Bergen was a larger city than Stavanger and felt more touristy with more things to see. It was also our starting point to take a driving tour around the Sognefjord, which is the largest fjord in Norway.
Some nice parks and flowers on the way from our hotel to the harbour.
A nice harbour with many nice shops.
On one side of the harbour is the area called Bryggen which is one of the oldest trading cities in Northern Europe and one of the few wooden-only neighbourhoods from 1700s. It is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is still being restored and a few of the buildings were tarped, but with designs on the tarp to mimic and look like the original building which we though was pretty smart.
Some of the buildings have sinking foundations making for some very unlevel stairways!
This was primarily a market and trading center with German traders.
At the end of that side of the harbour was the Bergenhus Fortress which used to protect the entrance to the harbour.
On the hill on the other side of the harbour was another Bergen neighbourhood that had lots of colourful houses and mini-pedestrian only streets.
There isn’t much of interest in this photo which was taken from our hotel room other than the fact that it was take at about 11pm at night. The days here are really long!
Slottet
As we headed north out of Bergen to tour the fjords, we did the Slottet hike. Slottet in Norwegian means castle and it is often referred to as the mini Pulpit Rock.
The hike felt very Canadian to us.
And like Canada, Julia decided to injure her leg by slipping on some boulders. Not as serious this time as she didn’t need a trip to the ER but definitely some scrapes and bruises. The picture on the right is on the way back down and she is showing where she slipped.
The top did come to a rock top that was about castle size, complete with a defendable entrance.
It wasn’t as impressive as Pulpit Rock but it was still beautiful and a nice place to have lunch.
Sognefjord
The fjord is large and has lots of little fingers off of it so in some sense it is hard to get a grasp of how big it is as you can’t see it all in one go. We mostly did driving along the edges with stops to take pictures. Some pretty impressive views along the way.
We spent the night in an AirBnB in the small village of Nessane on the north side of Sognefjord. Our driving tour of the fjord continued the next day.
A number of the ferries in Norway are all electric. We got to ride one crossing the eastern side of the fjord. When the ferry pulled into a stop, this large charging cable would drop automatically into this extended tray and be retracted into a charging port automatically. In this way it could recharge while unloading and loading at each stop along the way. Pretty clever design requiring no human intervention.
Countryside
After crossing to the south side of Sognefjord we followed the fjord for a bit until we reached the village of Vik where we turned south to take the country side and mountain pass drive back to Bergen.
The drive up the valley was beautiful. A little ways up was the Hopperstad Stave Church that a tourist info lady told us about. It was small, made of wood and didn’t look like any church we had ever seen! Some medieval and Viking influences there, I think.
Right across the street from the church was a little strawberry stand from the self-pick farm down the road. It was exciting to buy berries from the side of the road without having to worry about washing them and they were absolutely delicious. (And as another bonus, fruits and raw vegetables in general made it back into our diet in Norway as we don’t need to worry about the water, which was very exciting!)
Getting up and over the pass we left the tree line and entered the tundra like world of the highlands of Norway which are beautiful in their own way. Still snow up there and lots of creeks, ponds, and waterfalls.
The 4m tall snow poles along the side of the road gave us some indication of how much snow they get in winter.
Troldhaugen
While we were listening to music while driving, we were trying to think of what Norwegian music would be and decided to put on some Grieg music that we had since he was the most famous Norwegian composer. This inspired us to do a bit of last minute research and discovered that Grieg was born and lived in Bergen and his house was a museum. His house was called Troldhaugen and it became our last stop in Norway before flying out the next day.
Grieg’s house and the modern sod covered mini-concert hall on the property grounds where they give concerts.
At the request of Grieg’s wife who donated the house for the museum, it was mostly setup with the family belongings rather than historical information to keep it personable.
Grieg found the house too distracting so had made this small cabin down by the water which was his composing hut. Both Julia and Marika had special connections to some of Grieg’s music through some of their performances, so it was special for them.
The inside of the hut and some of the beautiful flowers in the gardens around it.