Written by Jane Archer
Anyone who has been to Norway knows how eye-wateringly expensive alcohol is. It’s said to be a bid to stop excessive drinking. Personally, I blame King Christian IV, who was so fond of a drink (or four) that the town of Kristiansand was built on a grid system so he could find his way around after a few bevvies. Apocryphal? Maybe, but it’s a good story.
We’re learning this, and the fact that when the boozy king founded the town in the 1600s, there was just sand there - hence the name - on our way to a museum in what was Gestapo HQ during World War Two.
We’re here on a cruise around Denmark and Norway with Ambassador Cruise Line that is not only our first time in Skagen (say Ska’an to sound like a local), Aarhus, both in Denmark, and also Kristiansand, but also our first time with Ambassador Cruise Line.
It’s also our first cruise from the UK for years - we’re sailing from London Tilbury - and a reminder of how easy it is. We parked the car, crossed the road, checked in, and within 20 minutes were on Ambience, our floating home for the next week.
It’s a nice-sized ship, not so big you get lost, but large enough (it holds 1,400 passengers) to have plenty of places to eat, drink and sleep. There are Indian and steakhouse speciality restaurants in addition to the main dining room and buffet, various pubs and bars that were buzzing before and after dinner, and a good supply of cabins and suites, many with private balconies.
Ambience launched as the very American Regal Princess, moved Down Under to sail for the now-defunct P&O Australia and is now as British as a stick of rock. Almost everyone on board was from the UK; most we spoke to were here for the good-value prices. “We can have three or four cruises with Ambassador Cruise Line for the price of one with other lines,” one couple told us.
From London Tilbury we have a day crossing a calm North Sea en route to Skagen, a pretty town heavily into fishing and looking its picturesque best as we arrive, its yellow houses and russet-coloured roofs shining under the blue sky.
It has one little problem, though: sand. So much of it that it has buried the town’s medieval church. It’s all the fault of a mini ice age that hit Europe in the 1500s. Locals cut down trees to keep warm, so there was nothing to stop the shifting sands.
Naturally, we have to go and look before heading to a sand spit where the Kattegat and Skagerrak (the Baltic and North Sea to you and me) meet, and the Germans built bunkers during the last war. The thing is, the bunkers used to be on the coast. Now the sand has moved the coast a mile away.
It’s quite a contrast to Aarhus, a busy city with an amazing free-to-visit rooftop garden on top of a department store, and Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, where we enjoy a leisurely 40-minute stroll into the city from Langelinie (hooray that Ambience is small enough to dock there instead of having to be in the cruise port way out of town).
We’ve been here before and love it for its laid-back style, canal cruises and blend of old and new, with narrow cobbled streets, grand squares, designer shops and cute restaurants, but boy is it expensive. A lesson, in case any of us needed it, of why it pays - literally - to visit on an Ambassador Cruise Line cruise!
