Bergen, Oslo & Stockholm

Bergen is a pretty town. The old Hanseatic buildings lean against each other on one side of the old harbour and are an interesting place to look around. There is a funicular tram which takes you to one of the mountains that ring the city to give a great view over the town.

On one of our days, we took a "Norway in a Nutshell" tour. This is simply a ticket on a number of linked transports. You take the main Bergen-Oslo railway to Myrdal (giving excellent views and many tunnels), then the Flam railway takes you on a journey that drops about 1000m in 20 km., including a 180 turn inside a mountain and great views down the Flam valley and of rushing waterfalls. The train ends at Flam on the shore of a fjord. Then you take a ferry boat through two fjords to Gundavagan; with great views of these fjords, of small villages and of abandoned farms that occupy impossible positions clinging to the fjord walls. From Gundavagan, you take a bus up a twisting road to end in Voss, where you catch the train to Bergen. it's a long day, but is really gives a great picture of the western fjord country.

From Bergen we took the train to Oslo. This train ride is justly famous for its scenery, particularly the mountain scenery in the first half of the journey. Our Oslo hotel was right next to the station. We had a good look around Oslo, including various museums and palaces. We enjoyed the Viking Ships museum, which has two well preserved Viking ships from burials over 1000 years ago. We also went out to the ski-jump at Holmennen, on a mountain in the Oslo suburbs.

We took another train from Oslo to Stockholm (with no customs checks anywhere). We wandered around the old town (Gamla Stan) and saw the requisite museums and palaces. Stockholm has a museum with the restored ship Vasa, which sank at its launch over 350 years ago. It was built to be the pride of the Swedish navy and the museum allows you to get a great view of it. A brief tour on the canals allowed us to get a better picture of this city built on an archipelago of hundreds of islands.