Flåm

I arrived in Flåm by ferry from Bergen, in an afternoon when the fjord was flat enough that the reflections were indistinguishable from the real thing. The village is small — a few streets, a harbour, a cluster of wooden buildings painted in the saturated reds and yellows that Scandinavian villages use the way other places use sunlight. It has absorbed extraordinary numbers of tourists and it is still, somehow, a place where people live — fishermen eating lunch at the harbour café, a woman hanging laundry in a garden behind the souvenir shops, a man with a dog who walked past me twice without acknowledging my existence.

The reason most people come is the Flåmsbana, one of the steepest standard-gauge railway lines in the world, climbing 864 metres over twenty kilometres through tunnels blasted through solid rock and across bridges that overhang the valley floor. I took the early morning departure before the crowds arrived, and for long sections I was alone in the carriage — the rest of the passengers had migrated to the observation cars at the ends of the train. The train moves slowly enough that you can study individual waterfalls as they appear, plummet, and vanish, the landscape rearranging itself with each hairpin bend.

At Kjosfossen the train stops for five minutes and everyone gets off to look at the waterfall. It is enormous and the mist from it is cold and I stood close enough to feel it on my face. A recording of a woman singing in Norse drifted out of a speaker hidden somewhere in the rocks — a slightly odd touch, theatrical in a way that is both unnecessary and somehow charming. I ate a pastry from the platform café that was still warm and extremely buttery. The train continued upward.

At the top, Myrdal is a tiny junction where the Flåmsbana meets the Bergen-Oslo mainline. There is a café, a few benches, views back down into the valley you have just climbed. I ate lunch there and then walked a section of the Rallarvegen — the old road built by the railway workers in the early twentieth century — through a landscape of high moorland and snowfields and the kind of silence that has texture. The bilberries were ripe and blue and I ate them by the handful directly from the ground.

Back in Flåm in the evening, after the day-trippers have gone, the village contracts into something quieter and more itself. I had dinner at the Ægir brewery — a turf-roofed building designed to look like a Viking longhouse, which should be kitsch and is actually comfortable. The house beer is good and the lamb stew is excellent and the fire is real. Outside, the fjord went dark and the mountains became silhouettes and I walked back to the guesthouse on a road that was perfectly empty, with only the sound of the Flåmselvi river for company.

When to go: June and September are ideal. June brings long evenings where the light doesn’t fully leave until midnight, and the Rallarvegen trail opens once the snow clears. September reduces the cruise traffic significantly while keeping the walking weather reasonable. The Flåmsbana runs year-round but the valley is deepest in winter — worth coming for the snow if you can time it for a clear day.