Here’s part 2 of our Norway travel notes.
A Fairly Fleeting Float through the Fjord – Flåm to Gudvangen
After waiting awhile in Flåm, getting rained on, then getting into a line for waiting so we could get into another line for boarding, the fjord cruise was finally in motion. My father was happy to park himself in a comfortable spot and watch the scenery go by while I darted around on deck to take pictures of everything. It was here that I came to realize that this country is obnoxiously beautiful. Every rock and tree and waterfall and quaint little adorable building seems photo worthy, which leads one to not really be sure where to point your camera. I shotgunned everything I could, thankfully realizing halfway through I wasn’t shooting in RAW photo mode, but not realizing that my wide angle lens was capping my resolution at 10 megapixels. Still, I’m happy with how those photos turned out, but for the rest of the trip relied on my 35mm and stock 24~105mm lenses.
Our time in Gudvangen was short, but fraught with initial panic. The hotel was much farther away than my father would be able to deal with, and after calling the hotel they seemed to think we didn’t need a car, no matter what. It took them awhile to realize that I had unknowingly booked the father out hotel, but they were the owner of both, and after some time in their office they emerged to hand us a key to a different room, literally feet from where we were standing, and a few tickets for breakfast into the bargain, apparently because I had booked a room for each of us and now we were to share a single room. We gladly accepted their adjustment and, after some profuse thanking, had dinner and tried to sleep.
A difficult thing sleep is when your hotel room has a built in skylight that cannot close and the sun never really quite sets. A dull blue haze flooded the room throughout the night. The hotel was supplied with night masks, but given my head is rather larger than a normal person, in at minimum the literal sense, I couldn’t get used to the sensation of being weakly crushed by the elastic around my head to get a decent night’s sleep. I did eventually get a few hours, which I was thankful for, after eventually fidgeting into a position where a pillow and/or blanket was sufficiently blocking the light.
Voss Now
We woke up and I started scoping out the buses, trying to figure out where the bus would come around to pick us up. After some research I found the stop was much farther away than expected, but we were kindly given a lift by the hotel staff to our bus stop for the next leg of the journey. We learned the hotel owner was Olaf and the receptionist was Renée, which I made a point to remember. Our bus to Voss made it to our next destination without further incident.
Voss is a beautiful little town. Idylic to the point of being saccharine, at least in the summer. With only 16,000 people, it seems to be mostly a tourist transport hub, with people stopping to connect trains or coming to take the gondola up to the mountain so they can jump off of it with parachutes. There’s a small downtown center with an ancient church that seems to be the town’s centerpiece.
With some time before our hotel’s check in, we hired a taxi to take us around. Normally this would be a more general tourism maneuver, but my father had a few locations in mind. We drove around the lake and down to the Winsand farmhouse cluster, the birthplace of my great grandmother Judith Borghild Windsand, and the Rokne farm, the location of a somewhat distant cousin, Knut Rokne. I made a few efforts to be sure my father didn’t want to try to talk to any of the current residents there, but he seemed completely content with just finally having seen these places with his own eyes. Given the amount of time since any of our relatives had been here (his own mother hadn’t even made it as far as Voss in her visits to Norway more than 40 years prior) it was safe to say we’d just cause some confusion. I imagine if any one of them find photos of my father in front of their house here, that will be confusing enough.
Once our lap around the lake was done, we checked out the church, got a bunch of photos, and finally went to the hotel. We stayed at the historic Fletcher’s Hotel, which looks and feels straight out of the 1800s. We settled in and then went downstairs for dinner, where I tried to get the bartender to make me my favorite nerd drink, but they had 1 out of 4 ingredients. Still, they gave it a shot, and the result was a fine effort. The next bartender to appear asked what the odd thing on our tab was, and I explained it was a “Cosmo Canyon,” which he immediately recognized as the thing from Final Fantasy VII. All of our exchanges after that point were about geeking out over the game and its newer remakes. A fully unexpected set of interactions.
After our dinner ended I took a stroll around the town, checking out various streets and places well beyond the other end of the train station. Initially I wandered around the lake, starting at a “culture house” that had some kind of seminar going on, and finding my first few example of… fake graffiti? I encountered a lot of this kind of “graffiti” on the trip that looked a little too well-planned and clean.
In my wanderings I ran across a host of people enjoying the mild summer and found a lot of a particular kind of bird I couldn’t personally identify. The mostly black, striped birds were rather striking, and didn’t seem overly shy. The seagulls, however, seemed to think I was an intruder, and at one point took such offense at my presence that I found myself ducking behind the corner of a building to escape their inexplicable wrath.
I’m certain I confused a fair number of folks, trekking into places the normal tourist probably wouldn’t bother to go, but go I did, taking random photos of whatever I came across. Once I had gone high enough up the hillside that I was certain the only good way down was back the way I came, I turned back and went back to the hotel.
In the morning we walked out to the little park in front of the hotel to pose with a statue of Knut Rokne (Knute Rockne in the US), an early 1900s football player/coach who resides on our family tree as some degree of cousin to my father. The resemblance is certainly there.
After that we had quite a lot of time to burn. I wasn’t sure how much family history we’d be getting into, so I baked in a lot of extra time in Voss we ended up not needing. We decided to buy tickets for an earlier train, sacrificing our repurchased seats. The new tickets were nearly half the price of the old ones, a function either of the time of the departure or that Rail Ninja may have been ripping me off from the start. I guess with a name like “Rail Ninja” I shouldn’t have trusted them in the first place.
The gondola leads up to a place simply called “Hangurstoppen” which isn’t particularly inspired as names for places go. Oddly I didn’t seen much evidence that naming mountains is a thing that happens in these parts, probably due to the excessive number of them. If every impressive looking rock had a name they’d probably struggle to come up with new ones for them. I’m guessing they wait for one of them to explode and destroy a small town before granting it specific moniker.
I wandered around the top of the hill for a time, taking photos of the scenery far below. I learned a few things about mountain tops I hadn’t considered. Mainly, they’re covered in swamps and flies that seemed rather fond of the citrus-themed shampoo and body wash the hotel had provided. They were annoying, but not annoying enough to stop me from getting my photographs before we went back down to the town. The most amusing event was a group of Japanese tourists showing up and seeming to mistake my father as one of the locals, getting a photo posing with him. Truly astounding.
Overall, sleepy as the town was, it made me wonder just how amazing the promise of American prosperity must have been 150 years ago to make anyone want to pack up and leave such a place. If I were growing up in Voss, or in nearly any other town that I’ve seen on this trip, and I had access to heating, air conditioning, and gigabit Internet, I’d absolutely never leave.
James Gets Through 