Needless to say, I’m not going anywhere for spring break this year. But last year, my then-ten-year-old daughter and I went to Norway. A chunk of our trip was dedicated to 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. I wrote about the first part of this trip within a trip earlier. Now you can read the rest of the story.
There is no shortage of awesome bakeries in Seattle. I have favorites scattered around town. “Well, since I’m in West Seattle, I have to stop at Bakery Nouveau.” Every time I stray north of Market I feel like hitting up Larsen’s. On the other hand, I never just happen to be in Black Diamond, but I love the Black Diamond Bakery. Some bakeries in remote places still thrive because people make excuses to drive out to them. These are the destination bakeries that you go out of your way to sample. I found one such bakery in Flåm.
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 Flåmwebsite 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.}
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.
