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Norway, Land of Waterfalls

By Beth Ede

It takes a lot of waterfalls for someone who has always been enchanted by moving water to become slightly blasé about them, but after just three days I stopped insisting that we pulled over to take a photo every time. Disregarding everything else, we would have made very slow progress otherwise – Norway’s roads are not made for quick driving. This is probably a good thing, as even the main roads would be classed as scenic routes anywhere else, and an average speed of 40mph meant that my partner, who was driving, was able to admire the scenery too. I was the designated navigator, but only nominally: Norway doesn’t have that many roads, so junctions are few and far between, rendering map-reading unnecessary. More important was my ability to rifle quickly through the book of ferry timetables and judge which ferry route was the best in terms of duration and frequency. Any concerns we’d had beforehand about relying on ferries to get across the fjords soon dissipated after a couple of crossings – we never got turned away because the ferry was full and, with a bit of planning, never had to wait more than twenty minutes for one to turn up. Like the rest of Norway’s public transport system, they run like clockwork.

Water is a common theme in Norway’s landscapes: rushing mountain rivers sending spray up into the air as they hurtle over the rocks; cascading waterfalls creating white gashes on precipitous rock faces; astonishingly calm fjords on whose mirror-like surfaces are reflected rugged mountains; and the rivulets of melting ice carving crevasses on some of Europe’s largest glaciers. All the time I had to remind myself that this was late August, and if water gushed from every crevice at the end of summer, what must it be like earlier in the year?

Touring the fjords, we soon discovered that no two were the same. Hardangerfjord, the southernmost of the three great fjords, was dripping with fruit. Planted in neat rows on the slopes above the ink-blue water, the trees were well tended, any branches that were sagging under the weight of the abundant fruit carefully propped up by stakes. Impromptu roadside stalls selling glistening plums, shiny apples and succulent pears appeared at the most unlikely of places, and we did our bit for propagation by jettisoning our cherry stones from the car window as we drove. Some 65 kilometres further north, autumn had already arrived in Sognefjord, but the real surprise lay in its size: stand on its shores and all you can see in either direction is a succession of hazy blue mountain headlands descending into the water; look on a map and you can appreciate how the water writhes through the landscape, creating an extraordinary number of fingers. Further north still, Nordfjord has less of a chocolate-box feel to it, the villages being more workaday, but it has more snow capping the mountains either side. Tiny Kjøsnesfjord boasts emerald-green water framed by huge slabs of bare purple rock, while Geirangerfjord, one of the most recent additions to the Unesco World Heritage Site list, can only be accessed by boat yet was inhabited until the middle of the 20th century. That anyone should have had to carve a living in such harsh conditions is proof that cultivatable land of any form has always been scarce, and the ferry commentary recounted remarkable stories of survival at the farms that cling to the steep green slopes: children tied to boulders to stop them from falling to their deaths as they played; the family that had to row across the fjord twice daily to collect water; the farm reached via a ladder up a vertical cliff face, the only advantage of which was that they successfully evaded taxes for years because they simply drew up the ladder each time they saw the taxman in his boat.

Awe-inspiring as the fjords may be, I personally found the mountains above even more alluring in their wild, rugged beauty. Think the Scottish Highlands but on an even grander scale, with red timber cottages topped with turf, lush expanses of grassland strewn with mossy boulders climbing to rocky outcrops, and large patches of snow that, not having melted by the end of August, seemed unlikely to do so before the onset of winter. The weather must be fairly unforgiving for much of the year, but in the summer sunshine there was a wonderful tranquillity (something I’d noticed in the fjords too), and the panoramas from the viewpoints we drove to were so breathtaking that they remain fresh in my mind several months on.

Having travelled to Norway to ‘scratch an itch’, I returned home wishing I could see more, so I offer this advice: don’t postpone Norway for a special holiday. Instead, go as soon as you can, as you’ll want to go back.

Beth enjoyed a tailor-made trip, flying to Bergen and hiring a car for the duration of the holiday. She spent three nights on the shores of Hardangerfjord at the beautifully appointed Hotel Ullensvang, her favourite of all the hotels; two nights at the eastern extremity of Nordfjord at the Hotel Alexandra in Loen, where the dinner buffet is legendary; three nights on the northern shores of Sognefjord at the friendly Kviknes’ Hotel in Balestrand; and finished with a night at the high-quality Hotel Neptun in Bergen, close to the colourful harbour district.

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