Bergen
NORWAY
Forlorn in the Fjords
By LYNDI
Friday, April 3, 2015
If you’ve seen a postcard of Norway, you’ve probably seen Bergen. It is the quintessential Norwegian town – complete with a Hanseatic wharf, clapboard wooden houses lined impossibly close together, a bustling downtown and classic cathedral all draped by the surrounding seven mountains. It is the second largest city in Norway, but maintains the feeling of a small town with plenty to see and do in the surrounding area.
I was really looking forward to Bergen – mostly for the Bryggen wharf area that remains seemingly unchanged in the past 300 years – but also for the fjord tour for which it is famous. We arrived by a bus/ferry/bus/ferry/bus/ferry trip from Stavanger on a Friday afternoon. A crystal clear blue sky welcomed us to the city and we strolled through a busy downtown area to get to the Bryggen wharf where our hotel was located.
In the 13th century, Bergen’s wharf was a hub of European trade and the colorful wooden houses lining the bay remain virtually unchanged through the centuries despite burning down half a dozen times. Walking through the dark alleys and along the boardwalk feels like a step back into the Middle Ages where trade ships line the moors and souvenir shops basically assault you every step you take. Probably not how you learned about the Middle Ages in school, but I assure you it is authentic. We headed straight for the tourist office to book a tour of the fjords but found out they had just sold that day’s last ticket to the person right in front of us. Not the best timing, but we just bought tickets for the following morning and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening wandering the streets and ducking in and out of tourist shops.
Needless to say we were pretty excited about the fjord tour the next day. The 3.5 hour tour takes you up the Osterfjord and through narrow channels where the steep mountainsides dwarf the small villages that you pass through. We had dropped $100 per person on the excursion, so it was definitely going to be one of our highlights.
And it turned out to be the most expensive fog tour I’ll probably ever take.
We woke up that morning to thick clouds and a light mist. Ever the optimists, we headed out to the Fish Market to catch our boat, convinced that the sun would “burn it off!”. The sun probably would have burned it off if it had ever penetrated the thick mass of condensation sitting about ten feet over our boat. The tour proceeded through the impressive fjords, and we even braved the biting cold and bitter wind on deck – just in case the rain drops on the windows of the cabin were creating an illusion of devastating rain. But alas. It was not to be. Not only could we not see the towering cliffs above us, we couldn’t even see the shore! The tour’s narrator continued to describe the beautiful scenery we were missing, but it didn’t sound so much “descriptive” as “taunting”.
The 3.5 hours slowly ticked by as our fog-fest never improved and probably even got worse as we went along. If there is a positive to all this – we met some pretty cool people on the tour and were reminded how nice it must be to live in Europe. Everyone was from London on a “weekend holiday”. I can probably get to San Francisco or Vancouver on a weekend holiday, but somehow that doesn’t quite seem to compare to the world’s greatest fjords in Scandinavia.
We were pretty bummed at missing our “once in a lifetime” tour (and even more bummed that we paid $200 for it – ha!), so we pulled our purse strings a little looser and decided to grab a cheap dinner and a beer. So we went from alley to alley, street to street – all to no avail. Apparently it was the Saturday of Easter weekend, meaning Easter Sunday was in a few hours and all those God-fearing Norwegians were packed up and ready to get their Jesus on the next day. That, or they planned ahead and were partying at home. We finally found a Thai restaurant that was open, so scarfed down a pretty decent meal there and closed the night with a 3% beer at a Chinese restaurant. The ultimate Norway experience for sure.
We spent Easter Sunday wandering through a self-guided walking tour of old town, hiking up Mount Floyen and getting completely lost in some Bergen neighborhoods on our way back to town. The hike up Floyen was great – it was nice and steep, but the crisp spring air made it a beautiful and comfortable hike up.
The weather had by now completely cleared up, so we had magnificent views from the top. We intended to hike the 11 miles between Mount Floyen and Mount Ulriken, but we didn’t get very far before the path was completely buried in snow and ice. Although early spring means fewer crowds, it also means your hiking plans might be buried with the path you are looking for. So we just headed down an easier path and compensated by enjoying the sauna in our hotel.
We headed out that night to our one-and-only Norwegian dinner. As I may have mentioned – we are cheap. And as I also may have mentioned – Norway is not. So we decided to spoil ourselves and buy dinner at a real restaurant and enjoyed a pretty amazing dinner at Pingvinen to help close out our Bergen experience.
Bergen was beautiful and historic – but it also felt a little Disney-esque. That’s probably not Bergen’s fault, but the hordes of tourists (and this is the slow season, remember…), countless tourist shops selling the same thing, overpriced restaurants and Irish pubs seemed to take a little bit away from the whole experience.
It’s rare that we feel like we get to beat Mother Nature, but that’s exactly what we did the following day. We were headed back to Oslo via the Norway in a Nutshell tour, which just happened to traverse the same fjords that had previously been hidden on our other boating excursion. So as we departed Bergen, we looked up at the beautiful blue sky and gave Mother Nature the middle finger as we headed towards what turned out to be the most beautiful ride of our lives.
