Pavel's Blog

The Wikitravel article on Oslo describes the Oslo-to-Bergen rail trip as "the most beautiful train journey in the world". We didn't take it the whole way to Bergen, getting off instead in Myrdal, but what we saw was indeed pretty nice.

Initially, on leaving Oslo, we just had the more prosaic beauty of the Oslo suburbs, with lots of greenery on the hillsides surrounding the loosely packed houses. As we got further out, though, the scene became dominated by Norway's seemingly endless supply of trees, densely whipping past the train windows. Every once in a while, through a break in the trees, we'd see lakes. And such lakes! The worst of them was picturesque, and the best were breathtakingly beautiful. As we headed up into the hills and mountains, the highlights shifted. There were still many gorgeous lakes, but now there were also waterfalls. Lots of them. Sometimes small or far away, sometimes right next to the tracks. By this time of the summer, of course, the flow was much lower than it would have been in late spring, during the height of the snowmelt, but that didn't dampen our enjoyment.

As I said, we left that train in Myrdal, to transfer to the wonderful Flåm Railway, established in the early 20th century to provide a link from the Oslo-to-Bergen rail route down to one of the fingers of Sognefjord, and the village of Flåm. Over the course of one hour and 20 kilometers, this train drops from 865 meters above sea level down to just two, in Flåm. At one point, we entered a very unusual switchback, with the tracks leading us into a sharp U-turn entirely within the bulk of the mountain: you enter going one way, with the view on the right, and exit again a few minutes later going the other way, with the view now on the left. It's a pretty weird feeling.

There is a brief stop a bit later at Kjosfossen, easily the most exhilarating waterfall I've ever seen. The railway platform / observation deck there brings you right up to the falls, maybe 10-20 meters away, close enough that the spray from the water's impact on the rocks regularly washes over the viewers, giving you a real sense of its mighty presence.

Kathleen had visited Flåm before, some 25 years ago, and she was dismayed to see how touristy it had become over that time. Her memories were all of brightly painted cottages, each with its window box of geraniums. Some of the cottages are still there, but many have been replaced by newer houses, and the village is now a tourist hub, with fjord cruises, buses, trains, and gift shops dominating the scene. Some friends of ours had stayed in a waterfront cottage in Flåm a few years ago, and loved it, but their stories hadn't prepared us for what we saw.

The bus trip from Flåm to Voss isn't mentioned in Wikitravel, but the first part of it would surely rate pretty high in the ranks of least beautiful routes. We spent 18 of the first 20 minutes of that trip underground, in two different tunnels, each extremely long by American standards; I think one of them was something like 15 kilometers long! Ever the optimist, I tried to find something of interest in the tunnels (aside from their mind-numbing eternity), and I succeeded, noticing that Norwegian auto tunnels show the raw rock, exactly as it was blasted or picked or dug or whatever. Unlike American tunnels, with their geometrically regular wall sections and lighting, Norwegian tunnels display their violent origins, roughmade wounds through the stony flesh of a mountain.