ships or ports or fishing, then perhaps you’ll have a whale of time here. That wasn’t an intentional sea-related pun.
At the risk of coming across like one of those obsessed cruise bloggers who only talks about cruises and only goes on cruises for the ships and only wears cruise-themed clothing and knows the deadly secret of pineapples on cruise ships and can only go to sleep with the sounds of waves playing – okay, that last one is me but I have tinnitus and I find it helps to not have silence around – a far more interesting part of the Norwegian Maritime Museum was the area dedicated to scheduled shipping: cargo and passenger travel by sea. And this was where we headed as soon as our guide gave us a time and place to meet up and left us to our own devices.
There were some lovely pieces of cruise memorabilia in the form of posters and models of ships. One of the photos on the wall was of Black Watch, a ship we’d spent a night on and enjoyed immensely. She is no longer with us, sadly.
The Steamship Sandnaes dates from 1914 and was in service running a route that included Bergen, Stavanger, and Haugesund, amongst others, until 1950 (with a minor interruption during the war when she was commandeered by the Germans). In 1950 she was replaced and renamed as the Soma, serving as a tourist ship until the mid-1960s when she was renamed again, this time to the Hustel, and became an accommodation vessel. In 1972 she was due to be broken up and used as a barge but some of the interiors were saved and relocated to the museum, and they were lovely, as you can see below.
We concluded our free time in the Norwegian Maritime Museum with a quick nose around an area that seemed more geared towards kids – it certainly had some loud, screaming ones in it – but which did feature a giant octopus model. Weird fact about me and my wife: we bloody love octopuses.
We had a small amount of time to kill outside the museum while waiting for our bus to appear and take us to the next museum and the final part of this cruise excursion. Looking across the water we could see our home for just a couple more nights, Sky Princess, docked at the port of Oslo.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll travel the short distance to the Norsk Folkemuseum (or Norwegian Museum of Cultural History).