Last night, at dinner, it occurred to me that we were in the home port of the Origo, the ship that took us around Svalbard back in 2018 (see our Islands of the North Atlantic adventure). There are web pages that will tell you where ships are, based on their AIS signalling systems, so we looked it up. It was in port, perhaps having arrived just the previous day: moored at a berth just over the bay from our hotel. Since we were feeling a bit better this morning, we decided to start our waterfront exploration by finding the Origo.
The original plan involved walking to the ferry wharf and catching the ferry across, but I misread the google map and we walked in the wrong direction. By the time I noticed the shortest course correction involved hopping on a bus, so we walked a bit further to the bus stop and did that. Still not a very big ride, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. That dropped us at what turned out to be the Lindholmen Science Park, which joins onto Chalmers University Göteborg. And there she was!
So we walked all around the dock, taking pictures and remembering our time on her: standing out on the back deck after meals. Standing there on that low deck to take the photo of the polar bear that is this site’s mascot. Watching wildlife from up at the prow or on the top deck. The lights were on and the engine running, but we didn’t see anyone about.
Caught the ferry back to the city-side of the harbour and walked along the front there as far as the Opera House at which point it started to rain gently. So we caught the bus back to near the hotel and stopped into the coffee shop that I’d bought coffees at the previous day. Had a coupe of nice coffees before adjourning over to the hotel lounge to work on photos and blog entries…
Back at the hotel there was a protest rally that finished just as we got there. Took photos of some of the placards to try to figure out what it was about, but still not sure. My guess is that they were unhappy about laws requiring the reporting of undocumented immigrants or refugees.
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