Norway Redeems Itself

I’ve had to keep reminding myself that during the winter, Scandinavia only has a few hours of sunlight a day, because the Norwegian coast is so beautiful it’s tempting to runway here. After my day in the hospital (toe is improving nicely now, by the way!), Jay and I spent another two and a half days in Bergen, exploring the nearby fjords, the hills around town and the must-see attractions in the town itself. (I say “town” because it feels small, but Bergen is the second biggest city in Norway with 265,000 residents.)

To see the fjords, Jay and I did the “Norway in a Nutshell” tour. It’s pretty cleaver: instead of piling a bunch of tourists into a guided group, Norway just uses the existing transportation systems and does the leg work for you to do the trip “independently:” All the different transports (three train rides, a boat ride, and a bus ride) are compiled into one ticket, you are handed the time table you are to follow if you wish to do the whole loop in one day, and given an info book describing the sights throughout the trip. There is no “guide” per say, but on the Flåm train and the boat there are recordings (on the boat, you get to hear about the fjords in nine languages!).

From Bergen, we took a train inland to Myrdal, where the Flåm railway starts. Norway seems very proud of this railway, which is the steepest normal gauge railway line in Northern Europe with 20 hand-built tunnels, including one that houses a 180-degree switchback. Honestly the train didn’t seem that impressive to me—I’m pretty sure I’ve been on steeper railways (Jay says narrow gauge trains can go much steeper) and I didn’t even notice the 180-degree turn because it was inside the dark tunnel. Flåm itself is a little itty bitty town with a prime location at the end of the Aurlandsfjord, an arm of the Sognefjord, one of the big famous ones. When we visited, Flåm looked ridiculous because there was a cruise boat in the port that was several times larger than the town itself. 

Big cruise ship, tiny town

From Flåm, we boarded a boat that took us up Aurlandsfjord to Sognefjord and down Nærøyfjord to another tiny town, Gudvangen, where we took a bus then a train to get back to Bergen. I still don’t quite understand the process, but to the best of my understanding, fjord creation goes like this: when the Ice Age was on its way out, glaciers created cracks in the mountains, then those cracks were gouged out by ice and water until they were deep enough to connect with the ocean. Then throughout time, the glacial waters/avalanches/rock slides brought deposits to the bottom of the walls and created fan-shaped land masses on which small villages were eventually built. So that’s why fjords have the unique features of the straight up and down walls that go down beneath the surface of the water (versus rivers that tend to round out under the water), a direct connection to the ocean, and the variable depth of the water (the same fjord can go from 1,300 meters to 12 meters deep), even though there are sill villages on their edges. I also still don’t quite understand what makes one fjord more remarkable than another. Sogneford is famous because it’s really really big. And Nærøyfjord is narrow and shallow and thus (evidently) considered by UNESCO to be a World Heritage site. To me, the fjords all pretty much looked the same (beautiful, but the same). I guess I lack a connoisseur’s eye for geology. 

Mouth of the fjord

Fjord walls

The next day, we did a very relaxed exploration of Bergen and the surrounding hills. We started off checking out Torget, the (unexciting) fish market, and Bryggen, the historic waterfront buildings that mainly housed craft workshops and bars for Hanseatic Germans. Bryggen’s story is kind of funny—it’s another World Heritage site, but the original buildings from the 1400s burnt to the ground in 1702. Apparently the 1702 residents had the foresight to rebuild them following exactly the same line, and thus the area is still considered a historic remnant of the 1400s.

Bryggen

Wood warp: hazard of wooden buildings

From Bryggen, we took the Fløibanen railway up to Mount Fløyen, one of the six hills bordering the non-water facing sides of Bergen, from which you have a panoramic view of the city. From the top of the hill, I could finally see how 265,000 people live in Bergen—the tourist map only covers the pretty part by the water, but the city extends quite far inland and then out on a few other peninsulas farther away from the historic areas. From the top of the railway there are a ton of hiking/walking/running trails, reminiscent of Jefferson County Open Space. We walked a short distance to a lake, then the 45 minutes back down to the city center. 

Bergen from above

That alone would have been just a lovely day, but the cherry on top was when I headed back out in the early evening to hang out with the penguins at the Aquarium. I think I will have to be a penguin for Halloween this year because they are so funny to watch and imitate. (If you don’t believe me, check out the Penguin cam, the best procrastination device ever invented.) The Bergen Aquarium has a whole bunch of penguins and I happened to be there during feeding time and got to learn some about them. I like their mating process: a male penguin picks a rock and presents it to a female. If she likes it, she accepts, that rock makes the first rock in their nest, they collect many more together and are mated for life. If she does not like it, she squawks and shoos him away, game over Mr. Penguin. Talk about high pressure rock selection!!

Can you see why I love this picture?

A final cool thing about our time in Bergen was that we were there just before the start of their two annual festivals, a Jazz festival and some kind of international drama/art festival. For one of the two festivals, a whole bunch of different teams were building all these intricate geometric sculptures around town and we were able to watch them from start to (almost) finish. Here are some of my favorites: 

Built the structure, then built the scaffolding to burn the structure from