We were struggling to find anything that worked well for us in Alesund before the trip. Most of the cruise excursions seemed uninteresting to us, especially considering it was likely to be 30 in a coach of people being dropped off for a brief leg stretch before heading back to the ship. So we noticed that there was a Marine Aquarium that was near Alesund. It was about 3.6km walk from the port, but we were up for it.

So we set off in the morning making our way through part of Alesund towards the marine park. It was a pleasant walk with lots of little sights to see. While we had heard good things about the marine park online, we were very surprised by how entertaining it was and how good quality the exhibits were for a relatively isolated part of the world. We had found out later that it was the first week of the school holidays in Norway and so by mid-afternoon the museum was teeming with kids. They had an interactive pond, where kids could touch sea creatures and a tank full of crabs which you would use prawns at the end of the lines to tempt the crabs. Simon remarked how “brave” the kids were, just mucking in and quite fearlessly manhandling these sea creatures. Especially the young Norwegian boys, who seemed that it was almost an accomplishment to torment a crab into snapping on your fingers!

We walked back into town and then decided to go up to the top of the main hill in Alesund. On the way up, we took the “back” way, which was avoiding the 440 steps up to the top, but required a bit more of a concerted effort as the path became quite involved at points. We also wandered around to the summit (which was different than the lookout point). We finally made it to the lookout point which had a view over and across Alesund (and of course our ship docked in port). We then went down the 440 steps (which had only just re-opened after being heavily renovated over the past year) and found our way back to the ship.

We then went to Q-Sine for the second time that evening, a bit early too, having avoided having a lunch to ensure we were robustly hungry by the time we had dinner. We had the same waitress as we previously had, which made the dinner interesting as we started to have a nice rapport with her. We rounded out the food we had, trying a few dishes we never had and I think pretty much having had everything on the menu at least once.