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.