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Fjord Tour: Nærøyfjord

Until very recently, the easiest way to get around Norway was by boat. Even today, you could make a strong argument that it’s the best way to see the country. Certainly few people would argue that it’s the best way to see the area around the fjords. That’s why a fjord tour is a central part of the famous Norway in a Nutshell tour. For my own DIY Nutshell tour, I took the ferry from Flåm to Gudvangen.

A Three-Hour Tour

The hapless residents of Gilligan’s Island got stranded on what they expected to be a three-hour tour. When you’re touring the fjords, you can spend as long as you like. From the famous (and expensive) Hurtigruten that can last two weeks to regular old car ferries that drop you off in an hour, the choice is yours. And even if, like me, your fjord cruise only lasts a couple hours, about the only thing the experience will have in common with Gilligan’s is that you can bring all your luggage on board.

The Flåm Ferry

You don’t have to buy fjord tour tickets in advance, but they can sell out in the busy season. So it’s a good idea to get your tickets on the Visit Flåm website before you leave home. There are a lot of options to choose from. I chose the Fjord Cruise Nærøyfjord, which is only two hours long and connects the tiny village of Flåm in Aurlandsfjord to the even smaller Gudvangen in in the Nærøyfjord. Both fjords are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. You can take the ferry in either direction and you can take a shuttle bus back through the tunnel road that takes less than half an hour. We were starting from Flåm with the intent to visit Njardarheimr before continuing on to Bergen, so we brought our luggage with us. In another place, I might have been worried about the requirement to leave suitcases on the empty car deck, but even on a boat filled with other foreign tourists, it felt safe to do so on such a rural boat.

Problem People

The boat wasn’t actually completely full, but it was crowded enough that I was glad we were traveling in the off-season. Nearly everyone else on the boat was part of a Chinese bus tour. I try not to judge other people’s travel choices, and I appreciate that international travel is a relatively new option for the Chinese middle class. But big bus tourists have a way of taking up more space. They often seem more interested in gossiping over packed-from-home snacks than experiencing their trip, or seem more excited to look at the landscape in the photos they take with their selfie sticks than seeing directly with their own eyes. And they don’t seem to think the rules apply to them, even when the signs make sense without language.

Lest I give the impression that I’m only judgey about package tourists, I should also mention that on this day my daughter decided to ignore my advice to dress warmly for the boat. Literally everything you will read about the fjord tours will come with a warning that no matter what the weather is like, it’s cold out on the water. Not only does the wind cut right through you, but the mountains shade the boat a lot of the time.

But of course, my contrary little child refused to layer and then spent the whole trip complaining about the cold. We tried to warm her up with hot chocolate, but we also spent much more time inside (where all the seats were taken) than we would normally have chosen to.

The Up Side

One benefit of spending too much time inside was that we stumbled on the educational posters in a stairwell that talked about the native flora and fauna, as well as the creative economic endeavors of locals trying to make a living – like the brewery at Flåm and a farmer who made goat cheese – in an extremely rural area.

When we did come out from the shade of the looming mountains and enjoy some direct sunshine, we took a selfie party. And in our search for spots on the boat that were protected from the wind and the crowd, we also found a few like-minded seekers of solitude and beauty. Not to mention some incredible views devoid of selfie-sticks. There were a few moments when you could imagine what it would have been like in decades past to travel these waterways in your own little boat. With a little stretching of the imagination you could even turn the tourist chatter into the background noise of crowded longboat filled with isolated farmers and warriors excited for the Assembly and catching up on a year’s worth of gossip.

Docking in Gudvangen

I could easily see the appeal of a longer tour with multiple stops around the fjords. There are so many picturesque little spots that would be interesting to visit, but don’t have enough to do to hold you there overnight (especially given the time it would take to get there by road). And I imagine that the selfie frenzy would die down on a longer ride, allowing for more of those soul-soothing quiet moments contemplating the mountains from the aquatic perspective. But given our schedule, travel priorities, and wardrobe malfunctions, I was really glad we chose the two-hour Nærøyfjord tour.

Docking in Gudvangen and walking off the ferry was such a mundane and homely end to the journey that it added a new dimension. Instead of imagining legendary pasts, it felt a lot like getting off the Vashon ferry back home. That was a nice reminder that these legendary fjords are the everyday homes of a few lucky people, who may or may not remember on a daily basis why all those strangers with selfie-sticks are so worked up about the view.

{My ferry ticket was provided courtesy of Visit Flåm. The ticket was theirs, but as always, the opinions are mine.}

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My DIY Norway in a Nutshell Out of Oslo -Part One

We didn’t feel like we were done with Oslo, but there was an art workshop in Bergen on Saturday that we didn’t want to miss. And we had a lot of ground to cover in between. So on our third day in Norway, we started our DIY Norway in a Nutshell tour.

Norway in a Nutshell

If you spend any time at all planning a trip to Norway, you’ll run across the Norway in a Nutshell tour. Like the Golden Circle in Iceland, it’s a roughly defined loop in the southern part of the country with a few popular tourist attractions that have been built up into “you haven’t been there if you missed this” status. The Norway version usually involves Oslo and Bergen, the rail line in between, a fjord tour, and the Flåmsbana train ride. People do it in either direction, and sometimes only one way. Most people take two days to complete it, but you can cram it into one (minus the return trip) or stretch it to a whole vacation, depending on how much ground you want to cover each day.

Why I DIY

There’s a tour company that runs Norway in a Nutshell, but the thing is, they really only serve as a booking agent. They don’t provide guides or the actual transportation. They do offer a lot of different variations on the itinerary, but their website was kind of confusing for me. Then I found a website that broke down the steps and the cost of a self-planned Nutshell. Booking the “official” tour cost nearly twice as much as planning your own trip and buying minipris tickets or using a Eurail pass. I was already planning on a Eurail pass, so DIY seemed like the obvious way to go.  

A Rocky Start

We arrived at the Eurail office just as they were closing on Wednesday night. They activated our passes, but said we needed a seat reservation to ride the Bergen line – something that was not obvious on the Eurail or NSB web sites. We had to come back in the morning since they had already turned off their POS system. Like a dork, I stressed out about making it to the station on time to get our seats and make the train, so I got insomnia and slept a total of 3 hours that night. Because a sleepless night is the best way to guarantee smooth travel.

Catching the Train

Since I was up early (you know, 2 am) we got there in plenty of time. We reserved our seats, bought our discounted Flåmsbana tickets (Eurail Pass holders get 30% off the private rail line) and made it to the platform, which was almost adjacent to the office, with about 40 minutes to spare before our 8:25 train. We found our seats, stowed our stuff, and fell asleep before we were out of the Oslo suburbs. We slept through half of the six hour train ride to Myrdal through some of the most gorgeous scenery known to mankind and I still managed to use up all the data on my prepaid sim card.

Flåmsbana

The Flåm Railway runs from the mountaintop at Myrdal down to the village of Flåm on the Sognefjord (you know, the fjord where Egil Skallagrimsson’s family came from). It is one of the world’s steepest railways on normal track. It’s only 12.4 miles long but has a half-mile vertical elevation drop and some famous tunnels and super-twisty bits. It’s definitely an engineering feat if you’re in to that, but people are mainly attracted to it for the chance to see world-class mountain views from inside a photogenic historic train car.

In fact, the train stops barely five minutes out of Myrdal to let people off to take pictures of a waterfall. The waterfall wasn’t running much since the snowpack hadn’t started melting yet when we were there in mid-April, but it was still a beautiful place to go camera crazy.

The rest of the ride only takes about an hour, which most people spend obsessively trying to grab Instagram shots. Unfortunately, that means they keep the windows down, and you know, old trains are really loud, especially in tunnels. My daughter and eye spent as much time with our hands over our ears as our fingers on the shutters.

But that’s okay, it was still a ride on a cool old train, and the mountains were still drop dead gorgeous. For all that the engineering talk, the train ride didn’t feel particularly vertiginous compared to the funicular we would later ride in Bergen, or remotely scary compared to the bus rides I took on mountain roads when I was in India. In other words, it wasn’t a thrill ride; it was easy to relax and enjoy the views.

The Village of Flåm

Flåm is a tiny village of about 300 people. It mostly consists of gift shops and restaurants clustered around a tourist information center. We hit up the TIC first to confirm our boat tickets for the morning. I wasted time looking for a sim card at the only tiny grocery store in town, then promptly got lost looking for the campground where we had reserved a cabin.

But even in the middle of dragging suitcases around trying to figure out where we were going, my daughter relaxed as soon as we got off the train. I hadn’t realized that she was tense when we were running around Oslo. But something about that tiny strip of photogenic land inside the bowl-like enclosure of mountains on the edge of the fjord put her immediately at ease.

Cozy Cabins

Once we found it (and there was no reason we had such a hard time), we loved our little cabin. My daughter was delighted to discover that she could have both the top and bottom bunks for herself, and I just loved how cozy it was.

By the time we walked back into town, everyone from our train had disappeared and the town seemed almost deserted. We shopped at the gift shops until they closed (most of them at 4 o’clock). I got a thulite pendant and we bought some locally made chocolate. Then we hung around until the brewery opened for dinner.

We had an excellent dinner and walked back to cabin in the dusk (the sun disappeared behind the mountains hours before the actual “sunset”). There I failed to properly operate the washing machine, so I gave up and spent a peaceful evening relaxing with a local brew in the cabin while my daughter read a book in her bunk. We went to sleep early and had the first solid night’s rest of the trip.

Visit Flåm

Despite the almost complete lack of activity – or maybe because of it – we were seriously tempted to stay longer. I could easily have spent a day just soaking in the quiet, and then hung around for a couple days more with day trips to Stegastein and the nearby village of Aurland (where Egil’s in-laws lived). I guess I’m not surprised that my artsy introvert wanted more time in Flåm. But I’m all about concerts and museums and fancy coffee, and I still felt weirdly at home in that tiny little town where you have to look up to see the horizon.

ByGD
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Norwegian Folk Museum in Oslo

A lot of people like folk museums for their down-to-earth “what life was like in the old days” approach to history. For me, the old days in question are never old enough. But when you’re traveling with a kid, the hands-on outdoor folk museum is kind of a no-brainer. Plus, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) in Oslo has a stave church. Since we were on Bygdøy anyway, that was enough to merit a quick visit. Little did I know they’d have to push us out the door at closing time.

The Draw

The Norwegian folk museum is an open-air museum with 160 historic buildings, mostly built in the last 500 years. One exception is the Gol Stave Church, a main attraction at the museum that was built in the village of Gol sometime around 1200. There are also indoor exhibits featuring Norwegian folk costumes, folk art, church art and Sami culture. They offer hands-on activities for children, and docents in period dress demonstrate old skills and explain aspects of life in different epochs. My daughter requested participatory art experiences on our itinerary, and this sounded like the kind of museum where you might get to try working at a loom or braiding rope.

The Reality

The reality of Norway’s hard divide between high season and off season with no shoulder in between meant that there were no costumed docents walking around or doing demonstrations. The majority of the buildings were locked up and only visible from the outside or, if you were tall enough, by peeking through a window. Surprisingly, running around on a sunny spring day peeking into windows had tremendous appeal to my ten-year-old. All the patience she extended to me at the Viking Ship Museum was now repaid, as she attempted to peek into every single one of the 160 historic buildings onsite.

The promised petting zoo of farm animals appeared deserted, and to my eyes, the dozens of elevated, turf-roofed farm buildings quickly blurred together. But my daughter was having a blast, stopping to photograph architectural details on nearly identical buildings and cataloguing the contents observed through dirty windows. We both found the apartment buildings where each unit was decorated in the style of a different decade entertaining. And the stave church, well, it deserves its own subheading. By the time we got to the indoor exhibits there were only a few minutes left to closing. We had to breeze past exhibits on folk art, clothing, and Sami culture. Fortunately these overlapped a lot with exhibits at our own Nordic Heritage Museum back home, so we didn’t miss too much.

Gol Stave Church

You may have noticed that I am irreligious. I have to work at being open-minded enough to stay on the polite side of antireligious. I do appreciate architecture, but churches don’t usually do it for me. (Exceptions include St. Stephen’s in Vienna and the chapel at Seattle U, both of which I can appreciate for purely aesthetic reasons).

I say all this is to set up what a tremendous surprise it was to walk inside the tiny wooden Gol stave church and feel something. Yes, of course it was pretty. But there really was a special atmosphere inside that little 13th century village church. Only one other visitor entered while we were there. She stopped short just inside the door, said, “Wow,” and quickly dropped to the floor to take a picture of the roof.

Medieval cathedrals in mainland Europe awe with their immensity. But this tiny church creates the same sense of smallness inside a vast universe using a very tall, narrow space. It almost felt like standing inside a concentrated column of energy.

Unexpected Highs

One of my favorite things about travel is how you’re guaranteed to have moments you’ll never forget, but they are almost never the ones you planned for. I never expected to have a spiritual moment in a church of all places. And I never thought that running around looking in the windows of old buildings would keep my 10-year-old occupied in sheer delight for a whole afternoon. I can only imagine what highs we might have achieved if all the activities I was expecting had been available. But then again, maybe the magic lay in having acres of old Norway all to ourselves.

ByGD
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The Viking Ship Museum in Oslo

On our second day in Oslo, we visited the Viking Ship Museum (Vikingskipshuset) on the Bygdøy peninsula. When we planned our Norway itinerary, my daughter and I both picked a couple of must-see items that we would accomplish no matter what. The Viking Ship Museum was my first pick. I’ve been to several exhibits of authentic Viking-age artifacts, but boats are (ironically) not so mobile. So the closest I’d gotten to a real Viking ship was the Gokstad reproduction at Viking World in Iceland. Íslendingur is awesome, but the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo displays the actual Gokstad ship.

Getting There

It’s worth just dedicating an entire day to museums on Bygdøy (or two, since most museums seem to only be open from 10-4 and you can’t fit them all in that window). Bygdøy is called an island, but it’s really a peninsula. You can just drive or take the bus to get there. But it’s more fun (and faster) to take the ferry from the downtown Oslo harbor.

We caught the second ferry of the day at City Hall Pier 3 (tickets were free with our Oslo Passes) and got off at the Dronningen stop. From there it was about a 10-minute walk to the museum through a quiet neighborhood of fancy houses.

Oseberg Ship

The Viking Ship Museum houses three authentic Viking ships that were used to bury their wealthy owners together with the grave goods contained in the ships. The Oseberg ship is the largest of the three and arguably the finest Viking Age find (a farmer dug into it in 1903). Built in Norway around 820 A.D., the clinker-built oak ship had room for 30 oarsmen and was richly ornamented.

Detail, Oseberg ship bow

The Oseberg ship probably sailed along the coast and up rivers in Southern Norway before being pulled ashore to bury two high-ranking women. One was in her fifties and the other was in her seventies. They were buried on a bed in the ship, along with the richest trove of Viking era grave goods ever found. Whoever they were, at least one of them was extremely important. The grave goods include a functional sled and a highly ornamented horse cart. The Oseberg ship is also notable for being the source of most of the textile remains from the Viking age.

Oseberg ship

Gokstad Ship

In 1879 two teenagers dug into “The King’s Mound” on their farm to see if there was really anything buried there. They discovered the grave of a Viking king (or an important chieftain, at least) who was buried around 900 A.D. The chieftain was not as wealthy as the Oseberg women, but his burial gifts were still extensive, including shields, small boats, and exotic animals. Compared to Oseberg, the ship is less extravagant in ornamentation, but bigger in size.

It was used for ocean voyages until the chieftain was killed in battle. (This is why they modeled Íslendingur after Gokstad instead of the more famous Oseberg.) Having walked around on its replica in Iceland made the relatively plain Gokstad ship more interesting. It was easier to imaging the ship fitted out with sails and shields, ready to cross the ocean and devastate monasteries.

Tune Ship

A farmer found the Tune ship in 1867. It was the first Viking ship to be excavated and is still one of the best-preserved Viking ships in the world. But compared to the other two it mostly serves to illustrate just how amazing the Oseberg and Gokstad ships really are. Not only is the ship itself less complete, but the grave was plundered and the remaining goods are not in great condition.

All This and More

Even though I’ve already seen a lot of Viking artifacts, the items at the Viking Ship Museum are quite unusual. There wasn’t a lot of overlap with other exhibits, so I still felt like I learned a lot – for example, I always wondered what Viking shoes looked like, and now I know. There were several documentaries on loop in the museum, including one about textiles, which was all new information for me.

A normal person with only a passing interest in the Viking age would probably be satisfied with half an hour in the museum. But I had to read every single plaque and watch every film in its entirety. We spent well over two hours there, not counting the gift ship, where many items were purchased. I have no regrets.

A Penny Saved

We visited the museum using our Oslo Passes, which more than paid for themselves on our museum-focused itinerary. But if you’re only going to visit a couple of museums, your ticket from the Viking Ship Museum grants free entry to the Historical Museum, Norway’s largest collection of historical artifacts, including Viking treasures, Egyptian mummies and a multitude of ethnographic exhibitions, within 48 hours.

Ten year old examining art at the International Children's Art Museum
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The International Children’s Museum in Oslo

If I was traveling with anyone else, I probably would not have gone there. But since my companion was a 10-year-old who asked for “chances to make art” for her special trip to Norway, the International Children’s Art Museum (Det Internasjonale Barnekunstmuseet) in Oslo was the first stop on our itinerary. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t expect much. People always underestimate kids.

The International Children’s Art Museum

Nearly every city has a children’s museum these days, and sometimes art museums have sections or special exhibits for children. But as far as I know, the International Children’s Art Museum in Oslo is the only art museum in the world dedicated entirely to children. Even if it is not, this museum is still unique because it’s not just showing art to children, it’s showing art by children.

Established in 1986 by film director Rafael Goldin and his wife, Dr. Alla Goldin, the museum (colloquially known as Barnekunst) collects, preserves, and displays art by children. They have a massive collection of art from over 180 countries. Only a small fraction of it is on display at any given time in the museum, a large converted house in a quiet suburban neighborhood of Oslo that houses the embassies of many small nations.

The Museum Experience

Nearly every inch of the big, old house is covered in art. Some of it is original works on small, framed pieces of paper. Some of the pieces have been blown up and printed on giant posters for better viewing. One small room houses sculptures while other rooms are dedicated to rotating themed exhibitions and displays from the permanent collection. The top floor straddles the line between wonderland and creepy, with red walls and a huge collection of dolls from around the world. The basement houses a gift shop and work room where children can create their own art and participate in regularly held weekend workshops.

Barnekunst was our first stop in Oslo after picking up our Bergen Cards at the tourist information center. We arrived in the late morning of an April Tuesday, just as some others were leaving. Aside from the woman working the front desk, they were the only other people we saw during our visit. You could easily view the entire museum in half an hour, but to really take it all in, you have move slowly. We ended up staying nearly three hours.

We left our shoes in the cubbies by the door and explored the museum in our socks. The friendly staff person at the front desk gave us a worksheet with a scavenger hunt of images from the museum – if you found them all, you could get a prize. Starting from the basement, we worked our way slowly through rooms, ending in the uncanny doll room. Along the way, we found a few of the scavenger hunt items and marveled in awe at the skill of some young artists.

Then we worked our bay back down, looking more closely for the ones we missed. Several of the images on the worksheet were close-up details of larger works and gave us a real challenge. We had to get hints from the lady at the desk to find the last two.

Inspired, my daughter spent nearly an hour at the end of our visit drawing a picture in the work room. She drew a portrait of a gender-fluid child. Since I hadn’t noticed gender as a theme in the museum, I asked her what inspired the choice. She said she couldn’t decide whether to draw a girl or a boy, then realized it didn’t have to be one or the other. Again, I was reminded that youth is not the same as ignorance.

The Art

On our first pass through the museum, we were mostly struck by the talented kids. We marveled at the technical skill and maturity of some of the drawings relative to the age of the artist. My daughter’s ego took a few hits as she repeatedly commented, “That person is my age,” or “That was done by someone younger than me.”

Ten year old examining art at the International Children's Art Museum

But as we went back through more slowly, I began to pay more attention to the way the work was grouped. Not all of it was technically superior. Some 13-year-olds’ pictures looked like first grade scribbles, and after a while, you even began to see that overall, a certain level of skill and detail generally matched up with age.

But you also began to notice the way geography tended to influence style. Children from South Asia and Africa tended to use brighter colors, art in a cartoon style was more likely to be from East Asia. Regardless of technique or style, the pictures often revealed the inner workings of the artist’s mind. Whether it was a stick figure that somehow captured the anguish of getting lost or an impressionistic painting of a father’s yelling face, these images had just as much emotional weight as the work hanging in other museums.

The Impact

Sometimes the choice of subject matter revealed that childhood is not the uniformly naïve and unburdened experience adults like to imagine. Among the robots and superheroes and spaceships were also pictures of farm work, hunting for food or hauling water, and anxiety for the future. Individual works were sometimes very compelling, and sometimes Regardless of whether an individual works was compelling of itself or became so through the careful curation and context of museum display, the end result was as effective as any exhibition of professional works. Perhaps it was even more so for being so unexpected.

When we were done, my daughter got to pick a prize. She chose a postcard of one of the paintings that I had liked. It sits on my desk now as a reminder that anyone can make good art.

Solene i hendene by Lyudmilla Barzion (15)

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