When I started researching what to do in Norway, I came across the Norway-in-a-Nutshell tour. It seems to be a very popular tour that many tourists who visit Norway embark upon, but it also seems to be run by 1 company. That seemed like a ripoff (I think it ended up being ~$500 for two people), but when I tried pricing out the parts of the trip individually, the price was close. I was going to just buy the tour to save the hassle of booking and scheduling everything myself (since it’s more likely that I’ll screw up somewhere), but in the end we didn’t. The main reason was because the suggested schedule was for more “casual” travelers and we wanted to do the night train to Oslo (as it was significantly cheaper and saved a night of hotel).
Instead, we started leisurely in the morning from Bergen. The first leg was the Bergen Railway to Voss. The Bergen Railway is thought of as one of the top train rides in the world; at least that’s what they said. It certainly is pretty as you leave Bergen towards Oslo, where the train winds through the fjords and mountainside with houses along the mountainside; but I wouldn’t say it is much nicer than the train ride around Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
After an hour or two, we arrived in Voss. Voss is a gateway to numerous outdoor activities and we saw a lot of people hang gliding off nearby mountains. It also seems like a hub for tour buses as there were a great amount of tourists from Korea and European nations. We planned to have lunch there and did so beside a lake. Here’s a panoramic view of where we had lunch. Voss was probably the prettiest part of Norway that we visited.
From Voss, we took a bus to our next destination. The bus only comes every hour and by chance, we ended up on the variation of the route that took us on Stalheimskleiva road. This was probably the best part of the day because this was a one way road with 13 hairpin turns and descending at an 18% grade from the top of a mountain to the valley below. And we did this in a Coach bus (it took the driver 5 minutes to navigate all the turns). I have no idea why one would run a bus route through this road.
The bus terminated at our destination, Gudvangen. This small town basically had one purpose, as a ferry dock to explore the Songnefjord. Of particular interest is the Nærøyfjord which is the narrowest part, except we really have no idea where that was. The ferry that we were on had a loudspeaker that describe attractions as we passed, but they failed to mention this! I was disappointed by this because it took 3 hours and the scenery was not special.
The ferry arrived in Flåm where the next leg was the famous Flåm railway. This railway’s claim to fame is that it is one of the steepest railways, rising 1m ever 18m. My back of the envelope calculations puts this at a 3% grade – not quite as impressive as the 18% grade we descended earlier in the day! Plus, it took an hour to go ~20km (because there was a 20 minute stop in the middle, and a 5 minute stop at a waterfall) and it costs almost $100! Perhaps I don’t appreciate the technical difficulty or history behind the railway, but I thought this was not worthwhile.
In fact it turns out many people walk or hike up/down the path instead of taking the railway. Seems like a sensible use of money (although perhaps not time and effort). We had one last leg which was to catch the Bergen railway to take us to Oslo. The only problem was we arrived at the station (Myrdal) at 7PM and our night train wouldn’t arrive until 1AM! Myrdal is not a town, it is simply a rail station (fortunately there was shelter) and we ended up sitting around (literally) for 6 hours. There were a couple of people who were there even longer than us!
The rest of the journey was at night so there wasn’t much to see (I had enough mountains, rivers and lakes by then though). One high point was Finse at 1222m above sea level. This stop was only an hour after we got on the train so I stayed up for that – but there was nothing memorable there at night. After catching a bit of sleep, we pulled into Oslo. The rest of the train journey wasn’t as beautiful as the first stretch – as you get closer to the city, you see more farms and civilization instead of nature.
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