10 Norway in a Nutshell

Sunday 19 August 2007

I would like the names and addresses of the people (somewhere between 2 and 200 of them) who spent Saturday night in the street below our hotel window. There was a great deal of merriment going on, at times at the top of their lungs. I thought I might hire someone to go and return the favor about noon, because I am sure they will be trying to sleep (probably sleep it off) around that time of day.

We had set the alarm for 6:00 but were up a bit before that. Packed and ready to go about 7:00 we went down to the breakfast room even though the announced time for the start of the meal was not until 8:00. Penny had read that the Thon hotel’s breakfast rooms are typically always opened with the juice machines available. Not only was that true but they had already put out some cold items like cereal. I had Post Toasties.

At the train station we found our train track and were walking the length of the train to find “Vogan” 1. We found ourselves following a gaggle of tourists with lots of bags and all (and I do mean all) of them talking at once. I quickened the pace and sure enough they were headed to the same car. We got on and found our seats. If we had been behind them we would have waited for several minutes for them to find their seats and store their stuff.

The first bit of the train trip was less than scenic. We traveled through a six mile long tunnel. We stopped at several small towns and the airport but only one person got on our car. We had moved to a different seat because our assigned seat has a wall that separates two windows. Consequently a big part of the view is missing. Naturally the seat I picked out to move to was the one belonging to the man coming on board.


There were lots of other empty seats and we found a nice forward facing one. While sitting in the small viewing area of the train I met a man who was traveling with 3 families from China. He works for an American Company that makes optic fiber cable. He has been to the US many times for his business. He said that part of his job from time to time is to accompany customers from China on tours of the US sights. His company has facilities in Dallas and somewhere in California. He has been most impressed with places like our national parks: Arches, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite. It made me stop and think that indeed Norway is lovely but so are the many places in the US.


It is 10:15 and we have stopped at a station. The scenery started out with fields and farms punctuated by houses and villages. It is growing more hilly and we have begun passing bodies of waters that are heavenly blue in contrast to the nearly uniformly gray skies today. I am not sure whether the waters are lakes or fjords (I did figure out that those I could see the entire shore line are lakes.)

The train is now traveling along the floor of valleys as we climb higher into the mountains of Norway. We have been gliding through consecutive tunnels of trees only to emerge for ever so brief glimpses of waterfalls resulting in streams tumbling down the sides of the mountains and making their way across idyllic red barned farms. These farms are islands in the forests and it would appear that the task of holding back the inexorable forest would be formidable.


What appears to be large round bales of hay are all covered with white plastic making them appear to be giant marshmallows (at least so Penny thought). Throughout the day we say these bales but with the exception of a few sheep I do not recall seeing many animals of any kind other than birds. I will have to ask about that.


The train left the valley floor where we had been following the lowest, flattest path often by a river. We left that easy and broad path and began winding our way up the side of the mountain and the way was narrow but definitely not straight. Now all the farms are below rather than above us as we look out the window. The train spent a lot of time in the tree tunnels and some made of rock. The sights were given a sound track as some young sisters from Massachusetts gasped and oohed as they saw waterfalls and rapids through the brief spaces between the times where we had tunnel vision.


We climbed higher and soon rose above the tree line which at this latitude is around 3000 feet. This did not necessarily help the view as this part of the trip has most of the 200 tunnels we passed through on the 4 hour trip. It also has over 18 miles of snow sheds. Indeed we began to see patches of snow and even a glacier in the distance. The brilliant white of the snow patches kept the grays of the rocks and skies from merging into an indistinguishable blur.



Near the peak of the mountains we stopped in Myrdal and rushed along with almost everyone on board across the platform to catch the Flam railroad which takes you down the other side of the mountain to sea level. The ride that had taken 4 hours to climb up would take us just an hour to go down. Our rush across the platform was not fast enough and the remaining seats were on the aisle. We sat in the midst of 3 Spanish speaking families (from Spain I believe). I so enjoyed the fact that they were having a hoot. There was constant laughter and joking and ribbing each other. One woman handed her camera to what I think was her husband and asked him to take a picture of a waterfall we were passing. The man tries to figure which button to push and she begins to yell “Rapido, Rapido.” He clicks the picture of the waterfall and it turns out to look a lot like the inside of a tunnel we were entering. Everyone in the family laughed and kidded him. One lady stood up to poke fun at him and when she sat back down the movie theatre style seats had folded up and she wound up (unhurt) in the middle of the isle. More laughter broke out.

We had a table on the train so we broke out the picnic lunch we packed. We had a loaf of unsliced bread and we had purchased some plastic knives I had thought we would use them to spread the peanut butter and jam, but it turns out that these little plastic knives are tough. They have a ridge on the back (like half an I-beam) so they had no problem slicing through the tough skinned loaf of bread. We also had coconut shortbread cookies, chocolate, apples, raisins and “gold fish”. The later to our surprise did not have that familiar cheese taste and orange finger residue. They were just fish shaped crackers although they were very tasty. Dinner on the boat portion of the trip looked very similar.


We arrived in Flam and they announced the pier for the boat to Gudsvangen. Penny got in the line for the boat and I went to ask if we were in the correct line and to confirm that we could buy tickets on board. I was half right (which is an improvement from my recent record). It was the correct line but we had to buy tickets inside. I dashed in and got the tickets for the boat and also the tickets for the next leg which was by bus. We are now all ticketed up.


The ferry cruised us through an arm of the Sognefjord where the water on this day was nearly black and the mountains leap from the water’s edge in a very nearly 90 degree angle. There was no sun visible but there were some whiffs of very white clouds bumping into and sometimes clinging to the mountains about ¾ of the way up. The waterfalls here are numerous and they appear to be trying to impress everyone by pretending to be more than they are. As the water plummets down the steep sides it is frothed and splashed and it looks as if there is a huge amount of water in the flow. But when the bottom is reached the water runs the last few feet across the rocky waters’ edge and the pretense is banished and it shown to be the trickle that it is.


At the next change of transportation we rushed off the ferry to where people were putting baggage on the bus and then taking it off because the bus was full. We were assured that they counted the people on the boat and that there would be more buses. As the first bus pulled out a second pulled in and we got on that bus.


The road from Gudvangen to Voss is supposed to be the most spectacular view and ride in all of Norway and perhaps in the world. The first 10 minutes of the hour ride did not impress me and then we turned off of the main road to a cart path going up the mountain. It was a paved cart path but still just about that wide. We started up in this giant 60 passenger bus and on the first and subsequent hairpin turns the road would disappear. I am confident it was still there as the antigravity bus lift has not been invented yet. However the road could not be seen at times as I peered directly down out the side of the bus. We met several cars on this road and they were evidently locals because they either stopped or backed up to just the right spot so that the bus could pass.


The bus stopped at a hotel near the top so we could look back down where we had driven up and the driver told folks we would leave at 6:00 and she meant 6:00. At 6:00 she pulled out and here come running 3 men and she did stop just long enough for them to scramble sheepishly on board.


We arrived in Voss and a few paces form the bus was the train platform and there sat a train with no identifying number. The doors were closed and we decided that had to be the train but no one was getting on. Penny took the bull by the horn and pushed the “open door” button. It opened and we got in and got the pick of the seats. Soon the button pushing frenzy caught on and everyone was getting on.


We arrived nearly on time in Bergen and with a map in hand we trudged into the light rain in search of the tourist information center and picked up some brochures for planning and then we walked another 10 minutes to our hotel.


Ray