THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608090069
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: 344 lines
LET ME TRY to get your mind off this heat and humidity. Think down jackets and warm woolen sweaters. Think snow-capped mountains and lots of water - towering cascades, lakes, rivers, maybe the sea.
As long as we're dreaming, may as well think spectacular beauty, too. Perhaps some place like the Inside Passage from Vancouver to Alaska's Glacier Bay. Or Switzerland around Interlaken. Or the Salzkammergut lakes district of Austria.
What if we could combine the majestic scenery of Yosemite, Glacier and Grand Teton National Parks and get there by way of something like America's most awesome drive, the road through Beartooth Pass in Montana?
Suppose I tell you about a place where you could experience the best of all this - but also a place where you could go on a safari in search of a rare and exotic animal, where you could take two of the half-dozen or so most scenic rail trips in the world, where you could travel by convenient and comfortable public buses and ferries (and maybe even a horse cart), where you visit a couple of interesting, manageable and safe cities, where you could do all this in less than two weeks.
May I suggest Norway?
Here are some things I came across during a dozen days in a part of the Norwegian back country:
Stalking the beast. The question, posed by Harald Hansen of the Norwegian Tourist Board in New York, was, ``How would you like to go on a musk-ox safari?'' My answer: ``Yes. Absolutely.''
I sort of ``collect'' exotic wild animals. On film. And the musk-ox is a rather rare one. Actually, it has been hunted almost to extinction, and the small herd in Norway, about 70, had been imported from Greenland some years ago.
Safaris are great fun, too. I had done some in Zimbabwe. You ride around in a Land Rover or Land Cruiser with a guide and pull up to within 30 yards or so of an elephant or a line and snap away with your camera. Here's a chance to ``shoot'' another exotic beast. How much different could this be?
A lot. They don't do vehicle safaris here. They hike. I am a stroller, hardly a real walker and certainly not a hiker. Worse, near as I could see this would be mostly uphill. Very uphill. And for a person who resides at an elevation of about seven feet, this hike on what they call the Roof of Norway would be very difficult.
The landscape in Dovrefjell National Park, about 20 miles north of Dombas (which is about a four-hour train ride north of Oslo), is bleak and treeless with rivers fed by waterfalls and patches of snow, much like the moors of Wales or the Scottish Highlands. Its unique ecological system has been called Europe's last remaining wilderness.
It was sculpted millions of years ago by glaciers when Mother Nature was a teen-ager, and like a typical teen-ager she didn't clean up after herself very well.
In the years since, all that has grown over these jumbled rocks is thick moss, pale yellow lichen, an off-white lichen that looks like tiny cauliflower florets, occasional heather and gourse - actually I am guessing at that - and stunted knee-high willows that musk-ox love to eat.
There is no real trail. Walking here is like walking on a very thick, plush carpet - with rocks underneath. The ground is springy, spongy, squishy because the snowmelt has been followed by weeks of rain, and there is a drizzle now. Also, there is a chill wind blowing.
Roar Strand, who is from the local tourist office, tells me that the headline in yesterday's newspaper said, ``Will the last person out of Norway please turn off the shower?''
After what seems like an eternity of climbing and (me) gasping for breath, guide Leif Erjen gives us a choice. We can go left here, he says, and probably see two musk-ox or we can go right for a little longer climb where maybe we might see five or six.
We gamble for the big numbers.
Leif also tells us that we will not get very close because the musk-ox can be dangerous. They stand about five feet high at the shoulders and have long, shaggy outer hair that hangs well down the legs, covering a thick mat of wool. They are smaller than an American bison or an African cape buffalo, but they have long curled horns that go down and flip back up like a very early Mary Tyler Moore hairdo. And they have an attitude. That is, they like their isolated life and they are quite unpredictable when their space is invaded.
Despite their stubby appearance, they are capable of running about 30 miles an hour over this sort of terrain. That is at least 29 miles an hour faster than I could manage, and there are no trees to climb.
Finally we see them - seven of them! - some grazing contentedly, others lying on the ground like large brown rocks. We are half a mile away and uphill. That's a long way for a camera lens or binoculars, but it seems safe enough for me.
I suppose it was worth it. I got my musk-ox. But I'd rather have done it from a Land Rover.
The steam train. The Rauma Line, from Dombas westward to Andalsnas, is one of Norway's - no make that Europe's or maybe the world's - most scenic rail trips. The real beauty begins when the Romsdal Valley comes into view at Bjorli, where we caught a special excursion train with a steam locomotive built in 1914 and passenger cars from the 1920s.
Norway's modern railway stock is wonderful - second-class travel is like first class in many other European countries - but this is special. This is nostalgia, the smell of steam and coal smoke of a romantic, bygone era.
Bjorli is a mountain ski center. In 35 miles, at Andalsnes, we will be on the edge of a fjord at sea level. This is an extraordinarily steep descent.
From the train window you can see the rough-hewn stone Kylling bridge, 230 feet long and 180 feet above the boulder-strewn river bed, over which the train will cross on the other side of the valley.
Inside the 4,200-foot-long Stavems tunnel the train makes a full 180-degree turn and emerges farther down the mountainside heading in the opposite direction. On the other side is a 1,200-foot waterfall. After crossing the Kylling bridge, the train continues along bare rock walls where glacier melt comes cascading down into the foaming torrents of the river.
After reaching the valley floor, high above small, well-kept farms, you glimpse one of Europe's most magnificent rock formations, the Trollveggen or the Troll Wall. Rising 5,950 feet above the valley floor, its 3,300-foot vertical face is the highest rock wall on the continent. It is famous for its extremely challenging climbing routes - before 1965 it was thought impossible - and its dramatic rescue operations.
The Golden Route. This is the remarkable road from the incredibly beautiful fjord town of Andalsnes to the maybe even more incredibly beautiful fjord town of Geiranger, along which you (1) climb up one of man's most amazing engineering achievements, (2) cross over a pair of mountain ridges with a fjord ferry crossing in between that is merely spectacular and (3) creep down another nearly equal engineering marvel of switchbacks.
Am I overdoing this? I think not.
The Trollstigen (Troll Path) is a two-lane road that was hand-carved out of the side of these mountains in 1936. It's been called the Troll Path for a long time because Norwegians believe, sort of believe, that trolls live in these mountains - although no one wants to admit to actually seeing one. Not long ago Erling Kjolseth local tourism booster, persuaded local authorities to put up a triangular ``troll crossing'' sign. Just in case.
It was stolen seven times - by trolls or tourists - before it was embedded in a very large rock.
The road climbs, by way of 11 giant switchbacks and at a grade of 1 to 12 (one foot vertical for every 12 feet linear), from fjord or sea level to an elevation of 2,600 feet in just 16 miles, and the views of the valley and the fjord below are awesome every inch of the way.
About halfway up, a bridge crosses a raging waterfall, the Stigfossen, that cascades more than 900 feet down the mountain.
``At the time of the snowmelt,'' Kjolseth said, ``when it is at full flow, I often stop and wash my car in the spray. I wash one side on the way up and the other side on the way down.''
Later, at the plateau, Kjolseth took us on a five-minute walk to the ``utsikten'' or viewpoint. Down there, far beyond our shoetops, we can see all of the zig-zags on the mountain side that led us up here.
``Up here,'' he said, ``you can see just how big you actually are.''
An hour later we made the trip again by public bus. This time it was pouring rain, and our fellow passengers missed the view.
The descent later into Geiranger by a similar 11-switchback road called the Eagle's Road was an equal spectacle in reverse. By this time the weather had cleared and we stopped to watch a cruise ship creep out of the fjord below.
Geiranger the postcard. This place gives me hyperbole problems. Look again at the main picture on Page E1. That is the view from high above Geiranger. It is the supreme example of a fjord landscape. It is a place where one sits and stares in silence, as if in a cathedral of nature. The experience borders on the spiritual.
Those little toy bathtub boats in the long, narrow Geirangerfjord are actually a couple of medium-sized cruise ships. The sheer rock walls that rise from the fjord are more than 1,000 feet high. They are as tall as the fjord is deep.
On the rock ledge to the right, you may be able to pick out people. The drop is about 700 feet, straight down. They call this Flydalsnakken, the Grand Canyon of Norway. A panoramic camera might capture the image of the seven foaming cascades of water that pour from these surrounding mountains, but not their awesome power.
The town of Geiranger, with about 300 permanent inhabitants, nestles beside the delta where two of the waterfall streams come together and feed the fjord.
From Geiranger we take a 13-mile ferry ride (round trip less than $10) along the deep blue-green fjord to Hellesylt. Tour narration is in Norwegian, German, English, French and Japanese.
There are more towering waterfalls than you can imagine - the Seven Sisters, the nearby Suitor and the Bridal Veil among the most famous. They average more than 1,000 feet each.
High on the plateaus are the remains of farms, all abandoned in the last quarter century. Children were secured with with ropes to keep them from falling over the side.
These mountain farmers used to carry everything they needed on their backs from the fjords up to the farms. There is a story of one of these farm wives, Gjorid Nilsdotter, who carried an iron stove to her house. And another of a farmer who moved to a flatland farm but thought it to be so laborious to bend down and straighten up all the time when he worked the fields that he moved back up on the mountainside.
Glacierland. Ice Age glaciers were the landscape architect for this entire country. Today, what's left is Jostedalsbreen, the largest ice mass on the European continent. The mass rests on a plateau, about 50 miles long and varying greatly in width by covering an area of 188 square miles, with 28 named branches sliding like great plastic blobs down into U-shaped valleys that were once filled with ice.
Although the ice has receded in these valleys, nature continually remolds the features.
Jens Skrede of Stryn had offered to take us to his favorite place in the area: past the turquoise-green glacial waters of Loen Lake, surrounded by cultivated fields and orchards, to the foot of Kjenndals glacier.
As the valley became progressively narrower, the walls steeper and more confining, Jens pointed to the scarred steep face of Ramnefjell (Raven Mountain), rising 4,600 feet above a narrow strait.
``Two of Norway's greatest natural disasters occurred right here,'' he said, ``when twice part of the face fell off that mountain.''
The first occurred in 1905 when a huge mass of rock, loosened by water freezing in the cracks, hurtled down and created a wave in the lake that swept over the low-lying farms, killing 63 people and tossing a lake steamer more than 1,200 feet inland from its mooring. The second landslide in 1936 was even worse, killing 74 people, and raising the level of the lake 30 feet.
Next day we caught up with Nils Paulsen, director of the Norwegian Glacier Museum in Fjaerland. Actually, he met us in Skei so that he could take us through the six-mile tunnel under the Jostedalsbreen icepack.
Before the tunnel, Fjaerland could be reached only by fjord steamer. In 1986 it was opened by former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale, a Norwegian-American with roots in Fjaerland (where the name is spelled Mondal).
When you exit the south portal of the tunnel, there, over your left shoulder looms the Boyabreen, a jumbled mass of ice - some of it dirty brown, some of it sky blue - inching its way down the slope.
No, inching is wrong. Nils says this glacier is currently moving about six feet a day. Up close, you can hear the power of the ice mass. There is a tunnel at its base where the snowmelt is emerging, sometimes in automobile-size icebergs. Inside the tunnel there are periodic rumbles and sometimes crashes that sound like train wrecks.
``We're waiting for an airplane to appear,'' says Nils. ``In 1972 a single engine plane crashed into the glacier. It could come out today, or next week. We don't know when, really, but we know it will come out.''
We have a snack in the cafe near the base of the glacier. You'd have to know it was a cafe; otherwise you'd think it was a terminal morraine with sloping windows. It was built to withstand the force of the air blasts that precede avalanches, which can reach 100 miles an hour.
As we drove to the Supphellebreen glacier nearby, Nils pointed to the home of a friend. Some of the windows on the valley side had been boarded over. ``He got tired of the windows being blown out every time there was an avalanche,'' he said.
Supphellebreen is a ``regenerated'' glacier that is divided into two parts, the lower part sustained by avalanches that tumble over the steep polished rocks from the upper part.
Nils said he brought a party of friends to Supphellebreen two years ago to celebrate his 50th birthday. ``It was a full moon night and there was a spectacular avalanche while we were here. They all thought it was arranged.''
In the Glacier Museum, open every day April-October, there is an 18-minute movie shown on a wrap-around screen in which you can experience the thrill of soaring like a bird over the Jostedalsbreen icefields. The vast scale of the glacier becomes apparent when the filming helicopter flies deep into the crevasses of the glacier.
Among the many interactive exhibits is a model glacier you enter through a melt-water tunnel. You feel the ice-cold air and hear the dripping water as your feet sink into clay. You listen to the rumbling and crashing of ice and rock above you as you walk along the bottom of a crevasse with only the dim light filtering through the ice above. Embedded in the ice is a primitive ski, an artifact dated to about 1170.
Fjaerland, a pretty fjord-side village with a view of both the Boyabreen and the Supphellebreen, has become a mecca for second-hand book hunters. Following the example of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, it has become Europe's eighth ``book town'' and the first in Scandinavia. Great place to browse while waiting for the ferry.
The big fjord. Perhaps I should explain that word. A fjord (pronounced fee-ord) is a long, narrow arm of the sea, commonly extending far inland, the result of marine inundation of a glaciated valley. It looks a lot like a river, but it isn't. Norway has hundreds of them.
The greatest of these is the Sognefjord, ``king of fjords.'' Longest in the world, it extends 125 miles inland, with many branches. At its deepest it measures 4,100 feet; in many places the nearly vertical walls on either side rise above the water to at least that height.
At about Sognefjord's midpoint, some 60 miles inland, lies a cluster of towns and villages - notably Ballestrand and nearby Dragsvik, and across the fjord Vangsnes and nearby Vik - where tourists have been drawn since the first steamers arrived in 1858.
First came the artists, attracted by the beauty, and their works were the area's first marketing tools. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany loved it here. He was sitting in the ornate lounge of Kvikne's Hotel at Balestrand in 1914 when he got word of that shooting in Sarajevo that started World War I. He hastened off in his imperial yacht to declare war on Russia and France and even his cousin George, King of England.
Kvikne's still has the look of a place fit for the rich and famous. It's a sprawling white wooden building at the water's edge, said to be constructed in the ``Swiss chalet'' style, but really more what I'd call carpenter gingerbread. Sigurd Kvikne, the fourth generation of his family to run the place, showed us the chair where the kaiser was sitting beneath the hand-carved decorations and oil paintings that decorate the hotel's public rooms.
Afterward, I had a buffet dinner at Kvikne's that I would have to rank among the five or so best I have ever experienced, this covering a fairly wide swath across the globe from, say, Thailand to Turkey.
There's a Sognefjord Aquarium in Balestrand that is quite remarkable. It's a base for the Kringsja Outdoor School. Children come here and stay for a week, catching the fish in the aquarium and monitoring the fjord environment. There are a number of enlightening exhibits.
At the Hopstock Hotel at Vik, I wondered about the portrait of the guy with muttonchop whiskers whose eyes seem to follow me around the lounge area. Host Carl M. Riiber ``introduced'' me to Bergen architect Peter Andraeus Blix, who had spent many summers at the hotel as he supervised the restoration of two of Vik's, and Norway's, most famous landmarks - the richly ornamented wooden stave church, dating from about 1130, and the nearby stone church, dating from about 1170.
The farm stay. If I go back - no, when I go back - I want to stay with Ingvar and Marit Halsnes and their four charming children on their hillside farm at Leikanger overlooking the Sognefjord. It's one of nearly 30 farm stay accommodations in the fjord country - some down in the valleys, some high up in the mountains - where you can experience what they call ``rural adventures.''
Ingvar, tall and slender, is a former agriculture adviser who worked for a number of years in Zambia. He's a full-time farmer and also chairman of the local tourism association.
He and Marit also take in troubled youth from time to time ``and have them do useful agricultural work in a family setting.'' That's the sort of caring people they are.
``We're particularly trying to develop walks to let tourists experience the rural life,'' he said. ``What we have here is nature. We want visitors to see how the people of Norway live. They can take part in practical farm work if they like, but they don't have to.''
Their farm complex is one of the four original sites in Leikanger that have been farmed for about 2,000 years. There are Viking burial mounds nearby that may be twice that old, but they have never been excavated. Ingvar and Marit, who built their own classic wooden farmhouse adjoining older buildings, raise fruit and sheep, and they make cider and beer.
``Actually, we keep only four sheep at home with their lambs and use them to keep the grave mounds mowed,'' Ingvar said. ``We call them our cultural landscape group. The rest are up in the mountains.''
We had driven up to the farm in Ingvar's car, but for the return trip he insisted on hitching up Brynjar, a stocky little tan horse, to a 100-year-old two-wheel cart and driving us down the mountain to the ferry pier.
On the way, we stopped at Liekanger Church, one of the original stone churches in Norway, built about 1250. Inside we found the organist practicing, so Ingvar, a soloist in the choir, sang a hymn for us in the ancient sanctuary. A memorable sendoff.
Norway in a nutshell. If you don't have time for all or any of the above, here's a daytrip, from either Bergen or Oslo, that captures the essence of the country.
Leave Bergen by train to Voss, birthplace of Knute Rockne. Bus from Voss to Gudvagen. Then it's a 90-minute ferry ride through the Naeroyfjord and Aurlandfjord, the narrowest and most dramatic branches of the Sognefjord, to Flam.
From there you catch the 12 1/2-mile Flam Line, arguably the most scenic rail route in Europe, for a 50-minute ride more than 2,800 feet up the mountain to Myrdal station on the main Bergen-Oslo line. The Flam Line twists and turns and creeps through 20 tunnels totaling more than three miles up the 1:18 grade. It has five different braking systems, any one of which is sufficient to stop the train.
If the weather is clear, the views down into the valley and along the steep slopes are remarkable. The train even stops for a few minutes at the Kjosfossen waterfall so passengers can get out for a closer look and feel the spray. The adjacent hydroelectric station supplies the power for the railroad.
Cost: $72 for the circuit from Bergen, $168 from Oslo (a longer day) and $100 for the trip from Bergen to Oslo, or vice versa, with the ``nutshell'' thrown in. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
ABOVE: The fjord town of Geiranger. RIGHT: The unpredictable
musk-ox.
Photo
Norway Tourism Bureau
Map
VP by CNB