Norway

After Denmark, we flew to Norway. The plan was to work our way up the west coast from south to north, seeing the fjords, mountains, forests, and everything else, then stop in Oslo. Small spoiler: I found Oslo much less interesting than Copenhagen.

We started in Bergen. It’s a port city in the southwest and a transit hub for people heading elsewhere in Norway. Plenty of flights go there.

The adventures started here, because our luggage bravely decided to stay in Copenhagen (I get it). It arrived on a flight the next day, and then the airline took another 26 hours to deliver it to our hotel. A hotel we’d already checked out of. Ha-ha. The only thing that saved us was that our route would bring us back to the same hotel a little later.

Bergen isn’t particularly big, but it has some interesting places and streets. You can climb the mountain for a great view of the city, then walk through a beautiful forest with a lake nearby. So yes, I’d recommend it.

After that, we took a train to Flåm, a little farther north. Two trains, actually.

First, you board a modern, comfortable high-speed train and ride past incredible scenery. Then, at a very cold mountain pass high up in the middle of nowhere, you switch to a restored vintage train that looks a bit like the Hogwarts Express. Sit on the left. You can’t reserve a seat, so you have to grab one when you board.

There’s not much to do in Flåm itself. It’s another tourist transit hub, so you’re better off heading straight somewhere else. We went to Aurland. Getting there turned out to be tricky: the shuttles run rather unpredictably and, by the way, cost a lot.

Aurland is a cozy, beautiful, quiet little town, and we really liked it. I probably wouldn’t stay for long, but it’s worth spending a night or two and exploring the area. We hiked to a nearby viewpoint, wore ourselves out a bit, and spent some time with the goats. A great trail, which would have been even better if I’d had all the clothes I’d planned to wear (the suitcase still hadn’t arrived).

Flåm is farther north than Bergen, but somehow feels warmer and more southern. So much greenery and so many flowers. The houses and the flower beds around them make you feel that if snow does fall here, it must be rare and mostly by accident.

We took a ferry from Flåm back to Bergen, looking at the fjords and everything else along the way. It’s beautiful, so if you have a camera with a long lens, going by water makes sense. The ferry takes even longer than the train, almost five hours.

The next morning, we flew on a small plane, changed to an even smaller one, and arrived in the Lofoten Islands. The airport there is probably the smallest I’ve ever been to. One security lane and a terminal with two gates: the door on the left and the door on the right. The planes are small enough to mistake for private jets, but they actually fit more than 30 people.

This is where the wild northern landscape really begins. It feels like the alpine zone starts literally ten meters above sea level. Any higher and there’s barely any vegetation, mostly rocks and lichen. But it’s beautiful.

The weather changes constantly, especially in autumn: rain, howling wind, clouds, fog. Then the sun comes out in the middle of it all. One day, we saw a rainbow about twenty times.

Lots of unusual old fishing villages, with houses built on stilts over the rocks by the ocean, making it easy to head out fishing and haul the catch back home. Many have now become stylish, expensive hotels.

We were lucky to get clear skies on at least one of our days there. That evening, we saw the northern lights. Some landscapes and natural phenomena look beautiful in person but are hard to photograph. Mountains on the horizon, forests, often the Moon. The northern lights are the opposite: they look much better and brighter in photos than in real life. Ours were fairly faint, of course. They can be much stronger. In person, it was more of a barely visible grayish streak in the sky, easy to mistake for a cloud unless you stopped and watched it for a while.

Lofoten attracts a particular kind of tourist. Everyone speaks English: the local Norwegians and absolutely all the tourists, from the French to the Chinese. I suppose there aren’t many group tours, so you have to figure things out yourself. Which means you can talk to everyone.

We went kayaking, did a couple of hikes, and drove around to see the scenery. Unlike the Alps or the Dolomites, Lofoten doesn’t really require you to be particularly fit.

One thing I won’t miss is Norwegian prices.