The ferry to Bodø was a bit dodgy but my travel sickness tablets also seem to be pretty effective sleeping pills so I was fine! After that we took a train to Oslo where we had somehow managed to reserve seats in a really old school carriage where we had MASSIVE seats which was pretty fun! We spent the day watching Norway go past which was pretty cool. Having just come off the ferry around the top it didn’t seem that impressive though and made me think we’d been on MegaTrip for too long as awesome scenery was not impressing me as much as it should have done!
That evening we made it to Oslo which a Norwegian friend of mine had advised us not to visit claiming it was a bit rubbish so my hopes had been lowered. It came as quite a surprise when it turned out to be a near perfect example of a clean, friendly city. The centre of which seemed completely devoid of the usual ugly concrete buildings which plague large cities.
While in Oslo we visited the Nobel Peace Center to see the announcement of this year’s winner (which actually happens in the Nobel Institute) but was being shown on a big screen where we were. There were several youth football teams from around the world there and a famous Norwegian footballer who used to play for a UK team but, not being football fans, we didn’t know who he was (though we did later see him in a Norwegian TV advert!)
Soon after we arrived we were approached by a journalist who wanted to interview us, apparently for a Norwegian national newspaper, though it didn’t go that well as we explained we’d just happened to be there and hadn’t made the trip specifically. I think we got slightly more interesting after the winner was announced and we got to tell her about our recent experience in China. We then got to hear all the stories about the prize being censored from Chinese media and the Chinese government’s response and the winner’s wife not being allowed to collect the prize which were all good examples of what we’d said. The journalist did seem a bit bored by the whole thing though so I doubt we made it past her notebook! We did ask her why someone would say Oslo was a bit rubbish as it seemed so inappropriate but she said that everyone in Norway thought that, and seemed to agree too! We decided it must be just that everywhere in Norway is so beautiful that Oslo is relatively a bit crap!
We also visited a proper fort which put the one in Helsinki to shame! It had towers, high walls, loads of canons and even had royal guards with silly outfits (who we also saw outside the king’s palace). The story of the Norwegian monarchy is a bizarre one too. Apparently in the early 1900s the Norwegian people voted to instate a monarchy (as they didn’t have one and wanted one!) they then voted to have a Danish prince as their king. He was rightly pretty chuffed by this and so the Norwegian royal family was created!
Oslo also has a really cool opera and ballet theatre with a sloping roof which you can walk up starting at the water front.
We visited a Viking museum with some restored Viking burial ships in it. We also spent a lot of money as Oslo is expensive for Norway (like London is for the UK) which, as Norway is already the most expensive place we’ve ever been, makes you feel like you’ve got holes in your pockets. The 10 minute bus ride back from the Viking museum cost us about £7.50 and we struggled to get any lunch for our £20 a day budget, eventually opting for making our own ham and cheese sandwiches which still cost £15!
We took a train from Oslo to Bergen which was truly spectacular. We passed ice fields and glaciers and even went up into the clouds at one point. We also took a detour onto the Flåm (pronounced Flom) railway. That was also spectacular as it weaved down the valley through tunnels in the cliffs and occasionally out on the cliffs as well as over a waterfall and below another one where the water has a 100 metre free fall drop. I realised that I wasn’t bored of scenery, it’s just that my standards have gone up! It was great on the train too. Half the fun was just listening to everyone (ourselves included) going ‘ooooh!’, ‘wow!’ and, after a brief exchange I’d had with a group of Malaysian tourists where I’d said it was lovely which they thought was a fun word, I kept hearing them saying how lovely it was too! The railway ends at a small town (called Flåm) by a fjord where we saw another seal!
Most people get on a boat from there but we went back up the railway and caught the next train onward to Bergen.
Bergen is a lovely place! There isn’t much to do there (especially off season when all the attractions are closed – making the Bergen City Pass, which includes entrance to all the museums, seem pretty bad value for money). But it is fun just to look around. It’s almost entirely made up of painted wooden houses, many of which, including our hotel, are perched on the side of a very steep hill meaning we had a very impressive view over the city.
One thing we did do is take the Funicular train up the mountain for some awesome views of the town. We then walked back down which was fun but was all downhill so, I thought, would have been more fun with one of those push scooter things which, Laura says, are for kids!
Bergen is also a bit cheaper than Oslo which made the whole thing a bit less scary!
Also, I think this is very funny but the look Laura gave me when she saw me taking the picture makes me think it might be slightly immature humour:
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