We’re going right back for this story. In September 2012, I went to Bergen (which is in itself a beautiful city, if not one I’ve managed to find much to say about) and while I was there, I did the round trip up to the Flåmsbana, down to Flåm on the end of the Aurlandsfjorden and then took the boat back down the coast to Bergen. It was a long day but it gives you a good bit of the best of Norway. The Flåmsbana bit is the key feature of the Norway in a Nutshell tour but the long fjord trip was an addition of my own.
It was a drizzly September day, which doesn’t show off mountain and fjord at their most beautiful, I admit. I think it’s done better on a clear sunny day or on a clear snowy day. I set off while the sky was still a bit on the grey pre-dawn side for the station a kilometre and a half away, bought my ticket to Myrdal, the junction with the mainline, from a machine and boarded the ordinary train bound for Oslo.
I have a vague idea that I might have changed at Voss but as there’s a direct line from Bergen to Myrdal, I can’t see why I might have. That bit of journey was so unremarkable that not only do I not remember it, I don’t have any photos of it. The camera came out when I got to Myrdal.
I suspect that most Flåmsbana passengers come from Oslo because I was the only person hanging around at Myrdal until the Flåmsbana train came in. Or perhaps there was a later train from Bergen that matched up better with the Flåmsbana timetable and I was just the disorganised one who didn’t look too deeply into such things. It was chilly at Myrdal; it’s up in the mountains at 866m, there was a light mist only just above my head and the mountains around the little junction were snowy even in September. That was fine. I’d brought my ski jacket and there were places to wait indoors but when I have ever done that when I can roam a platform and look at the mountains? There’s nowhere else to go. Other than a few cottages and hotels opposite the station, there’s nothing up here except the views.
Besides, I had a problem. I hadn’t been able to buy my Flåmsbana ticket from the machine at Bergen – which is why I should have gone to a desk and talked to a human being – and decided to buy it at Myrdal. The ticket machine here didn’t take cards and I had no cash, or at least not enough for a train ticket. Ok, this was the smartphone age. I’d buy it online. But there was no wifi, very little mobile signal and this was before the EU roaming thing, when using data abroad would have been more expensive than my flight and hotel combined. Not that it mattered because there was no data out there in the middle of nowhere. Effectively, I was stranded. I was in the mountains with a card I couldn’t use and no ticket in either direction. So I paced the platform worrying.
You can buy a ticket on the train using a card. I think I’d established by then that I could buy my ticket on the train but the issue of paying wasn’t entirely resolved and I couldn’t properly relax until I was on that tourist train with my ticket in my hand. I can’t remember whether it included my boat back to Bergen or whether I had to buy that in Flåm and my photos don’t give me any clues. But I didn’t panic about tickets for the rest of the day once I had that train part sorted.
Really, it should be a steam train. That’s the sort of locomotive that suits such a scenic route. But it’s not, it’s a big chunky ugly green electric loco, although the carriages are suitably old-fashioned inside, with a lot of wood and big padded seats, albeit the kind that fold up like at the cinema. It takes a little under an hour to slowly and gently chug the 12.6 miles down the mountainside to Flåm. There are plenty of tunnels and shelters but on the whole, you do get to see the view most of the way. And so off we went. The scenery was that kind of early autumn where it’s still green but it’s a yellowish green and everything is wet, but on the other hand, there’s still snow-patched mountains in the background.
I wasn’t expecting a stop. There’s nowhere and nothing between Myrdal and Flåm; this train is the only way out of the mountains in either direction. But there’s a viewing platform next to Kjosfossen which is a fairly spectacular waterfall that runs almost underneath the railway line. The train stops for a few minutes to allow the passengers to leap out, take some photos and enjoy some sharp fresh air before boarding to continue the journey.
From here the scenery starts to open out. The line is no longer cradled by the mountains. You start to see rivers and roads and cliffs, the mountains gradually become above you rather than around you, more waterfalls go by, you pass villages and it becomes very Swiss in places and then the biggest village comes into view in front and you’re down at sea level at Flåm.
Now you can take your time to enjoy the town and the fjord and the scenery before re-boarding the train for the return journey. I wasn’t going to do this, though.
I was taking the Hurtigbåt along the Sognefjord and then back down the coast to Bergen. These are smallish high-speed catamarans that rocket along the fjords. Like the Hurtigruten, they’re a combination of fast commuter boat, local ferry and tourist adventure boat. For locals who want to get around their home fjord, there’s no quicker way to get from village to village than by the express boat. Once it’s finished bouncing across the fjord and starts heading for more open water, you’re more likely to get the tourists, I think. It’s a long way to commute by boat from the small towns of Sogneford to Bergen.
The views down the narrower Aurlandsfjord arm would have been spectacular on a less-misty day. As it was, I had steep-sided mountains plunging into the water and now I have a better idea of what a fjord actually is, I can imagine with cold horror just how deep that water is. We left the side fjord and made our way along the wider, longer Sogenfjord and as the sky began to clear, the sun began to sink. I won’t go so far as to say we got an amazing sunset over the water but we did get a sunset of sorts.
By the time we’d threaded our way down the shattered islandy coast and come in to Bergen, it was dark. I always like to see city lights in the dark and back in 2012, I wasn’t yet really in the habit of going out in strange countries on my own at night and although I wasn’t afraid of walking a kilometre and a half back from the quay to my hotel in Bergen, I was a little wary, more than I would be today.
Of course, the next day dawned bright and clear and beautiful. I went up Bergen’s mountain and took some glorious photos of the city and the fjord but think how much nicer my Flåmsbana and boat pictures would have been if I’d waited twenty-four hours.