I'm in Norway right now.
It all started out a few monts ago when my advisor suggested that I should go to a conference that he was presenting at in Finland. Since he was helping to run the thing, he figured that I had a pretty good shot at getting the €500 registration fee waived. So I figured "what the heck" and signed up. And hey, while I´m at it, I might as well take the time to travel around and enjoy Scandinavia since I have to pay about $1000 to get over there anyway.
Departure
Monday, May 31
So on May 31, I found myself departing my grandmother's house up in Northern Virginia, heading off to Reagan National Airport. On the way, I treated my mom and my grandma to breakfast. Ironically, the place we went just so happened to be an International House of Pancakes.
So I went through 3 different flights, some of them short, some of them long, with seemingly longer layovers in between each one. It was interesting to see the characteristics of each of the different airports as I went through. National was kind of freaky and modern, JFK's Terminal 8 was newly rebuilt with some fantastic roof trusses, Helsinki was boxy and stuffed to the gills (?) with duty-free shops to the point that I wonder if there are any stores outside the airport, and Oslo was stylish and wood-panneled. It was also kind of interesting that at each of my gates, I found a sight awaithing me that was somewhat stereotypical of the town itself. At DCA, if I looked past my plane and across the Potomac, the dome of the Capitol Building rose up from just in front of the tail fin. At JFK, it was the same but with the midtown Manhattan skyline, with the Empire State Building featured prominently in the foreground. And in HEL, well, there were loads and loads of evergreen trees filling up the background.
The airplanes were nice, and on my transatlantic flight I was even treated to a large selection of free on-demand movies. I watched Invictus in advance of the World Cup coming up in a few weeks. After not too long, I found myself flying through a new dawn over the Finnish countryside. Though I have yet to see any mountains, so far I can report that the Monty Python song holds relatively true. Furthermore, even though I've never been there before either, from the air Finland reminds me of what I think Minnesota must look like - gently rolling hills covered in an even coating of trees, punctuated at regular intervals by swaths of farmland and a great many irregularly shaped lakes.
The most surreal experience of my whole time in the airportshas been sitting next to my gate in Helsinki-Vantaa and watching the classic Looney Toons "Rabbit Season/Duck Season" skit - dubbed into Finnish. Well, it's either that or the fact that at the same airport it seems like all of the employees keep riding through the terminal on these dinky push scooters to get where they're going.
Oslo
Tuesday, June 1
Anyway, as soon as I got into Oslo's Gardermoen airport, I was immediately struck by just how... Norwegian it was. It was by far the most stylish airport I've ever been to, and coming soon after visiting JFK's Terminal 8, that's saying a lot. But seriously, it had a distinctly Nordic feel in that it's the only airport I've ever seen with hardwood floors. Heck, even the Flytoget, the airport express train has wood panneling on the inside. I later came to discover that pretty much every transit mode in thish country includes wood in some way, from wood floors on the trams to wooden armrests on one of the buses that I took. It may seem antiquated, but I think that it is a remider of the classic, glory days of rail and air transport in some way.
I eventually found myself at Oslo S, the central train station for the town. I changed some money to Kroner and set off across the streets of Oslo to my lodging for the night, the Hostel Perminalen. I could write about the experience of my first night in a hostel room with 3 other guys, but other than the fact that everybody tiptoes around all the time for general courtesy to avoid waking others, there's not much to say.
Bu the time I had my stuff dropped off, it was only 3:30pm and I figured I sjhould go out and see some museums. However, after consulting my travel guide (Let's Go Europe - good suggestion, Mom!) I discovered that just about every noteworthy attraction closed by 5 or 6pm. For a guy who routinely goes to sleep well after midnight in a country where the sun doesn't even set until around 11pm, this struck me as kind of odd. So instead I decided to wander around downtown and try to hit a free museum or two before they all shut for the day.
I wound up improvising myself quite the little walking tour. I visited the old Akershus castle, including stopping to watch a military band run through some drills. On the far side of the fortress, I discovered that I'd found a good vantage point out over the city's harbor. In typical fashion, it smelled distinctly of fish, which only increased as I descended from the ramparts and walked down by the piers towards the Rådhaus (city hall), a curious looking building considering that it is probably a dozen stories tall and composed entirely of unadorned brick.
From there, I continued north to the Nasjonalmuseet, the Norwegian National Art Museum. As was to be the trend with Norwegian museums, I was kind of underwhelmed by the size. I guess the Smithsonians have spoiled me, but I expect it to take me more than 17 minutes to vieall the exhibits in a museum, especially the "National Art Museum". The one redeeming feature of the visit, thought, was a painting that I'd actually heard of - Munch's The Scream. However, dampening the sight was the fact that it was displayed in a room full of his other works, which all look like fingerpaintings viewed through a soft filter - no hard edges or fine details (like faces or fingers) to be seen anywhere. And to think that they have a whole museum devoted to the guy just down the road.
Following this disappointment on the art front, I decided to try to let the country redeem itself with a visit to a larger and considerably more bizzare art center, Vigeland Park. Apparently around 1890, everybody in Norway up and decided that this one guy, Gustav Vigeland, was the best sculptor the country had ever seen, so they built him a studio in Oslo and gave him 80 acres of land next to it to do whatever he wanted. So he filled it up with over 200 statues in bronze and marble - all of them naked - of peole dancing or whatever. At the highest point of the park, there's even a remarkably phallic column of interwined bodies called "Monolith" that must be at least 60' tall. Apparently it took a team of 3 master masons 14 years to carve it based on the plaster models Vigeland made (full size, too - they're in a museum in his old studio) which I suppose is a good thing because Vigeland died 10 years into the process.
However, I wasn't really concerned with the big stuff in the park. I was there to find the most curious and most absurd statue in the park. In fact, one of the reasons that I even came to Oslo in this trip was just to see if the pictures I've seen can be believed. So there I was, wandering through the park between frisbee games and children running about and countless picnics - all of them, thousands of them, grilling on these tiny grills that looked like disposable aluminum pans covered with a grate - on a singular mission to find "Man Attacked by Genii". And eventually, after covering the whole park once I found it in an unassuming place right near where I came in: a statue of an angry, naked man being attacked by babies.
Luckily by this point, I had bought an Oslo Pass. This city card, sold at the tourist offices, gives free transportation and free admision to nearly all museums in town. I can't overstate just how ince it was to be able to stroll right onto the subway or to walk up to a ticket vendor at a museum, sho my card, and be waved right in. So I rode some trams and buses around to get a good view of the town, watched the sun go down (around 11pm) at the harbor, and called it a night.
Wednesday, June 2
In the morning, I woke to find myself feeling fine and surprisingly free of any residual jet lag. I guess going to bed at 1:30am one night and then staying up until 8am to finish a paper the next during college kind of broke me of having a conventional sleep schedule. Plus, I guess getting very little sleep the previous few nights hlped my brain accept sleep whenevery I was willing to give it and in whatever quantities. I honestly think that what has been harder than the time change has been the light - you see, even though the sun sets at 10:30 or so, it doesn't ever really get all the way dark. So when I got up with the light, I looked at my watch to find that it was only 6:15. I tried to roll over - breakfast wasn't until 7pm - but that wasn't happening. So I showered (and therefore changed underwear for the first time in days) and headed downstairs for what will presumably become a typical european breakfast of cereal, fruit, toast,a hardboilded egg, and a sandwich that I steal/pack away for later, this time for dinner. And with that, I packed my stuff up again, got a locker at the train station, and set off across town unencumbered by personal effects.
I should take this time to point out that not only is Norway tremendously expensive - even by european standards - but they don't provide very many basic services here that we take for granted in the US. I find myself planning my days around where I can go to get a free bathroom, all the while rationing my water supply in the surprisngly balmy 80-degree-F weather because aparently nobody in this country has ever heard of a water fountain. I can only hope that the next country is different.
So it came to pass that I spent my Wednesday bumming around Oslo on free public transit between tourist hotbeds thanks to my Oslo Pass. I for one love public transport, especially a good system like Oslo's because you get places faster using exclusive lanes and all the while you get to enjoy the convenience of arrival time message boards at EVERY stop, and then once you're on board you can read a book or look out the window or something. However, I guess the locals don't share my awe and appreciation for the system because it seems they mostly prefer to listen to music through headphones and stare at the floor. I tried that once in the subway (the staring part) and I same to a remarkable observation: not only do Europeans have their remarkably eclectic sense of fashion, they also have FANTASTIC shoes, from long, pointy italian looking things to blindingly white velcroed boots to the most garishly colored Converses imaginable.
The first stop of the day was at the Holmenkollen, the national ski arena. It was kind of an odd choice for visiting in June in retrospect, but given the fact that you can see the new, enormous ski jump from absolutely everywhere in downtown, it means you can see the entire city from up there on the hill. That is, you could if theyäd finished building the impressively large new one right smack dab on top of the old one yet. So instead I had to settle for a few nice but segmented vistas and an absolutely awesome view up at a gargantuan construction site. Oh yeah, and they also had a museum - a tiny museum - dedicated entirely to skis.
Next I rolled on down the hill and saw the Nobel Museum. Fortunately, I already knew that it was devoted to the peace prize alone (all the others are awarded in Stockholm), so the size and scope was actually pretty generous. Oh, and I'll have to remember to poplogize to Uncle Mike for not being able to steal him one of the awards. Anyway, after having watched Invictus on the plane ride over, it was really neat to see the exhibit they had devoted to the three South Africans who were awarded the prize for their work right around the time the movie was set.
I then hustled over to the Royal Palace in Slottsparken to see the changing of the guard. Meh. They looked downright unprofessional compared to the guys over at Buckingham Palace. Plus, who's guarding the palace when they're all down doing this elaborate changing ceremony, anyway?
From there, I was in for another jaunt back down to the harbor to catch a ferry over to the peninsula of Bygdøy to see all of the maritime museums they had over there. Now, these ones did not disappoint. I started off at the Viking Ship Museum, where they have the remains of several actual wooden ships that were buried (and thereby kept well-preserved) as a part of funerals around 1200 years ago. Then, I got to see the actual Kon-Tiki raft (the boat that floated from South America to Polynesia to prove that settlement from the east was possible) as well as seeing and actually getting to walk all throughout the FRAM, the 8" thick wooden sailing vessel that holds the record for the farthest north AND the farthest south traveled after engaging in quite a few winter expeditions and at least once being locked in ice for almost 3 years.
By this point, it was almost 6pm so I couldn't really visit any more museums. So I wandered through town a bit, familarized myself with the layout of the bus station for later, and settled in for a wait for my train to take me to the next city. During my layover, I finally ate that sandwich that I wrote about 1.5 pages ago. I should mention that in norway I've been keeping to my 2-meal-a-day schedule, and even at a somewhat sparse level for me. So far during the trip, I've had: IHOP breakfast/airplane dinner, airplane breakfast/raisins for dinner, breakfast at the hostel/leftover sandwich for dinner, pop-tart+apricots/beef jerky+raisins, pop-tarts+apricots/and then even more beef jerky for dinner again tonight for dinner. It's not only that Norway is expensive (here's a standard item from America to compare: the Chicken McNugget meal at McDonalds costs 99 kroner - about $16), it's also that I have not yet budgeted out incedentals for the entire trip, so while I still have some food from home - food that's just taking up space and weight in my pack, I should add - I figure I might as well play things conservatively. I expect tomorrow to be poptarts and beef jerky again, with my next real meal being that breakfast I splurged $13 on when I bought my ferry tickets. Sitting here now, writing this waiting to go to Sweden, I have but 7 kroner... which as it turn out isn't enough money to buy anything at all. They even gave me a 0,50 kroner coin when I got currency exchanged, but I don't know why: everything is priced in full kroner, with the cheapest anything I've seen (a pack of gum) costing 8 of them - more than a dollar.
But now back to Wednesday, where I left off before ranting about expenses. The reason I found myself waiting for a train at 10pm in the first place was based on a suggestion from a friend at school. I mentioned that I wanted to see some of the country's western fjords - in fact, my entire reason for visiting Norway in the first place was the fjords - so Tory came up with the name of a tiny town he'd visited during his travels: Flåm.
To get to Flåm (pronounced "Floam") by train requires traversing quite an interesting track and passing through numerous different biomes. You start off in downtown Oso, travel out into the suburbs and then to the farms and fields beyond, before reaching dense forests. I dozed in spurts during the overnight trip, checking outside every half hour or so to see the passing scenery, since although the sun had gone down long ago there was still plenty of brightness from the twilight glow to see things perfectly. You see, the sun sets in the west and transitions from a typical sunset orange to a twilight blue, but that blue never actually goes away. Instead, it just shifts around northward, getting slightly dimmer, until it's directly north of you, at which point it starts getting brighter until the sun eventually comes up again around 2:30 or so.
Thursday, June 4
About 4 hours into the trip, around 3am, we went from the forest into a tunnel and emerged at a ski resort that still had a decent amount of snow remaining on the slopes. Another half hour saw us in a fully arctic realm - a desolate, mountainous area with snowpacks all around and ice floating in large sheets across an eerily calm lake. At this point, I could sleep no longer and kept my face pressed against the window until we finally arrived at my stop around 4:45am.
Myrdal station is a curious place. It exists solely to transfer passengers - tourists like me - from the Bergen line to the Flåmsbana, the railway that descends down the valley into Flåm. There's no town there; not even a paved road exists to get there. The only way there that's not on a rail car is by walking up the old, switchback-infested construction road for 20km from Flåm. So with nothing to do, I settled down on the hard floor of the tiny station and awaited my train.
5 hours later, I was on the Flåmsbana headed down the hill - 20km of track, dropping 900m at a remarkably constant graged of 6%. As we dropped down into the valley, we left the snow and descended out of the clouds - it was very overcast all day on Thursday - down into the Aurland arm of the Songenfjord, Norway's longest and the second longest fjord in the world. And my, oh my, what a sight it was to behold. Just like the trees, the train seems to be hanging off of cliffsides and impossibly steep talus slopes as it winds its way through tunnels, both short and straight and long and corkscrewed, all the while descending steadily. There are frequent waterfalls along the way, including one (93m tall) where they actually stop the train so everybody can get some good, touristy pictures in front of an especially violent waterfall. In fact, though I haven't been there either, I think of the Flåm valley as Yosemite, but with more water in both pooled and falling form.
Kjosfoss Waterfall - 305' Tall
Fabulous Downtown Flåm
So despite the cloudy conditions, I set off to reach Prest, about 9km outside of town. Just like Tory had said, it would have been difficult to miss the trailhead, as it was marked by a 500' cascade, the very last bit of the Kjelfossen (in total about 840m tall). I climbed and I climbed, up past the waterfall, across streams and through fields and farms, all the while continuing steadily uphill. I hiked along a dirt road, joined a one lane paved road (long since bypassed in favor of a tunnel passing far below my feet) that reminded me of numerous winding mountain lanes featured in the Tour de France or perhaps the Giro d'Italia, until I reached the turnoff for the last, most aggressive part of the hike.
Kjelfossen 
At this point, I'll freely admit that I was tired - absolutely bushed - but as I'd told myself a few times before and probably would tell myself a few more times, "you've come 5000 miles for this, why stop now?" So I pressed on, up a ridge, through a steep rockfield to - aaugh, a false summit, and finally on to the overlook at Prest at 1,363m above sea level. Since Aurland is at only 2m above sea level, that meant I'd climbed a vertical gain of 4,460', which is probably why it took me 4 hours to go the 5ish miles.
Aurland and Flåm some 4460' below
Report from the top:
I've always liked walking into town. There's something about the sense of accomplishment you get when rounding a corner, seeing your destination there, but tantalizingly out of reach, and then watching it grow towards you ans you descend towards it out of the hills. This was just like that, except that owning to the tremendous elevation change and the fact that I was probably only 2.5km away to begin with, every time I got close I had to switch away, only to later switch back and start walking towards town again. And that was GREAT. Each time I started heading back towards the town, I noted more and more details. After 2 switches, I could see boats moored at docks along the shore. The fourth switch brought cars. A few more, and I could even make out some people.
Already that day I'd broken my record for the most elevation climbed in a day from back at Philmont, and here now I was getting the walking-back-into-camp experience that I'd missed at Philmont owing to our route's remote finish location. I had heard the stories of the tremendous switchbacks comig down off the Tooth of Time into base camp, how you can actually see the people eating ice cream out on the porch of the camp store, and hou you can hear their laughter but still be an hour away... and this was just like that. I could see tourists - is that the Chinese guy in the yellow jacket from back on the bus ride over? - sitting outised the grovery store, but I just wasn't there yet. Man, I could not wait for some ice cream. Eventually, I strolled into town 30 minutes in advance of the 8:35 bus back to Flåm, relieved to have made it in time for the bus.
Unfortunately, the store closed at 8.
But at least I made the bus, the last one of the day. I got back to Flåm, returned to the hostel, showered, and took advantage of the single room that I'd wisely paid an extra $7 to get and promptly fell asleep.
This is the widest photo I could take owing to the tight confines of the room.Friday, June 5
Today, Friday - my last day in Norway - was the start of a long period of travel. I caught the early train up out of Flåm, sad to see it go but glad to once again be making progress towards the actual conference itself, switched at Myrdal - this time with quite a bit more company than I'd had to share the floor with 28 hours earlier - and rode back to Oslo. This time, I was seated in reverse next to a very kindly older French-speaking women. Or at least I assume it was French, since aside from a few "Je"'s and "Oui"'s, I couldn't discern very many words from high school french... what was that, over 8 years ago? My, how time flies.
Anyway, my mother never liked sitting facing backwards on trains, so I had always in the past picked a forward seat out of habit until today where I was forced by my assigned seat to do otherwise. I've got to say, it was actually pretty cool. I found the viewpoint to be just as intriguing, expect instead of seeing sights in the distance and watching them grow, it's just that all of the sudden - BAM - Norway appears right next to you, fully grown, before rocketing off away into the distance. It truly is a neat sensation.
Before long, I was back in Oslo, ready to take care of a couple of errands like mailing letters and running out of cash so I couldn't buy beverages and still stay under budget because the post office doesn't accept credit cards and silly stuff like that (that's why my grandparents' postcards are going to be postmarked in Stockholm even though they were purchased and written in Oslo), but you probably don't care about that stuff. I started composing this back on the train by hand, and now I'm on page 9 of my legal pad sitting in the bus station waiting for my bus for Stockholm leaving at 11pm. (Editor's note: I'm in the bus station in Stockholm approaching 1hr45min just to copy down the handwritten thing. Fortunately my bus got here at 6:30am and none of the touristy places open until 10.)
Norway was absolutely fantastic, and I only wish I could remember more of the terribly fascinating details that I've already forgotten. But if my cramped hands (while writing) and my imagined carpal tunnel (while typing) are any indication, you're probably as tired of reading this as I am of describing every little detail, so I'll wrap it up. From Stockholm, I'll have a total of 12 hours to make it the 4km from the bus station to the ferry terminal to continue on to Finland, so I expect to see some sights along the way.
I hope this letter finds you all well, and I hope it doesn't come off as me bragging about things. This country is just so amazing, I feel like I am compelled to share.
Take care,
Peter
Wow, Peter! That sounds amazing (and your video of Flam makes the area look stunning)! I can't wait for pictures. Glad you're having a great time.
ReplyDeleteOh, and I thoroughly enjoyed the typo including an extra J. I hope it was intentional, actually, because that's how I imagine everything being spelled there.
Fabulous adventure and great writing--I can see a career as a travel writer some time in your future. Keep 'em coming, especially the pictures of mountains and glaciers.
ReplyDeleteyou are a superhero of blog posts. i cannot imagine writing so much, i haven't your strength. thanks for the mountain pics, they were beautiful to see.
ReplyDeletei'm feeling a little dazzled, travel-lagged, contented and foot-sore at the moment.
ReplyDelete