Today we had an early start as we organised a trip for ourselves. We started on the ferry service from Bergen to Flam, this journey is about five and a half hours and takes us into Sognefjord which is the longest fjord in the world at over 200 km long. This might be a ferry service but actually we only stop if someone wants to get on or off, if not we just sound the horn and carry on. Despite the forecast we were actually quite lucky with the weather as it was overcast but we only had a couple of showers on route. We alternated between sitting inside and out as it was a bit windy. To start off with the Fjord wasn’t that scenic but just after we passed Nordeide the sides got steeper and we started to see spectacular waterfalls, unfortunately it also became quite foggy and there was quite a bit of snow on the top of the mountains. June in Norway is very different to back home! Especially as we realised that the fog we thought we were seeing was actually horizontal rain! At Balestrand quite a few people got on and off, this is home to the glacier museum as well as a Swiss style hotel that is the largest wooden building in Scandinavia! Because we hadn’t stopped at all the ports we were ahead of schedule so the captain took us into Naeroy Fjord as an extra treat we sailed right up to a massive waterfall that was very spectacular after looking at this from every direction we then moored up in Flam. We had just over an hour to kill in Flam before the next part of our journey, just enough to have a look round the outlet store and get a drink then we got on the Flam railway which is actually billed as the most scenic railway in the world, I am not sure if that is the case but this one was definitely more spectacular. The railway climbs from Flam at 2 metres above sea level to Myrdal which is 886 metres above sea level. The journey takes about an hour and is 20km long but in parts the gradient is 1 in 18. The first town we saw was the old town of Flam which is a very small village probably only about 20 houses with a church that was built in 1667, we then passed a few little hamlets and a road that had 21 hairpin bends which was built in 1861 but is now mostly used by hikers and cyclists. They started building the railway in 1923 and it was finally opened in 1940 for trade and the first passengers traveled in 1941, there are 20 tunnels on the route, 18 of which were dug by hand and each tunnel took a month to dig. When the railway first opened the trains ran on steam but by 1947 it changed to electricity, powered by a hydro electric plant built especially for it. Our final stop was at Kjosfossen to look at a massive waterfall, this has a vertical drop of 305 feet, they stopped the train so we could all get off and have a look and we were serenaded by the mystical woman that lures travellers to the mountains, luckily everyone got back on the train and we finally reached Myrdal where we had another hour or so before our train back to Bergen. This is the same train as we arrived on but this time we were in standard class rather than the comfort class we had last time. This part of the journey wasn’t the most scenic and a lot of it was through tunnels but it is a nice enough train ride and we arrived pretty much on time about 7pm.
