Scandinavia - Norway

June 13, 1996

A House with A View

I used to joke that one day I wanted a house that had a view of mountains from one side and the ocean from the other, thinking that such a place could never exist. Well it does, and I can toss in a few waterfalls, flowering trees and green hills to boot, all for the price of a little rain. A lot actually; 275 days a year of it. The Fjords around Bergen see the second highest annual rainfall in the world (the largest is Milford Sound in New Zealand). But all that wet stuff does keep things green and lush and beautiful here.

We have been driving past spectacular scenery these last five days. The coastline is deeply cut by fjords, long narrow inlets of the sea boarded by high steep cliffs. Some of these ocean fingers reach over 50 miles inland.

We drove into Norway via Oslo and turned north toward Lillehammer, a beautiful town built on gently rolling hills. It was all one lane roads up those hills and twice we waited for sheep to cross our path and once a herd of cows. The cows didn't seem to be too particular about where they walked, right next to the van, at the rear of the van and dead smack in the center of the road all seemed just fine to them. Hill after hill we climbed higher. There were turn-offs with views as far as the eye can see and Lillehammer along with all the grass-roofed farm houses became smaller and smaller as we wound our way to the top. We camped up there, where the branches of the evergreens had parted to show us a view right out of a picture book.

Camping in Norway is easy; pull over just about anywhere when you're tired. We've camped on hills lined with trees and boarded by postcard views of valleys below, at the base of fjords where villages dotted the hills in front of us, on ice covered mountain passes where nothing but frozen lakes and snow could be seen, or waterfalls be heard.

Our destination from Lillehammer was the historic city of Bergen. Situated on a peninsula, this medieval town has seven mountains to look up at and a fjord at its feet. The getting there though was half the fun. Long tunnels are cut through so many mountains here that I've lost count. At the entrance to one a sign read "Bergen 157 km" at the end another sign read "Bergen 146 km". After the first few kilometers I got used to driving through rock lit only by orange hanging lights, (my headlights didn't add too much to the glow, their light was instantly sucked into the blackness). I think I relaxed completely at about 7 km but by 11 km I was aching to be out of there. We reached Bergen after a continual line of these tunnels, the final one placing us close to the sentrum (town center).

Bergen was the capital of Norway back in the 12th and 13th centuries. Today it is a university town, but the hanseatic influence is still visible in the gabbled row houses that line the harbor, in the restored buildings dating to the 1200's and in the old medieval quarters of Bryggen. We walked around town getting the seaman's view and then took the funicular to the top of Mt. Floien to get the birds-eye view. We hiked back down to the city through wooded trails that John said were prime habitat for trolls. Perhaps they were all the invisible kind, we didn't see any.

We spent two days in Bergen and then hopped back on the road to take in more fjorland scenery and make our way to the Jostedalsbreen National Park. Our new destination: glaciers.