Norway 2024 – Nice Place To Visit ;-)

BERGENSBANEN – OSLO TO BERGEN TRAIN

With all the travel I have and will be doing it is a pretty sure thing that there will be some flight delays/cancellations etc. Well, it was now that it would happen. I was due to fly from Florence to Oslo but in two legs with a small change in Amsterdam. Long story short, the flight was delayed and I was unable to connect with the Oslo flight.

The plans were that I would fly to Oslo and spend the following day looking around this city and then catch the train the next day to Bergen. So, what do you think the rebooked flight was to Oslo? 9am flight from Amsterdam to Bergen (yes, Bergen) then change for a flight to Oslo landing at 4pm there leaving not a lot of time to look around. And then first thing next morning I train it back to Bergen. You couldn’t script anymore ridiculously hey.

The thought did cross my mind to just leave the flight at Bergen and skip Oslo (and the train ride) altogether. But I am so glad that I didn’t do that option because the train ride from Oslo to Bergen has go to be in the top 5 train journeys, surely. You climb up into the mountains, passing lakes, rivers, snow (yes, snow), waterfalls, small towns, remote houses. It has everything and is breathtaking every bit of the way.

It was while we were at the peak of the journey and the snow was still on the ground that it dawned on me that in the 2 months I’d been away I had seen the sand of the Sahara and the snow of Norway. It was a pretty cool realisation to be honest and I was so grateful that I had the opportunity to do it.

BERGEN

Bergen is a nice city of 280,00 people on the west coast and is very, very patriotic, not of Norway but of Bergen. Our tour walking tour guide informed us that a common thing you will hear from locals is that “I am Bergen first and Norwegian second”. And the non-Bergens will say to those visiting Bergen, “Make sure you take your passport”.

All of that aside Bergen was lovely. I had 2 full days there and from what I can understand I was very lucky to have one sunny day. Two thirds of the days have rain so having a 50/50 I was actually statistically lucky.

The first day it was a tour of the old part of the town including the castle that remains a royal residence today when they are in town. There are some buildings there that are a bit crooked and are now UNESCO protected and any repairs need to be done in a very special way. In fact, being so close to the water they keep sinking and as such they need to raise the buildings back up. They in fact raise them higher than they need to as they know they will sing again.

On the royal family, they are reasonably liked but the princess is being, well, a little princess. She’s about to get married to an American swarmi, which on it’s own is no problem. But what she has gone and done is have the local Vodka producer sponsor the wedding. Again, on the surface this is a good thing especially because it may reduce the cost to the people for a royal wedding. But when you realise that alcohol advertising has been banned in Norway since the mid 70’s. It appears that some of the royals in Norway think they are above others. Sounds all too familiar hey.

Bergen and fire go hand in hand. With 250 days of rain every year you wonder how this could be so but the fact that timber and not stone is the primary building material and the fact that the buildings were built so close together made it a hazard in the making. Some of the buildings will have a series of years written on them representing the year it was originally built and the years that it was rebuilt after a fire. Very little of the town has been unaffected. Today the neighbourhoods need fire break streets but having seen them I would be amazed if they were wide enough to stop a fire to be honest.

The highlight on the first day though was the discovery of the food stalls permanently set up on the habourside. It was great, affordable food stalls in the more expensive part of the city. But what made it the highlight of the day was on the menu. There was a Moose Burger, Reindeer Hot Dog or Stew, Whale Burger among other things. I skipped the Whale Burger but had a crack at the Moose and Reindeer. The Reindeer Hot Dog was just like any other hot dog to be honest but the Moose Burger was very nice. It had a sweet sauce on it, a bit like Cranberry, but the combination of that and the meat was very good indeed. But fish and seafood is their thing. Every second food stall was seafood of all kind. They do love their seafood.

The second tour was on the other side of the harbour which was a mix of the very wealthy and the very rough (though the rough has very much been gentrified now). It was also the home to the witch trials and killings in this city that went on in the past when we didn’t have explanations for why certain things happened and we needed (wanted?) to find some to blame (the last killing in 1695). Many women, and a few men, became scapegoats for these mysteries which I guess appeased the populace that the “cause” of these bad things had been taken out of the society.

Like Sydney the old working class residences have been scooped up and renovated into some very wealthy properties. They were beautiful streets and a lot showed a throw back to the trading past with streets named after the countries people who would have lived there in the past.

THE FJORD

In the afternoon I took a boat ride down the fjord which, despite the poor weather, was amazing. All along the journey there were these little villages and I did wonder what on earth these people did for an income. And then even more bizarrely were a huge number of single dwellings out in the middle of nowhere on their own. I couldn’t even see roads in and assumed that it all must have been accessed by the water only. Anyway, the scenery was magnificent especially as we headed down the narrower river to the start of the Fjord. Absolutely stunning.

I often thought while I was in Bergen that this would be a great place to live and then I remembered the 250 days of rain, snow on the mountain in the middle of summer, the temperature rarely getting over 20 degrees and then thought, “nice place to visit”.