This Arctic journey is a Viking (and foodie) fantasy

Something is stirring in the cod-spawning waters of the Norwegian Sea.

We stand on a gravelly hummock, just north of the Arctic Circle, transfixed by a wake of bubbles weaving towards the fretted shoreline of Lyngenfjord.

The awesome scale of Norway arouses expectations. It must be whale? Or orca? Seal perhaps? But the sea creature finally belched to the surface is human. Quite a disappointment. Except that the diver is hauling treasure from the deep.

Ocean fresh… Havets Bobler are aged exclusively for the cruise line in the Norwegian Sea.

You don’t have to be a Viking to experience the fundamental joy of plunder. Albanian-born Tani Gurra steps forward, retrieves the wax-sealed bottle encrusted with coral and, with a flourish befitting his role as beverage director of Hurtigruten, pops the cork. Sparkling wine fresh as an oyster flows into my champagne coupe.

“Say ‘bubbles’,” he grins, taking a bow for the classic cuvee that’s been ocean-aged over six months at a depth of 34 metres.

A bottle of Havets Bobler, or “Bubbles of the Sea”, is just one element of fantasy experienced by passengers cruising 2500 nautical miles along Norway’s ragged coastline with Hurtigruten’s Coastal Express.

Most travellers who embark at Bergen will sail northwards for seven days before reaching Kirkenes on the Arctic border with Russia. I’m on a different voyage having shipped aboard the battery-hybrid-powered vessel MS Richard With at Trondheim.

Postcard beauty: Hurtigruten Coastal Express between Bergen and Kirkenes.

I’ve crossed the Arctic Circle, at a line of latitude 66° 33′ north, heading for the thinly settled chain of Lofoten Islands off the Norwegian coast. Here I’ve stepped off the beaten track to meet some of the local artisan producers behind Hurtigruten’s Norway’s Culinary Coastal Kitchen concept.

More than 50 farms, fisheries, bakeries, butchers, cheese-makers, brewers and distillers trade with the Hurtigruten vessels that have been the lifeblood of Norway’s remote coastal communities since 1893.

From port to plate, daily menus highlight local suppliers, featuring short anecdotes about provenance and food traditions with a map to highlight source of ingredients across the regions of Norway. What shall it be today? Smoked char from Sigerfjord, wolf fish from Halsa in Meloy, smoked reindeer souvas with thin polarbread? Generous portions of food that span history and place can, at times, entice an afternoon snooze in a tidy cabin where there’s a comfortable double bed, a not-to-squeezy bathroom, a desk and a window onto wide, flowing waters.

Hurtigruten is one of Norway’s treasured national symbols. My parents sailed this route in the 1980s, encouraged by the combination of navigational prowess and extraordinary natural beauty, to undertake a more humble, utilitarian service delivering mail and freight to far-flung coastal communities otherwise completely isolated from the wider world.

Salmon is served ... a Norway Coastal Kitchen dish.

My father, a devotee of maps, would more easily have grasped the geography in this maze of fjords, channels and islets that provide continual visual delight to deck-bound passengers, and Northern Lights chasers, on board ship.

Jagged peaks are etched in charcoal across a darkening sky as I disembark at Stamsund, in the Lofoten Islands, an end-of-the world archipelago extending like a broken finger into the Norwegian Sea. A car is waiting at the end of the gangplank.

My driver is a scriptwriter turned farmer who knows his way around the cluster of boxy wooden houses painted in ox-blood red, buckwheat yellow, and that shade of blue that the sea turns at dusk. It’s drizzling. Cold.

Norse people have learned to live with weather extremes in a ferocious environment so the scene that opens, in the age-old barn at Myklevik Gard farm, feels perfect.

Icy comfort ... where stark meets snug in the Lofoten islands.

Scented juniper hangs from the rafters. A burner flickers heat towards the dinner table dressed in woven cloth. There are loaves of oven-warm bread and bottles of wine. Pickled vegetables garland local charcuterie. Conversation flows, then stops, as 1000 ducks waddle hysterically past the door in a wing-flapping quackophany.

“They don’t like the dark,” smiles Gisle Melhus, the guardian of this patch of land that has been lived on since the Vikings, and is still worked by hand. It’s a curious thought, that ducks don’t like the dark in a country without sun for six months of the year, but we’re moving on. Succulent pig with salty crackling has been plonked on a platter in front of my nose, with a medley of vegetables, like those Melhus trades with Hurtigruten chefs.

This is a feast caught or picked from earth fertilised by rich organic compost created, by the cruise company, in a sustainability initiative that converts edible food waste to zero.

It’s late. Bed comes in a red fisherman’s cabin, and that’s all I know, until rising to a crystal dawn above a sleepy harbour. Can anyone become desensitised to the unutterable beauty of so many sea-and-mountain vistas? The flickerfest of scale, silence, sometimes weirdness, continually spools past my car window on a two-hour journey over road and bridge to the island of Flakstadoya.

In the tiny fishing village of Napp, where snow-dusted peaks rise straight out of the sea, two women are standing waist-deep in whooshing water. They’re zipped into wetsuits with beanies pulled over their ears.

Angelita Eriksen and Tamara Singer are plucking and scooping seaweed into buckets for Hurtigruten eateries and, further afield, Europe’s Michelin-starred restaurants.

The briny smell of the ocean has been ever-present for Eriksen who grew up baiting long lines for her Lofoten fisherman father. She met Singer while studying in Australia, and now they’re in business under the banner of Lofoten Seaweed. I ask Singer, the New Zealand-born daughter of a Japanese mother who used seaweed in almost every meal, how she ended up in this remote community at the edge of the world.

Foraging for our dinner accompaniment… seaweed.Credit: Anabel Dean

“For love,” she replies. A man. And an adventure.

Above the tideline, wooden drying racks of Lofoten’s oldest export, Arctic cod, are eye-catching but empty of crisping fish-tails. Salted cod will not be served for lunch with Lofoten Seaweed. Instead, a delicious menu has been delicately contrived in the kitchen at the back of the shop.

Every seaweed has a different flavour – smoky, nutty, earthy or sweet – but the most remarkable is a truffle seaweed that tastes, well, precisely like truffle. It’s a small impact sprinkling that creates flavour with memory.

Dishes are born by brilliant minds, those who understand cultural traditions. Halvar Ellingsen is a young innovative Norwegian chef with a formidable reputation for exacting high standards at his centuries-old ancestral home. Guests wait for months to book a table at this farm restaurant called Kvitnes Gard.

To experience this place, I must drive for two hours, to the splendid isolation of Norway’s north-western Vesteralen archipelago. The chef is a culinary ambassador creating menus and mentoring staff for Hurtigruten when not in his timber-beamed kitchen at the end of a gravelly road.

“Welcome,” he says, big hands presenting a brass key for an upstairs bedroom in the house built by his great-great-great grandfather in 1855.

There’s a bottle of meadowsweet cordial in a woven basket on the table. And through a panelled window, I fancy that I will see moose, the shooting season has begun and two beasts were dispatched yesterday. Death in the mountains proves Ellingsen’s point that “we’re almost totally self-sufficient”.

We step outside, past rambling pig pens and chicken coops, along rows of leafy greens to an earthy, almost-underground store. It’s a pantry pulling from the landscape with ingredients that take months to mature, ripen, dry and cure. Jars are stuffed with fermented vegetables and flower syrups, boxes are filled with chanterelle and lovage.

Lofoten Islands Norway Hurtigruten culinary experiences cruise.

Nothing goes to waste when you know how long it takes to weed a field of cabbage or fatten a fluffle of rabbits. Chefs harvest herbs, waiters feed goats, and the spoils of land are refined in a simple but elegant dining room with an introspective 17-course tasting menu that changes with seasons.

It’s bold stuff. Salted leg of lamb comes with blood pancake and blueberries; goat oozes umami earthiness paired with zucchini and kale. I will not eat the whale, but appreciate the halibut, flaunting fleshy whiteness on a bed of seaweed.

“Nature is our supervisor,” says Ellingsen. “It’s the weather, the wind, the rain and the sun that decide when our vegetables are ready to be harvested.”

The weather has been indifferent through much of my food odyssey, but it’s positively inclement at Aurora Spirits distillery – where this story began– almost at the pole at 69 degrees north in Arctic Lyngen.

In the constellation of extremities, Norway’s northern most distillery is usually a good place to see the Northern Lights, but there is no hint of it across the bleak night sky. It hardly matters. There’s still fizz in the bottle. My glass is half full.

“How cold was that water?” I ask the Arctic diver, his face still flushed from immersion. “Cold as f---,” replies Tor Petter Christensen, the founder of the award-winning distillery and another Hurtigruten collaborator.

“I was in the sea for an hour waiting for you to come,” he says. We are both laughing, sipping bubbles from the sea, that bona fide Viking and me.

The details

Cruise

Hurtigruten plans to launch culinary-themed itineraries with several partners in 2026. Optional excursions include additional fjord visits, kayaking, RIB safaris, farm visits, brewery tours, Viking tours, dog sledding, e-bike tours, snowshoeing, hikes, king crab tastings, and Sami cultural experiences, depending on the season.

The 12-day Coastal Express round trip (Bergen-Kirkenes-Bergen) stops at 34 ports on Norway’s coast; from $1220 a person twin share (Black Friday pricing). The seven-day northbound trip (also 34 ports) is from Bergen to Kirkenes. A six-day southbound trip (33 stops) is from Kirkenes to Bergen. See hurtigruten.com/en-au

The writer was a guest of Hurtigruten.