Finding fjords

We stayed last night in Flåm in an incredibly scenic hotel on the Aurland Fjord, after coming down from the main Oslo - Bergen rail line, on a special train line built and operated by the people who run the hotel (more on that train later). You can see the fjord here from a hill above the hotel, part of a hike I will also come back to in a later post.

While a great hotel, it had Internet connection only at ISDN standard, which is 20 years old and so slow that I could not even load one Web page in an hour, so no blog yesterday.

Since getting out on the fjord was the main reason behind this trip for me, I am going to skip ahead to that and come back to other some things later. This afternoon (October 15), we took a ferry from Flåm to Gudvangen.

Here is a photo looking back at Flåm from the ferry, with Sandy in red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme (tip of the lyric to Richard Thompson, Vincent Black Lightning 1952).


The next photo shows the view ahead in the fjord. The interplay of clouds, sunlight and
shadow on the fjord was incredible throughout the day, as I looked down on it from above the hotel and as we went out from Flåm to Aurland, for which the fjord is named.

For fellow science fiction fans, you may remember a character in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, Slartibartfast, a planet designer who won an award for designing the fjords. Nice work, indeed. This ranks right up there with Machu Picchu in terms of most dramatic things I have ever seen in my life.


Along with the dramatic mountains, sun and clouds, we also got comic relief from a flock of seagulls who decided to play in the updrafts alongside the ship. They were a particularly big hit with other large flocks of Chinese, Korean and Japanese tourists who were on board.

The cruise went out from the Aurland Fjord into the main Sogne Fjord, which runs east into Norway a long way, with lots of tributaries. We went in it for a while, passing among other things a very remote farm high up on a hill overlooking the fjords.

These kinds of farms are legendary in Norway. Some, like this one, seen at the upper far left of this photo, are on hillsides so steep that people have to use ladders part of the way to get to them. This one is apparently named "stigen," which means ladder, for that reason. You can also see a nice waterfall to its right, one of literally dozens along the way.

Now this also brings up an interesting bit of my own history. My first wife was named Sandy (Sondra) Stigen, and the story in her family was that they were named for the family farm on a steep fjord hillside in Norway. Maybe this was it.

This also brings up the rather bizarre fact that I have been married to two women named Sandy from California who spoke Norwegian who had red hair (although Sandra Ballif started off as a blonde). Sandy (Ballif) Straubhaar simply says the wrong person played her in the first movie.

Here is another dramatic rock just as we turned from the Sogne Fjord into the Laerdal Fjord on the way to Gudvangen.

The sun sets much more quickly in these places, with high mountain walls, but still at sea level. So the last shot here shows the sun getting fainter as even more clouds rolled into to create a pretty dense fog.

There are a lot more wonderful fjord shots. Almost everyone on board was going crazy with their cameras. I will probably put more of them up on my Facebook site.

So stay tuned for more of Norway, Land of Giants.