Day 3 24/8/08 - Norway

Bergen -> Myrdal -> Flam -> Gudvangen -> Voss -. Bergen

Highlight

• A very long day ahead of travelling, and as our tour started very early and breakfast started late on a Sunday, we had to quickly wolf down our breakfast, like everyone else.
• Amazingly, we chose the right side of the Myrdal train to sit on (which was incidentally, the right side), so we were able to enjoy the spectacular scenery.
• Unfortunately, we didn’t do the same with the Flam railway (which was the left side this time), and as it was extremely crowded with tourists, we couldn’t actually run to a spare window to take any pictures. What annoyed me though, were all the tourists who reserved the right seats, but were too busy talking to even look out the window!!
• Watched a cheesy performance on our 5 minute stop to view a waterfall, where some woman comes out and dances to some eerie music. The performance lasted 3 minutes, after which time we all piled back onto the train again.
• Flam was very beautiful. We hired a bike from the very trusty tourist info, where they don’t even lock up their bikes. For 50NOK for an hour, it was well worth it, as we covered a lot more ground, although if you just took the bikes, they wouldn’t know anyway. But we were honest.
• We managed to ride to the Marina, a waterfall and a stave church, which was coolly painted on the inside.
• It was thrilling to ride through the mountain and water, and the weather was perfect.
• Had a look at the not very interesting Flam Museum, before fighting it out with everyone to get on the boat.
• Passed through some very nice scenery but it was too crowded to really enjoy it. We found relieve on the bottom deck, where there were no chairs and no speakers to hear the commentary, but you could see the scenery and there were no people.
• Another day of beautiful warm weather, but slightly cloudy at times. For Bergen and surrounds, this is excellent, considering they have like 260 days of rainfall a year.
• We actually bumped into Franklin and Danny on the cruise, what a small world. Because of the crowd though, we couldn’t really hang around together.
• We hung around Gudvangen instead of trying to rush for the bus when the cruise docked…bad mistake. They had miscalculated the number of people that were on the cruise and as a result, they weren’t enough buses, so we had to fight with everyone else to get on, and we didn’t end up getting a window seat on the bus.
• That was good and bad in a way, good because we got to take pictures from both sides of the bus, but bad because we weren’t in the best position.
• And the scenery were spectacular too. Went through Naeroydalen and up Stalheimskleiva (Stalhein Road), which climbs up the mountain between the Stalheim (126m) and Sivle (146m) waterfalls, with 13 hairpin bends and 20o slope.
• Even more amazing, we saw all these people running UP this road, apparently there was a race on the next weekend and everyone was training for it.
• The views once you reached the top of this mountain was absolutely spectacular, overlooking the Naeroy Valley.
• Had a brief stop at Voss, the “Adventure Town”, before we had to get back on the train, but of course we didn’t’ have the time to do any adventure activities.
• We did manage to see the lake, Olav’s Cross dating from 1023, the Bergslien monument, the Mosafinn Memorial and Vangskyrkja (Voss church).
• Then back on the last connection, an extremely crowded train, back to Bergen.
• Had dinner at what looked like a uni hangout, serving café fare with a focus on soup. The reindeer soup was very gamey but you couldn’t really taste reindeer as much as the mushrooms.

Food

• Incity breakfast:
  • bread with 7 cold cuts, cheese, herring, salad, pate, tuna and sardine
  • muesli and rice puffs with melon yoghurt
  • apple juice
• Zuperia dinner:
  • seafood soup with baguette
  • reindeer mushroom soup with baguette
  • raspberry yoghurt soup
  • cappuccino cake