Wednesday 5th July: arrival day
Our flight from Stockholm to Bergen went without event, other than the usual hassles checking in the bike. Our accommodation in Bergen was at the Ole Bull Hotel and Apartments where we had a one bedroom apartment on the 5th floor with a nice view and enough room for the 3 of us; Mark, myself and Daffy Defy (the bike). Mark is not too happy with the name I have afforded my nemesis so that may change, but that’s as generous as I’m feeling towards the bike after two months of carting her around. I do suspect though that the names I award her will only deteriorate from this point on. Just FYI: Daffy is the Christian name I’ve given her for now and Defy is the bike identifier.
I did check the curtains as soon as we entered the apartment and I’m pleased to say that they are good quality block-out curtains that will cope nicely with the late sunset (11:04 pm) and early sunrise (4:22 am).
One pleasing thing we found with our accommodation, as we were checking in, was that it had a rooftop bar and restaurant, MM Atmosphere, and we had a quick bite to eat there after dropping our bags in the apartment. Mark had a beer with his lunch, what a surprise, and it was the best beer he’d enjoyed since being in Europe. I was more amazed to see that the entire bar and restaurant area was filled with predominantly women; was there some global women’s conference that I’d missed? All of them out sitting in the full sun without any care or concern. Is this a reaction and rebellion against the long dark winter? I do wonder.
Our first destination, on leaving the hotel and future skin care patients after lunch, was to check the boarding location for the ferry to Balestrand that we were to catch early in the morning in two days’ time. Our excess luggage was being collected at our hotel in Bergen by a Porter service at 7-7:15 am on our departure day and we had a 5 minute walk to make it to the ferry by 7.30 am. Fingers crossed that there is no hiccup here! I did feel a bit like Tom Cruise, aka Mission Impossible, silently mapping the path and counting down the time of our journey towards the wharf on the majestic Bergen foreshore. However, there was no apocalyptic end here just the reconnaissance done and so we then headed around the U-shaped harbour front towards the 1500s Bergen Fortress, one of the oldest preserved fortresses in Norway. This path took us past the UNESCO World Heritage 14th century waterfront harbour area of Bryggen, the location of the first buildings in Bergen and from where most of the iconic post-card type images of Bergen are taken. The harbour front was a busy part of Bergen and full to the brim with tourists out enjoying the beautiful weather and surroundings.
The Fortress Tower of Bergen Fortress was closed by the time we got around there so this simply left us with a stroll around the grounds. There were a couple of other things we had wanted to do but most of them closed at 5 pm and left us wondering if this is that ‘finish work by 5 pm’ culture thing, that we’d heard about in Stockholm, impacting us here? There were loads of people around the waterfront, along the pedestrian mall and filling the many cafe and restaurants but quite a few of the shops were closed and this made it feel more like a Sunday than Wednesday afternoon.
We headed back to the apartment at around 5.30 pm, for Mark to assemble his bike, before we we ventured out again for dinner. Neither of us were that hungry so we just had tacos at a small Mexican place across the road. My goal had been to find somewhere that served vegetables but that was a challenge too far so the next best thing was a vegetarian (chick pea) soft taco and that fitted the bill just nicely.
One thing to keep in mind when traveling up in this part of the world, and by that I mean Finland, Stockholm and Norway, is that it is rather expensive eating out and drinking for us Aussies. This region is pricey in the first place but then factor in our weak currency and that makes it worse. We are not complaining, simply stating a fact. Our very nice simple taco meal tonight, at a small and humble hole-in-the-wall type of place, was $106 AUD.
Thursday 6th July: walking tour, Leprosy Museum and Funicular day
It was with some surprise that we woke to cloudy skies and drizzling rain as this had not been on the forecast but Mark still ventured out for a ride and I even got out for a walk. Apologies in advance for all the scenery shots at the start of the photos below. Bergen is just so pretty and it’s hard to stop from snapping away.
Our late morning was taken up with a 2hr free walking tour of Bergen and our guide was Thomas, a native of Spain but a resident of Bergen for the last three years. He was a lovely young guy but so softly spoken he was very lucky that there were only seven people in our group because, had there been more, no one would’ve been able to hear him. It left me wondering about when he was reflecting on suitable endeavours for himself to pursue, what on earth made him think to take on tour guiding? Walking-tour guides are, for the most, people with large personalities and large voices to match. Poor Thomas, lovely as he was, was none of these. Plus, he was late to the meeting point and had a burgundy umbrella, rather that the red one as advertised and this put some people off, so we can add punctuality and attention to detail as issues he needs to work on as well.
He did take us on a path through some parts of Bergen that we probably wouldn’t have found on our own but, at the end of the two hour tour, I was none the wiser for the particular nuanced history of Norway, as opposed from the broader Nordic history we’d picked up in Stockholm and Helsinki.
We did venture back to Bryggen and Thomas explained that the Hanseatic League were a group of German merchants that established a base in Bergen in the 14th century and this lasted for 400 years. The League constructed their home and office buildings in a tightly packed and small area to ensure that the workers didn’t stray. Numerous fires over the years had destroyed many of the historic timber buildings but they had been restored, as close as possible, to the original style and design. This area is now a popular destination for tourists to wander through as the historic timber buildings are now home to different artisan, cafe and craft shops.
There were a few bits of information I picked up on the tour that resonated and these are below:
- Bergen is surrounded by 7 mountains
- Population of Norway is 5.5 million, Bergen is 300,000 and Oslo is about 500.,000
- One month of oil export income is equivalent to 12 months of fish export income. Salmon is the main fish export
- Most popular food in Bergen is pizza and tacos! We were on trend then for our first night here!
Our walking tour finished at around 1 pm and we had a quick bite to eat on the way to visit the Leprosy Museum. This had piqued my interest, for some reason, back when I was planning this trip and so off we went. It was an interesting space but not all that well designed in that you were handed a ring binder with numerous laminated pages of copious text and you simply had to wander the rooms whilst reading a whole lot of script. We found it interesting though, probably given our science background, but I don’t know whether other people would’ve found it that interesting. We did find out that after oil and Salmon, weapons are the next major export for Norway and they have recently been supplying weapons to Ukraine. The economy in Norway has been in decline over recent years but one of the staff at the Leprosy Museum suspects this situation may have improved since the start of the Russia Ukraine war. A rather sad reality of this awful war 🙁
There was one main item that we hadn’t ticked off our list as yet and that was catching the funicular to the top of one of the seven mountains surrounding Bergen and to then walk back down so this is what we did after leaving the Leprosy Museum. The ticket for the two of us for the 2.5 minute ride up the mountain was around $25 so I was more than happy to walk down! The walk took about 40 minutes and we wound our way down the mountain initially through forest and then through the narrow lanes of tightly packed houses that back onto the Bergen harbour foreshore. We eventually emerged back at the UNESCO area of Bryggen and so we stopped off there for a drink and a rest before heading home to do a bit of packing. Dinner tonight was just next door at Oleana and it was great.
We’d enjoyed our short stopover in Bergen. We had been worried that two nights was not enough time but we think it was plenty. Tomorrow we depart early by ferry for one night in Balestrand before heading, again by ferry, for one night in Flam.
