Captain Greybeard

Sailing out of Flam to head down Aurlandsfjord and into Sognefjord would have been spectacular enough, with sheer cliffs on either side rising to snow-topped peaks, from which meltwater streams led to precipitous waterfalls. To make it even better, we made the first part of the journey on the bridge of Queen Victoria, thanks to an invitation from Captain Paul Wright. The calm of the operation, overseen by two Norwegian pilots, was broken only by a moment of cruel humour when a late-returning crew member turned up on the quayside just as the last rope had been cast and the [...]

Well we've been doing the boat bit for a week and a half now. Or rather ocean liner, as Cunard prefer to describe the Queen Victoria. We did the plane over Geirangerfjord, in the shape of a thrilling helicopter ride. On Friday it was time to take a train, with apologies to Bacharach and David for not travelling on their favourite modes of transport in the right order. Queen Victoria berthed in the early morning at Flam, at the end of an arm of Sognefjord, which at 128 miles from the North Sea to its furthest tip, is the longest [...]

There must be an affinity between sailing on cruise ships and flying in helicopters. While cruising in Alaska on board Radiance of the Seas I flew from Skagway to land on a glacier. In Barcelona a couple of years ago I stepped off P&O's Oriana and into a chopper to swoop over the Sagrada Familia and the Nou Camp stadium. Yesterday in Geiranger, Norway, I left Cunard's Queen Victoria to board a shiny new Eurocopter EC 130 for a 20-minute flight over the fjords. From an improvised landing site high up on the Eagles Bends road, the seven-seater craft dropped [...]