At Sea with Doug Newman

On his wonderful blog Ships & the Sea, Lisbon maritime writer and photographer Luís Miguel Correia has posted some of the very first interior photos of Hurtigruten’s new cruise ship Fram: Beautiful MS FRAM. He’s also posted a couple of excellent photos of the ship’s exterior: FRAM IN LISBON May 4, 2007.

Externally, it would be difficult to call Fram pretty, but she looks like a very attractive ship in a rugged sort of way. You can tell that this is a ship that’s meant to go places, not just float around the Caribbean or the Med. She has something of the appearance of a smaller version of the larger Hurtigruten ships Trollfjord and Midnatsol, even though those ships were built for Hurtigruten predecessor company TFDS while Fram was ordered for OVDS, the company that TFDS merged with to form Hurtigruten ASA. Nevertheless, Fram has a much closer resemblance to TFDS’ ships than the last OVDS vessel, Finnmarken.

Fram is of course quite different from the existing Hurtigruten ships in that she is a purpose-built cruise ship. She is not intended to spend even part of the year on the company’s namesake Norwegian coastal service. Rather, Fram will operate expedition cruises in Greenland in the summer and Antarctica in the winter (Austral summer). The name Fram (”Forward”) is fitting as it was the name of the polar exploration ship used by Norwegian explorers between 1893 and 1912 to visit both the Arctic and Antarctic, and which sailed farther north and farther south than any other wooden ship. (The original Fram is now a museum ship in Oslo.) The interiors of the new Fram have a modern decor with a Greenlandic theme and look attractive and comfortable. Like the larger Hurtigruten ships, the ship features huge expanses of glass to allow passengers to view the outdoors without being exposed to the often inhospitable polar climates.

Fram is now on her way to Oslo where she will be named on 19 May by HRH Mette-Marit, Crown Princess of Norway. I wish this handsome vessel a long and successful career exploring the far reaches of the earth!