Have to get up earlier than anticipated as we suspect we may not have collected the tickets for part of today's trip. So hastily down the usual breakfast and hurry to the railway booking office. Luckily we had made our picnic lunch last night and only had to pack it away. Arriving at the booking office we discover there was no mistake, the booking details are just needed when we get to the fjord safari boat quay.
So with the best part of an hour to wait we have a stroll around the park - good fountain in front of the Kode Museum buildings (save this treat for another day).
Back at the station we find a queue building for our train so we tag on to the end and after a few minutes we are off on a pretty spectacular ride to Myrdal.
The train is quite full, lots of people with fjord tours tickets. The first hour is to the town of Voss, and we think maybe we are on the wrong side of the train as the fjord views are out of the left hand side. Although there is a river on our side
You can get up and walk around, sometimes the views appear between tunnels and are generally too brief to get into position for a photo op.
Just about to enter a tunnel
However from Voss to Myrdal, after the bulk of the passengers have departed, is by far the most interesting and it's now on view through the right hand window.
There are quite a few bends that allow a view of both the train (just) and the landscape
Amazing how much snow is on the ground here still
and plenty of evidence of skiing as the main form of transportation.
The rivers are often partially snowed under, which makes for an interesting sight.
Our concerns about making the connection to the Flam train were ill founded. We thought the 7 minute difference in arrival to departure would be a stress, but no the train was waiting across the platform, along with a considerable number of passengers who had arrived by bus.
The 20km descent was scheduled as an hour which seemed a bit slow but this a train with plenty of scenic viewpoints and you are even able to alight at one to take the obligatory piccie, in this case of a rather long waterfall.
Plus they let you know when an interesting view is coming up, and even tell you which side it is on. Given the glorious weather we are having it may be unfair to compare this train ride with the New Zealand transalpine route, where it was raining, but this one is far more spectacular.
They give you a bit of history related to building the line in the early nineteen hundreds, here you can see where we have just come from along the top of the ridge, and one of the access roads used when they built it.
Arrive at Flam just in time for our Heritage Safari rib-boat tour, lunch will have to wait. Have to gear up for being on the water, they supply a full suit, hat, gloves and ski goggles. Plus a life jacket of course.
Whoa I don't want to go overboard.
Our guide for the trip was Danielle and she was very informative - starting with how we should contact people if she fell off the boat, assuring us she was attached to the motor with a lead and it would cut off if she went overboard. Plus we stop a few times for cultural, historic and nature insights. These include visiting a fjord designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site;
the obligatory waterfall, which we get up close and personal with;
a village where only 60 people lived but in the summer there are 600 goats.
This is the same village that was the inspiration for the village where the princess lived in Disney's Frozen movie, and that also had the oldest church in Scandinavia (since the 1100's); some porpoises (two weeks ago they had a pod of Orca, but this is extremely unusual); another Viking village (we stopped briefly here to let some people off and stretch our legs
Eric thought he'd better make himself secure for the next part of the journey.
plus some abandoned villages and one with only one eccentric resident remaining.
There was a very steep hillside, I'd call it close to vertical , where she told us they have an uphill race every year, the ascent is 750m over two and a half kilometres. The men's record was set with a time of 20 minutes - flipping heck!
Another highlight was this house on top of the cliff
It used to be a farm and the farmer was her sister's godfather, but it had been abandoned for a while and then bought by a rich American who married a Norwegian girl. They lived there until they had children and now run it as an exclusive guest house, they bought a village further down the fjord for their new home. The access is only by boat and then walking up what looked to me again like a near vertical face via a zig zag path. She had done this regularly, taking 45mins up and 29 mins down. The guesthouse has no electricity but does have solitude, some wood fired hot tubs and fantastic views. Our guide would like to get married there when she meets the right man.
Back in Flam we now have time to sit on the quay to devour our picnic lunch before the ferry ride back to Bergen.
Eric finds an interesting photo op.
It's a five or six hour journey down the Sonjesfjord, it's the express ferry (!) and only stops at a few places. This is the second longest fjord in the world, at over 230 km from start to the sea. The longest is in Greenland but is mostly inaccessible. Several pictures from along the way.
Gosh this is a good seat
Then we journey out to sea and along the coast to Bergen. The weather is still glorious, hurrah.
The most westerly point on the Norwegian mainland Is on the other side of the boat!
Travel between coastal islands
And into Bergen harbour area, Where they looked like they suddenly realised when they were building the road that they need to let boats get through
It's been a very long day.
