(You might also like stockholm in january and helsinki in february and norwich in march and paris in april)
This is a piece about a week I spent in Vestland, the westernmost bulge of Norway, in the Spring of 2024. It is probably the piece I have been most looking forward to writing since I started this monthly series, because it might have been the best week of my life. But it is so difficult to express that without slipping into mushy sentimentality, or (worse?) sounding disingenuous: the best week of my life? Really? There have been other excellent weeks, but this one - this place - did something to me, and one of the side effects is that I actually can’t avoid the earnest gushing. It altered my brain chemistry, as the kids would say. It stirred something in me. Two years later, I can’t look at these photos without my eyes welling up.
For full effect, and for reasons that will become clear, I recommend listening to Grieg’s Piano Concerto while you read - or at least while you look at the photos.
(Oh, and there are so many photos. I couldn’t resist. Do scroll to the end and tell me which was your favourite).
I cried at the airport. It was my first flight after a five year hiatus, the first reluctant backstep after proclaiming I’d never fly again. There had been a slow shifting, in the months before, and I’d started to wonder whether I could find a less black-and-white approach, whether there was space for compromise. And then the Norway opportunity presented itself, dates constrained tightly on both sides, by work commitments and my sister’s hen party. It would have taken nearly three days to get to Bergen by train and/or ferry. It would take less than two hours to fly. If I could force myself to be fiercely rational about it, I knew it made sense, but even so, I was taken aback by how awful it felt, arriving at Gatwick that morning. I couldn’t remember how any of it worked: how to affix the tag for my luggage and use the bag drop; what to unpack for the security trays and what to leave in place; what you were actually supposed to do, once you’d emerged out of duty free and into that vast transient waiting space with so many people, so many chairs, so many display screens. I was sniffling anxiously as I boarded, and a cabin crew host with a kind smile asked me if I was ok. I was just a bit nervous about flying, I told her. I hadn’t flown in a long time. And it was true, but only partly. I felt bitterly disappointed in myself. I’d let everybody - and the planet - down.
You forget what a short flight is like, when you’ve only travelled by train for five years. I had barely had time to engross myself in my book before the captain announced we were ready to begin our descent, and from my aisle seat I caught glimpses of blue sea and steep green mountains as the plane curled downwards. On the tram into the city, my first impressions confirmed what I’d imagined Norway might be like: clean, fresh, spacious, a particular airy kind of quality to the light. Behind me, a woman spoke to her toddler in hushed German (you are never far from a German-speaker in Scandinavia) and from my eavesdropping I took in the markers of their life in Bergen: a park here, a kindergarten there, yes, look, there’s a train on that bridge. And, yes! There’s a boat! There’s the mountain! There’s the sea!
I had booked a hostel a little way up a steep slope, just outside of the city centre. The mountain behind it was Ulriken, 643 metres high and barely a hill by Norwegian standards but the tallest in Bergen’s immediate vicinity. Climbing to the top of it was firmly on my to-do list for later in the week. I’d imagined a quiet first night - a simple supper, perhaps a beer somewhere pretty while I read my book. But now the sky was changing, overcast clouds parting to reveal bolts of evening sun. It occurred to me, in a thrilling rush of possibility, that I could just climb it now. I could literally just get up and go. On the way out, I asked the staff at the front desk whether I had time to go to the top and back before it got dark. They looked at me as if I was insane. It was only half past eight, they said. Of course there was time.
They were right: the sun was still pretty far from the horizon by the time I reached the top an hour or so later, sweaty, breathless, exhilarated. I had climbed up the 1,333 ‘sherpa steps’, a path laid by Nepalese mountaineers invited over by Norway to lend their expertise. The route was steep, direct and unforgiving, and I’d tried to resist the temptation to peek back as I climbed. But here, at the top, I could savour it: Bergen sprawling below me, scattered over islands and encroaching onto hillsides, green slopes holding it in its cradle. And there was the water, stretching out in every direction and reaching into inlets, glimmering now in the mid-summer sun.
I had been apprehensive about the hostel but its location made up for it. I hated sharing a room - as I knew I would - and I gritted my teeth as a new dorm-mate arrived clumsily in the middle of the night, unpacking and showering as if oblivious to the people around her trying to sleep. But being in Norway had calmed something in me: I could cope with this. I spent as little time as possible in my shared dorm, and sat instead in the hostel’s garden, perched precariously on a rocky hillside, overlooking the bay. Norway was expensive, prohibitively so, as I’d discover later in the week when I’d spend nearly £30 on a pizza, or £11 on a hot dog. This was going to be a week of hostel kitchen cooking and packed lunches, so I stocked up on ingredients in the nearby supermarket, where they sold whale and reindeer meet alongside Norwegian staples like crispbread and brown cheese. I hadn’t particularly intended to talk to anyone, but I was befriended by a small group of fellow hostel guests, and we spent evenings in the garden, giddy at the sunset and the company and the fresh air and the fact we were really there, that this was real life.
Norway is a big country. I hadn’t realised the scale of it until I’d tried to plan my trip there, first thinking I might be able to spend the week travelling from Tromsø to Oslo via Trondheim, Ålesund and Bergen; realising quickly that that was far too ambitious; trimming it down to just Ålesund and Bergen; and then realising that even that would mean cramming and squeezing. I had no intention of taking an internal flight, and Norway’s geography - its endless high mountains and deep, long fjords - mean that there are rarely quick lines of travel between A and B. There are good, fast trains on some routes, but only really in lines from Oslo to X: you can take the train from Oslo to Bergen or Trondheim, for example, but not between Bergen and Trondheim. There are boats which skim the west coast, picking up passengers at the main ports and depositing them many days (and many, many thousands of kronor) later. And there are roads, often long and winding and slow. Most visitors hire a car: I don’t drive, and I didn’t fancy ten hours on a coach. It was decided for me: I would base myself in Bergen.
Bergen is a pretty unrivalled starting point for a day trip. I crept out of my hostel dorm early in the morning, already bright daylight at this time of year, and took a bus out of the city to Nordheimsund, a village cradled by mountains with a grand, white, Wes-Anderson-esque hotel dominating its waterfront. This was the Hardangerfjord, one of the biggest, and it was the perfect day for it, the sea and sky a deep shade of blue, and the water so still that perfect fluffy clouds reflected on it like a mirror. I took a ferry out along the fjord, passing endless clusters of houses and little red cabins, villages connected more quickly by sea than by land. Sometimes, the driver told us, they saw whales here, glossy black humps surfacing from beneath the vast fjord. At Eidfjord, I disembarked and followed a trail a little way up the mountain - a very little way, but rising high enough that, when I sat down to eat my packed lunch of crispbread and sliced cheese, I could look back at the majestic, twisting valley I’d arrived from. On the return ferry, the driver pulled up next to a waterfall and handed out paper cups, encouraging us to reach out and sample the water. Norway’s water is incredibly clean, and they are - rightly - proud of it: I nodded admiringly as my fellow passengers took their sips, even though I was too much of a hypochondriac to try it for myself.
My second, even more spectacular, day trip took me out to the north of Bergen, where the mountains rise high into the clouds and where there was still snow, even in the final days of May. I went first to the Stave Church at Borgund, wonky and ramshackle and exceptionally well preserved, like something out of a Hogwarts film set or a Corky Paul picture book. There were no windows, the guide told us, not for lack of money or skill but to keep out the cold: nine hundred years ago, the church was the only place villagers could reliably find a warm fire. And the fierce dark wood of the outer walls was deceptive: the inside was gorgeously decorative, all ornate carvings and colourful murals. I was so taken with it that I almost missed my bus. Then, another boat, along another fjord. The Hardangerfjord had been wide and gentle, but the Sognefjord felt entirely different, a narrow waterway cutting through impossibly steep, tall mountains on either side, with jagged peaks and indigo hues. The ferry had, until a few years before, been a floating library, travelling between the tiny, remote villages in this part of Norway. It had been decommissioned but the bookshelves were still there, and I tried to read Norwegian picture books as we floated along. At Fjærland, I stepped back on to dry land and watched locals jump from a sauna cabin straight into the water. A little further on, at Jostedalsbreen, I sat at the foot of the glacier, trying to imagine the icy wilderness just beyond my view. When I think about peace, now, I think of that day on the Sognefjord, and how it felt to sit, to be still, to breathe in that clean air and take in those views, somewhere between serenity and euphoria.
At the end of the week, I took the train out of Bergen. I was going to Oslo, but slowly: this is one of the most famous, most beautiful train journeys in the world, rising high into the mountains. At Myrdal Station - a casual 867 metres above sea level - I took the iconic Flåm railway, which twists down right to the very bottom of the valley. This, it turned out, was a horrible mistake, a total failure on my part to recognise the tourist trap for what it was. I watched with horror as the platform filled up with coach loads of people, so many people I was worried we might be pushed onto the tracks, and bit my lip as we all crammed into the elegant wooden carriages. I had a seat by the window, and as the views shifted from side to side, passengers leaned over me so carelessly I could barely breathe. They were feral, these people: they had expensive cameras and they would stop at nothing to get the perfect shot. My heart sank when the train stopped mid-journey to let people off for a photo opportunity. I stayed in my seat. I just wanted to get off.
Flåm, when I arrived, revealed itself first as another mistake. It was a tiny fjord village, dwarfed not by mountains but by the vast cruise ship that had docked at its harbour - and overrun with the thousands of cruisers who had disembarked. I took myself for a walk, winding along the edge of the water and up onto higher lands, away from it all. When I got back, something felt different, and it took me a moment to realise that the ship had departed while I’d been gone. Flåm was a paradise after all. I stayed for three days, walking and swimming and reading. I sat in the long grass between old farm houses at Otternes Bygdetun, making daisy chains while the fjord sparkled below. I took a bus to the viewpoint at Aurland, and had the most scenic wee of my life in the glassy public toilets nearby. I had never spent so much time alone - and I had never felt so high on nature. I wanted to stay forever.
But I loved Bergen too. I gave myself several days to explore: steep cobbled streets of patchwork wooden houses; the buzz of the harbour; the most delicious cinnamon buns I’d ever tasted. It was just a few weeks after Norway’s national day, 17th May, and flags still hung proudly above doors, this combination of red, white and blue somehow much less grotesque than other flags I could think of. One evening, I went to the concert hall - the Grieghalle - to hear Grieg’s Piano Concerto (yes, the one you’re listening to now!). It was a piece I’d already loved for decades, but in Bergen, I could see the landscapes and the light the music described, so transcendent and so divine it made me shake. Another afternoon, I swam at Nordnes Sjøbad, a swimming pool cutting into the sea, until my fingers shrivelled. And on the final evening, the sun finally broke through days of overcast skies, painting the city in a golden, magical glow. That light. I have rarely been so happy.
Photo bonanza below. You’re welcome.
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