Trip to Bergen and the fjords

I am currently on a business trip to Stavanger, and this time they gave me the weekend off. Rather than going back to Holland, I chose to go to Bergen, to see the city and the fjords in spring. This is something that has been on my to-do list for years, but somehow I never had time off during this period.

I started out Friday evening by taking the fast boat to Bergen. This is a fairly good, cheap way of travelling from Stavanger to Bergen. The boat ride takes four hours and ten minutes, driving by car takes around four hours and 30 minutes, so it's actually faster than driving. The price was 200 NOK(around 25 Euro) to Bergen and 320 NOK(around 40 euro) back to Stavanger, so it was cheap compared to driving or flying.

It was quite moody sitting back enjoying the view of the rugged coastline in the sunset, with the boat pounding against the waves as we sped towards Bergen. The weather was very nice for a change when I arrived in Bergen, so I dropped off my backpack at the hotel and went for a walk in the city center.

Saturday I started out at around 07:30. I had ordered my tickets from Holland, so I had to pick them up at the railway station. This day I was doing the "Norway in a nutshell"-tour, which is the most popular roundtrip for tourists visiting Norway. I took the local train to Voss, there I changed to bus. The bus stop was kind of a mess, because there were lots of buses, but only one said "Norway in a nutshell", so all the tourists lined up in front of that one. Kind of funny to see probably a hundred tourists lining up in front of this already crowded bus, while the five or six other buses there were empty. The other ones said "Gudvangen" on the front, and I knew that was where we were going, but due to this bad signage they probably spent a good fifteen minutes extra loading up the buses before departure.

The bus ride from Voss was nice. We passed some waterfalls, and drove next to a beautiful green/white river. The river was nothing compared to Otta in spring back east, but it was nice to look at a properly angry river. Rivers in Holland are docile, and the rivers I looked at in Switzerland were all muddy and greyish, so it was a welcome change.

After about an hour's drive, we reached the entry point of the Nærøydalen. At this point I understood that some of the other passengers in this bus had not read the tour description. We started descending the Stalheimskleiva, and people started screaming. A woman in front of me started crying hysterically as we started going into the hairpin bends, which by the way were more like figures eight. I was enjoying the fantastic view of Nærøydalen along with a couple of big waterfalls while we were descending this really steep road with a cliff face at one side. It wasn't really that scary, as the descent was only 18%, and there were some big stone blocks between the bus and the edge of the cliff. I did slide forward slightly in my seat, though, and this is probably the steepest road I've been on outside of my army service. The bus driver had to yell at people to stay in their seats as some people were going from side to side trying to take pictures, making the bus tilt to one side.

At Gudvangen I entered the ferry going to Flåm. This was the high point of the trip for me, only it was a shame the weather was so bad, rainy and foggy. This would have been truly spectacular if the weather had been good. Nærøyfjord is one of the narrowest fjords in Norway, and it is one of the two fjords on the UNESCO World Heritage list(the other one being Geirangerfjord, which I plan to visit in August). I think going in springtime is probably best, because it means you have lots and lots of different shades of green in the trees and bushes on the sides of the fjord, and there's also flowers on the ground and snow in the mountains. Supposedly, there's also less tourists, but I must say there were a lot of Americans and Japanese on the boat. I don't think there were many Norwegians on board, reinforcing my belief that people in general don't go to touristy places close to where they live. After an hour or so, the boat comes out of the Nærøyfjord and goes into the wider Aurlandsfjord, before ending the trip in Flåm.

Flåm is a super-touristy village with cruise ships, souvenir shops, cafes and the starting point of the Flåm railway up into the mountains. I changed to train here, to take the famous Flåm railway up to Myrdal. Maybe I'm jaded from going on the really nice panoramic trains through Switzerland, but I thought it sucked. They did do the story about the underground people, and the Hulder, who would entrance men with their beauty and song and trick the lovesick men into coming underground with them. Then the train stopped at Kjosfossen, a really big waterfall right next to the train track, and suddenly there were these women in traditional costumes dancing in the waterfall, while some traditional singing was coming from hidden speakers in the mountain. It seemed to be very popular with the tourists...

At Myrdal I changed to the regular train going back to Bergen. The car I was in was full of tourists. They were amazed at the amount of snow up there. I told them that this is normal up here, because in the mountains you have snow until late in summer.

I spent the evening having a nice dinner with my uncle and aunt at their home in Bergen.

Sunday I went on the "Explore Hardangerfjord"-cruise. The weather was very nice, which made the trip more enjoyable than the one I took the day before. I took the train to Voss, changed to bus, and then we took a pictoresque side road to Ulvik, stopping to take pictures of some big waterfalls. There were big rainbows in most of the waterfalls...sweet. Only thing missing was the unicorns ;P


From Ulvik we took a fast boat to Eidfjord. With the nice weather, I really enjoyed standing on the deck with the wind in my hair taking pictures of the fjord.

In Eidfjord we changed to a bus, taking us up to Hardangervidda Nature Park Center, a mountain museum complete with a panoramic cinema showing helicopter views of the fjords and big waterfalls.

After a couple of hours, the tour continued up to one of the bigger remaining waterfalls in Norway - Vøringsfossen. Because of the regulation due to electricity production, the waterfall is muted compared to the old days. It only releases 15 cubic meters of water per second instead of 60. It's still nice to look at, though. I wonder if they have many accidents up there, because there were a lot of warnings before we could enter the viewing platform (It's about 200 meters down, and the rocks can be slippery...).

We finished up with two and a half hours of driving around the Hardangerfjord. I got to see the blooming cherry-trees and apple orchards of Hardanger. It was less impressive than I had hoped for. I had expected the trees to be bigger, like the cherry trees my grandfather used to have on his farm. The ones that were here were small, in neat rows along the water. As an eastern boy used to regular farmland, it was interesting for me to see all the fruit farms and fish farms in the fjords.

On Monday I went for the generic touristy things in Bergen, like visiting the Aquarium, going to the top of mount Ulriken for the grand view of Bergen, and going to mount Fløyen, just to compare views before jumping on the fast boat back to Stavanger. Bergen is a really pretty city when the weather is good, so it was kinda sad leaving Bergen to go back to rainy Stavanger. At least I had a good trip, met up with some family, and have a few more things ticked off from my "Things to see"-list.

Pictures are here and here.