Voss
"Voss is where Norwegians come to remind themselves that they are, at their core, people who jump off mountains for fun."
I reached Voss on the Bergen railway — a journey that is itself a destination, two hours through fjords and tunnels and high moorland, the train climbing into a landscape that keeps revising its own scale. The railway arrives at Voss station and you step out into a town that sits at the eastern end of Vangsvatnet lake, ringed on all sides by peaks, and immediately understand why people come here to test themselves against gravity. The mountains are right there, close, vertical, serious. The skyline is a proposal.
Voss is the adventure sports capital of western Norway — paragliding, skydiving, kayaking, white-water rafting on the Vosso river, skiing in winter. I came without plans to do any of these things and ended up doing two of them, because Voss operates on a specific social physics: everyone around you is doing something alarming, and the alarming things are very well organised, and the barrier to joining is lower than your sensible self would prefer. I went tandem paragliding from Hangurstoppen, launched off a hillside at 980 metres in the morning, and spent thirty minutes hanging in a harness watching the lake below turn in slow circles. The instructor behind me said almost nothing. There was very little to say. The Vangsvatnet was cobalt from altitude and perfectly still.
The old stave church in the town centre dates to 1277 — one of the oldest in Norway still in regular use. The exterior is dark wood and steep pitched roof, modest and precise, surrounded by a churchyard where the headstones are also dark and weathered. Inside, the painted wooden interior is unexpectedly vivid: greens and reds and blues on the columns, a painted ceiling with stylised figures. The juxtaposition of the austere exterior with the coloured interior is characteristic of this tradition — the surface of things in Scandinavia often reserves its warmth for the inside.
What surprised me about Voss was the food. The town has positioned itself seriously around local produce — the Voss lamb raised on mountain pastures, the brown trout from the lake, the local kvitost (white cheese) that the supermarket stocks in several varieties. I had dinner at a small restaurant on the main street where the lamb was served simply, with roasted root vegetables and a reduction made from local cloudberries that was tart enough to cut through the richness. The lamb itself was extraordinary — darker than what I was used to, with a mineral quality from the mountain grass, requiring nothing except salt and heat.
The cycling around Vangsvatnet takes three hours at a relaxed pace and is entirely flat, which is an unusual thing to say about anything in this region. The lake path is paved and quiet — in September I passed four other cyclists in a full circuit — and the reflections in the morning are the kind of thing that makes you stop and take the same photograph six times in slightly different light. The water is cold enough for swimming in July and August if you are the kind of person who finds cold water swimming restorative rather than punishing. I am only occasionally that person.
When to go: June through August for the full activity season — paragliding, white-water, hiking the high ridges. The Voss Extreme Sports Week runs in late June and brings the most activity, and the most crowds. September is ideal: the adventure infrastructure still operates, the light turns amber, and the lamb is at its best after a full summer on the mountain. December through March for skiing — the resort at Voss is well-regarded and significantly less expensive than Alpine alternatives.