While Geiranger exists almost entirely for the entertainment of tourists, Alesund is a real town with locals… and life, even in the winter. Population: 30,000-ish… not counting the fish.

I found several options when planning our itinerary, but they all started at more or less the same time of day, so we had a choice to make. In the end, we opted for a visit to the town’s aquarium, largely because’s it’s considered the “best in Northern Europe”, but also because it’s location – 45 mintutes’ walk from the port, on the outskirts of town – presented an opportunity to explore Alesund en route.

We took a bit of a risk perhaps, as that walk could easily have been through a less-than-salubrious part of town, but as it turned out, it really was a pretty stroll, and a very good way to see the half of Alesund that most of our fellow cruisers had no particular reason to visit.

The Aquarium is pretty big, focussing entirely on North Atlantic species (so no tanks with the inevitable (“Nemo”) clown fish). The highlight for all visitors under the age of 13 is the aquarium equivalent of a petting zoo – a shallow tank inhabited by various sea creatures that guests are invited to poke and prod to their heart’s content.

I did feel sorry for the lobster – the obvious “star” of the attraction, who inevitably therefore spent more time out of the water than he did in it. Hopefully has has a litany of buddies behind the scenes so he has a few days to recover from an afternoon of lobster abuse.

The previous afternoon, we attended the port briefing for Alesund and were assured that the highlight of a visit to Alesund was a 400-step walk up to an outlook on the southern border of the city.

So, on returning from the Aquarium, we headed that way. I’d like to say that we found the back entrance thanks to our well-honed ability to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing, but on this occasion, we just followed a sign and ended up discovering that the (“Puffin shop”) outlook is in fact just a small dot on a very much more substantial lump of craggy parkland.

We did take the tourists’ route back to the ship, and the angles of the zig-zagging staircase presented some good photo opportunities. Pity we didn’t have a blue-sky backdrop, but, as we later learned that Oslo is the wettest capital city in the whole of Europe, perhaps we should just be thankful for staying dry!

So, shining our torches into the gloom as we clambered down into the entranceway of a very dark and impossibly tight-looking underground tunnel, I realised I’d got us into something quite unlike those sanitised childhood experiences…

But it was a lot of fun. In total, we navigated 800m of tunnels in 90 minutes, standing for almost none of it.

I had assumed the answer to the question posed by our guide – “how do you think we’ll be getting through there?” – had been a binary one: crawl on your belly, or somehow squeeze through on your back. But no… the only viable technique was in fact to roll through the less-than-12” ‘opening’ (“like kindergartners do”!). I admit (if it wasn’t already obvious) that the photo accompanying this post was staged, but in fact it makes the ‘roll space’ look considerably more spacious than it actually was!

Near the end of our caving experience we got as close as the geology would allow to seeing stalactites and stalagmites. Now these really weren’t as impressive as the Wales, Devon & Cornwall variety, but we did find one that look strangely like a wizard. “Guntha The Grey” our guide suggested… though I think he meant Gandalf!

Talking of guides, I thought he did pretty well, considering that he sometimes goes into that cave three times on the same day! As well as the caving experience, we hiked to the rim of a long-since-dormant volcano crater – complete with a surprisingly-interesting explanation for how the land around it had been sculpted the by the eruption that occurred there two millennia ago. And later, we were treated to an arial view of Iceland’s capital from the outside deck of a rotating restaurant known locally as the “tit of Reykjavik” (after the apparent likeness of the building to a breast!).

En route to the restaurant, we made a brief stop to experience – in the words of our guide – the “real smell of Reykjavik”.  We assumed we were to sample the whiff of sulphur courtesy of some bubbling Icelandic mud… but instead, we were introduced to the local wildlife:

This was just one of a few million fish carcasses left out to dry before being crushed and shipped off to Africa for use as a food supplement!

I am lingering more on our evening excursion than the 3 hour bike tour that kicked off our first day in Reykjavik because there isn’t – in all honesty – a whole lot to say about that. It was fun, but we didn’t see anything that spectacular or that interesting, and our guide had the most dry sense of humour which took longer than 180 minutes to get used to!!

We did learn an Icelandic joke though…:

“What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest?”

“Stand up!”

Which doesn’t need explaining after you’re spent a few hours in this country! The trees really are mostly waist-high… and those which aren’t are imports.

As it was a 4km walk each way from the cruise ship to the starting point of the bike tour, we were – needless to say – a little bushed by the time we got back to the ship just before midnight. Good job the bars stay open late, as there was time for a little night cap before retiring. Well.. we are on holiday.