May 29 & 30: Riding the Flam railway & Norway in a Nutshell Tour to Bergen
This morning we were out of bed before 5am
– the Norwegian sun was up before us though! – and set off with a thermos of
hot soup for central station. From here
we were headed on the first leg of our Fjord adventure. A little touristy, perhaps, but with good
reason – we were taking the Norway in a Nutshell tour up to Bergen.
The trip is designed to take one extremely
long day and deliver you in Bergen for a late dinner. If you like, you can take the overnight bus
to get you back to Oslo for the next day.
That doesn’t sound super appealing, and we wanted to stretch out our
tour a little bit, so we decided to book an extra night in Flam to camp.
‘Tour’ is quite a loose term for the Norway
in a Nutshell – it’s more of a series of trains, buses and ferries that take
you a very, very scenic route through the dramatic Norwegian countryside and up
to Sognefjord, the largest, and most touristed, fjord in Norway.
It was almost half-past 6 when we boarded
the first leg of our journey – five hours of train riding from Oslo to Myrdal,
where you switch to the Flam railway.
The Flam is an extraordinary feat of Norwegian engineering, and is the
steepest railway in the world. I’m
getting ahead of myself, though, as I’ve not told you about the trip to Myrdal.
The first hour or so takes you through
industrial and outer suburban Oslo, then to smaller villages. Finally, you’re surrounded by lush greenery,
cliffs covered in trees and vast lakes.
Small red houses dot the countryside as you speed by on the train. The left side offers the best views, but
there was nobody in the seats next to us, so we were able to switch between the
left and right when opportunity presented itself.
“Where’s all the snow DNT warned us about?”
Nick joked. “It’s perfect hiking weather!”
The view out the train window
One girl brought her dog along for the ride. I was so envious.
In literally 30 minutes the landscape went from this, to this.
He ate his words twenty minutes or so
later, as we approached a desert-like plain of snow, with small bodies of water
rippling between the chunks of ice.
Occasionally we passed small red or yellow houses with snow-covered
roofs and gardens filled with leafless trees.
“I think we’re coming up to Finse,” he said. We had been told that Finse was the location
used for the scenes on Hoth, the ice planet, in Star Wars. The landscape was
quickly becoming whiter and whiter, and as we moved in and out of tunnels, we
were constantly being blinded by the overwhelming brightness of the snowy
fields.
When the train stopped at Finse, we had a
small break to jump out and breathe in the landscape. The air was cold, but not windy (thank
goodness), so we didn’t need more than a jumper. Nicholas plucked an icicle off the roof of
the train station, which I drank as it melted in my fingers.
Not long after, we arrived in Myrdal. It was snowing quite heavily on the platform,
but it had ceased by the time we boarded the train to Flam. We were going down from something like 800m
above sea level to just 2m, but most of this was through the tunnel. In fact, probably a majority of the trip was
in tunnels, which I didn’t expect.
The railway makes a couple of picture stops,
one of which you can jump out. The
voice-over American (who tells you where you are on the trip and proves that
you’ve definitely gone the tourist route) told us that a Norwegian mythical
woman appears in legends of the fjords, and she sings out, calling visitors
into the mountains. We had jumped out
for our photo op of a beautiful waterfall, when we heard a loud ethereal
shrieking, and figured they were showcasing the acoustics. A lady in red, donning a thick, blonde wig,
appeared from behind a ruin and started doing a silly (probably supposed to be
alluring) dance. The tourism industry is
a funny one (later on, at Flåm, we saw that this lady featured on postcards
that advertised the railway, so she must be a popular addition to the route).
Flåm
We arrived at Flåm and it was tourist
central. Every 10 minutes or so, another
ship pulled in delivering a horde of visitors, then ferried them back off
shortly afterwards. We were spending the
night here, so had some lunch, paid a quick visit to the Railway Museum and set
off to scout out a campsite.
There is a camping ground in Flåm, but it
costs a fee of around 200nok. We weren’t
prepared to pay that much for a campsite, even if it was close to the town, so
we head up a track that led to a nearby waterfall.
Walking steeply uphill is never
particularly easy, but it’s definitely harder with 20kg on your back and
another 5 strapped to the front. We
clamored up the path, until it got really, really steep, and I was beginning to
worry we wouldn’t find ground flat enough to camp. Nick ditched his pack with me and head
upwards, returning a little later, beaming.
At the very top of the climb, there was a
little rocky outcrop that gave two spectacular views – one overlooking the town
of Flam and another of the waterfall.
One spot was flat-ish, so we moved the sticks out of the way and set up
camp. I took to the warmth and comfort
of the tent almost straight away, while Nick popped down to the base of the
waterfall before we fell asleep, exhausted.
The view of Flåm from the top
Our tent from another angle... A waterfall on one side and a scenic town view on the other!
The next morning we were en route to
Bergen. The first challenge was, of
course, climbing back down the small mountain we’d slept on top of - possibly a
dangerous endeavor for one as clumsy as me, but even more so because I was
lugging around so much gear. Obviously,
we were down in one piece, and we could board the boat that would take us to
Gundvangen.
Quite slowly the boat took us through
Aurlandfjord and then into Nærøyfjord, which only recently became listed as a
UNESCO site. I think the narrowest part
was around 25m, and was only 12m deep!
The huge cruise boats we’d seen in the harbour at Flåm certainly hadn’t
gone through here.
What is this creature?! A sea monster? A common porpoise?!
The mist was sitting halfway up the cliffs
that made the fjord. The sky was grey,
and the snowy peaks of the mountains blended into the clouds. At one point, we saw something moving under
the water, poking its nose out to breathe and, while my first thought was that
we’d stumbled upon a sea monster on our second day in the fjords, I decided it
was probably a common porpoise.
From Gundvangen we took a bus through a
series of valleys to reach Voss. The bus
driver gave us something of a running commentary as we drove, mostly pointing
out churches – “How do they know when every church was built?!” exclaimed Nick
– and took us down a typically Norwegian road of 13 hairpin bends. The last hairpin took you down a road with a
gradient of over 25% so Nick and I, sitting at the very back of the bus, were
2m higher than the driver.
It had started to rain and it felt very
atmospheric to be bumping around in the back of the bus, looking at trees bent
to strange angles by a harsh winter, and tiny little crops of houses piled into
clumps on the edge of mountains.
In Voss, we had time for a quick grocery
run – we still haven’t eaten anything NOT bought from a grocery store! – before
hopping on the train to Bergen. Given
the state of the weather (cold, a bit windy, generally miserable), we hoped we
could find something last minute on AirBnB but had no such luck. It was going to be character-building camping
tonight.
Arriving at Bergen, we found that famous
Norwegian stylists had been doing makeovers on the train (???) for specific
people who booked in early on a specific carriage.
“Perhaps they’re trying to make taking the
train sexy,” said Nick.
“Trains don’t need to be sexy. They’re functional,” I replied, sounding like
the pragmatic one for once.
The Bergen Train Station
We popped our big packs into the lockers at
Bergen station so we wouldn’t have to lug them up to our campsite, and then
head for the closest mountain we could find.
It was raining heavily and we were hoping we would be able to find
somewhere flat enough to pitch a tent that wouldn’t be boggy.
Twisting and turning and walking steadily
upwards, we wandered through the suburban streets of Bergen, often literally
built on top of each other and at strange and precarious angles. Long steps of stairs led up to tiny front
doors and ladders went from ground to top floors. I was filled with an overwhelming desire to
draw them and their strange shapes.
Up and up we went, until we reached a
bubbling stream, not far from a fantastic panoramic view of the town below
us. We pitched the tent quickly, I
finished my book, and we quickly fell asleep.
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