- Day 1: Oslo (walked around in the sun, had tasty falafel, bought supplies for the trip) (sleep)
- Day 2: Train Oslo to Geilo, which is a ski resort that also supports hiking in the summer. 4ish hrs from Oslo by a really pretty train ride.
- Day 3: Train, Train, Ferry. This is the core of the trip.
- Train Geilo to Myrdal.
- Flåmsbana from Myrdal to Flåm.
- Fjord Cruise-Ferry from Flåm to Gudvangen (sleep)
- Day 4: Gudvangen Viking Village, then bus to Voss. Voss cable car up the rainy mountain.
- Day 5: Train Voss to Bergen. Bergen, the rainiest city in Europe.
Day 3 : the core of the trip
Day 4
End of Day 3 was us checking in to the Gudvangen Hotel, which involved tramping out in the rain and then back from the port, since there was a small sign on the hotel door telling us to use the check-in counter of the other hotel, next to the port. That hotel had a gift shop and restaurant and also luggage storage lockers, which we used the next day.
The hotel was alright. Shared bathrooms, but we were clearly the first to shower in the evening, and the bathroom areas had been pretty recently renovated and had great water pressure.
Gudvangen Viking Village
On day 4, we got to the "Viking Village" on opening at 10 am, which gave plenty of time to look around and take our bus after (unfortunately, due to being booked over Norway's best, they had a dumb cancellation policy, else we would have probably taken one bus later. Vy, the norwegian public transit service, has really flexible cancellations).
The first tour in the village was at 10:30 so we were encouraged to walk around, try out axe throwing and archery. My companion was an archery natural, although did have the bowstring snap back on her wrist. I was able to translate my several stints of wood-chopping in Finland into a successful axe-throw.
Despite the village in the description being described as not full of "actors" but instead people "living as Vikings!", our guide was not speaking in an immersed way (which I was fine with, it's kind of weird when they pretend to be 1000 years old). The nationalities of the employees were largely not Norwegian -- the axe throwing guy was French, the archery guy maybe Scottish, our tour guide from Spain, a woman beating a drum clearly from England, etc.
It was raining (as it was the whole trip) and I did feel bad that due to being "authentic", the people there were stuck with wool capes as their only defense against it (they didn't smear them authentically with lanolin to waterproof them).
The village profited from various archaeological digs, recreating various buildings and artefacts from them.
We were shown how one turns wool into yarn/thread and told this was usually annoying, repetitive work given to kids to do. We talked about dyes --- yellow, blue, green, red -- and how red was pretty popular but also prone to fading, so you should think of a lot of Vikings running around in pink.
Metal was super strenuous to smith, so spears were a good common weapon. Having a sword was a sign of extreme wealth, and you might have one person per village with a sword. Chain mail and horses also other signs of wealth.
There was a Viking burial with sword, armor, and two horses and with modern genetic testing we found out it was a woman (go Viking equality).
Also, as in York, emphasized again that Vikings all had combs and were fastidious about grooming. (Recall: York trip)
As we left the village, a giant crowd was waiting to enter, so my pro-tip would be: get there when they open. I wondered if these people were from the first boat of the morning.
We caught our bus, which made a short stop of about 10 minutes at a hotel with a nice lookout before going on to Voss(evangen). [the view is the picture from the next collage, upper right]
Voss/Vossevangen
It was still raining when we got to Voss and did the one thing on the docket for Voss, take the cable car. Which I admit was...a questionable decision given the weather.
It was nice to have down time. I went out for a hike to the 'Voss' in Voss while K read. Voss is the word for a kind of lazy waterfall, I guess? Rocks on a hillside with water running over them, but not a free-fall. I went to look at it, it was nice? I suppose? Nothing to go out of your way for, but nice enough to go look at.
We were in the "motel" looking out onto the water, with a little terrace off the room where we ate our meals. Dinner was a quick stir fry, using up our remaining veg snacks (I was pleased the whole trip how heavy it was to get snack-sized veg at the grocery stores) and a stir-fry freezer meal, cooked in a pan on a hot plate.
I couldn't remember the Swedish word for lake, and we asked the guy at the desk of the hotel-which-also-was-the-Voss-train-station what he would call it and he said something that to me clearly meant "big waters".
Next: Bergen, Norway's Hanseatic town, and our last stop.
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