Real Norway in Maloy

Mark was on day 3 of his flu bug, and we were arriving at the third port of our cruise. Mark was feeling good enough to smile during breakfast on the back deck overlooking our docking location in Maloy, Norway.

The water of the Norwegian Sea was as smooth as glass this morning, except the ripples caused from an occasional boat coming and going from the tiny town of Maloy.

While we were trip-planning at home, we tried to get some information about things to do at this stop. But we couldn't find any other ships that stop here. In fact, this was the first time we could find that MSC had made this stop. We guessed that this was a cheap port for the cruise company. So instead of a touristy village that caters to the cruise crowd, we have landed at a real Norwegian town where real people lived and worked real jobs. We could see three big buses waiting to take some of the ship passengers on excursions. But we had 6,000 passengers disembarking, and we weren't sure this little town was ready for us.

We planned to do our usual free hiking tour of the area. We had read about the murals in town, and we started with a mural tour. The details in these huge paintings were spectacular!

Maloy was situated on an island with water surrounding it. So of course, all the murals featured some aspect of the sea life.

We had to say that the paint jobs looked fresh, and the art was very well done on this fiddler crab fiddling.

We tried to put one of us in the pictures, just to give some comparison of how big these murals were. Most of them covered entire buildings.

Sometimes the person in the picture was supposed to look scared, because she was about to be swooped up by those sharp talons

While we arrived on a very nice summer morning, one of the murals led us to believe that the weather can be quite nasty around here.

Our walk around Maloy took us down to the dock, and the sea still looked like glass.

The folks working at the local visitor center were over-run by hundreds of visitors. But they had time to give us a map of the hike they would recommend. They've gotten lots of rain this week, and they explained that the hike we had planned to Veten Mountain would be muddy and slippery. Since Mark wasn't feeling 100%, this walk around the lake was a better fit for us.

What that map didn't show was the elevation gain to get to that lake. Instead of calling their town streets "avenues" or "drives," they were called "gates." Gate 1 was very close to the water, and ran parallel to the sea. Gate 2 was higher up the mountain, still running parallel to the sea. Each gate was straight up the side of the mountain, and we had to climb to Gate 7. From here we could see the bridge that connected the island of Maloy with the Norwegian mainland.

From Gate 7 we could also see where our ship was docked. We didn't have to worry about competing with other ships in this little-known port. We had already determined that no other ships made stops in Maloy. From this view we could also see the streets (aka gates) below us.

As we started the part of the hike on the nature trail, we saw that some of our fellow passengers got a ride up the hill. It looked like a local was making some cash today by charging cruisers for a little elevation gain. It didn't take us long to find our way to the lake at the top of this mountain.

From this angle we could see Mount Veten in the distance. That was the destination we had planned before we knew the trail was muddy and that Mark wasn't feeling well. Either way, we had wandered another of God's Norwegian wonders today.

Just like the Norwegian Sea, this lake was as smooth as glass. It was hard to imagine that Maloy was sometimes cold and windy like one of the murals depicted. Our weather this day was beautiful!

After walking the entire loop around the lake, we started on the loop through town. It wouldn't take us long to walk the length of this little Norway town. We passed by a school and a church and a hardware store. This was a town where real Norwegians live and work. The flowers here have a short growing season, but they were beautiful! After seeing many this day, Denisa finally stopped to take a picture of one.

We walked the entire length of Gate 7, then took the very steep path down towards the water and our ship. We had planned to do a more rigorous hike, but we thought the 8.5 miles we walked this day was far enough--especially since it started to sprinkle when we neared the cruise ship. We were lucky to make it to our room before it started raining hard. All this rain must be why the mountains of the Norwegian fjords stay so green.

Mark's flu symptoms seemed to be getting better, but Denisa was now coughing more. She was afraid that she had caught Mark's flu. So instead of going to the 1.5-hour meal in the dining room, we opted for a quick run through the buffet for dinner. We still had one more port on this cruise, and we hoped that the two of us stayed healthy enough to enjoy it.