Europe · Norway

Norway

Fjords, Preikestolen and the Flåm railway in nine days. Bergen to Stavanger to Geiranger by minibus.

Norway cannot be done in four days, so we take nine. We fly into Bergen, which has a reputation as the rainiest city in Europe. It rains 240 days a year there and that is not an exaggeration, so bring a rain shell for day one — the wooden houses of Bryggen look better wet anyway.

From there we go south to Stavanger for Preikestolen. It is four kilometres up with 350 metres of ascent, about two hours to the top. The path is marked and people in their seventies do it, but the rock is slick after rain and the platform has no railing: 604 metres straight down. If heights bother you, stop twenty metres short — the view is the same.

The second half is the Geirangerfjord, on the UNESCO list, and the Flåm railway: twenty kilometres of track on a 1:18 gradient, one of the steepest adhesion railways in the world. The train stops for five minutes at the Kjosfossen waterfall. On the way back to Bergen we cross the Aurlandsfjellet, the so-called Snow Road, which is only open from June to October. We also sail the Nærøyfjord, 250 metres wide at its narrowest, with walls more than a kilometre high above it. Accommodation is small hotels and, for one night, a rorbu — a converted fisherman's cabin standing over the water. The group is capped at 16 people and travels by minibus.

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