My mum and I managed to get cheap train tickets from Oslo to Bergen, so we decided to do a weekend in Bergen. Now, November might not be the best time to visit Bergen, something we got to feel a bit too well on our first day, but our second day there was great. And I'll tell you all about it here.
So we left our house at about 10 pm, because we had opted to travel over night and wake up in Bergen. Oslo-Bergen by train takes about 7 hours and the overnight train leaves Oslo at 11:25 pm. I would say that's pretty perfect, however, the train we were on didn't turn the lights off til about 1 am, that's too late in my opinion. We had normal seats on the train, and unfortunately ended up at at 4 seater group, meaning we didn't have seats and a leg rest in front of us, but rather a table and a couple of seats facing us. These trains do have sleeper rooms too, but they cost a bit, and for us the whole point was that is was cheap. If we wanted a hotel room we would have flown instead, but we wanted to travel the cheapest way possible, so train in was. Long distance trains in Norway can be really cheap if you book them early enough, there are only a few really cheap tickets on each of these trains. We got a bit lucky, and we were pretty early in booking it, so the tickets cost us about €25 each (each way). The train has a cafe and they hand out blankets and blow-up pillows there too, so you really have most of what you need for a good journey. I managed to sleep a bit on the train, probably 4-5 hours, my mum struggled to sleep though, so I guess these overnight trains work better for some than others. The girl sitting opposite us in the 4 seater had no problems sleeping at all, I was quite amazed by how she could sleep that well in the positions she slept in. I mean, there is a limit to how comfortable you can get in a seat.
Anyways, we arrived in Bergen a little before 7 am, went to the toilet to change into better clothes for walking all day and then headed out for the sunrise and our first geocaches of the day. Like I've mentioned before I do a bit of geocaching, but my mum is an avid geocacher, so our trip would revolve around that a lot, but with a bit of balance, because there is a limit to how much I'll let geocaches dictate my trip. So after finding a couple of geocaches we arrived at a nice spot to take some photos of the pink morning sky. While I did this my mum was looking for a cache, I helped a little, but we couldn't find it, and unfortunately that is sometimes a part of the game, some are difficult to find and some are missing from their location. So we eventually gave up on this one and started heading back towards the city centre and our hotel for the next two nights. At the hotel we were told our room would probably be ready before the normal check-in time, so if we wanted to check in as soon as possible (and we did because of our late afternoon/evening plans), they could text us when it was ready. So we left our luggage and started walking towards the famous Bryggen. We stopped by a mall first, I needed the toilet and the hotel didn't have a toilet in the lobby, and my mum needed insoles for her hiking boots. I also ended up going into a shop for trousers, I needed a nice pair for the next weekend and found the perfect shop for it. I didn't consider what I was wearing though. I won't recommend buying trousers when you're wearing leggings, hiking trousers and mountain boots. But I really wanted a pair so I decided to try them on even though it was annoying to have to take all that off. And it was worth it too, I got a great pair for a great price (they were on sale, I paid about 30% of the original price).
Then we could finally make our way to Bryggen. Bryggen was built in the early 1700s and is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. I have to say, I never really understood why, I mean it's sort of pretty but it's doesn't look like anything special. But that's because the photos one normally sees of Bryggen are taken from across the water (like the one I posted here, taken the next day), you only see the facade, which is nice, but it just looks like a row of old wooden houses.
But stepping in between these old buildings you see why it's on the UNESCO list. It really is like stepping through time. By the time we'd gotten to Bryggen it had started raining and we were getting hungry, so we found the geocache located there and then went to Egon for food. We considered finding a place a little more unique for lunch, but seeing as I'm really picky we ended up at good old Egon. Egon is a Norwegian chain of restaurants with the same sort of concept as Wetherspoons in the UK, in a way. They have an okay selection and the prices aren't too bad. And this one had great service as well, we might just have been lucky because we were a little early for lunch so there weren't that many people in yet, but either way; we felt appreciated and well taken care of by some lovely staff. While eating we got a text from the hotel, so that was pretty perfect. After checking in we started making our way towards a popular path up one of the 7 mountains that surround Bergen, this was a bad decision though.
We had planned to walk this path, "Stoltzen", a few days before, when it looked like it wouldn't be raining, but because there was now also a geocache event at the end of the walk we still decided to do it. We soon came to regret that decision! We should have just taken the funicular up to Fløyen, and maybe rather walked up the next day, but the weather in Bergen is unpredictable and we had no guarantee the next day would be any better. There is a cache at the start of Stoltzekleiven, nickcamed "Stoltzen", but the gps couldn't really understand where we were, and a hint such as "under a big rock" doesn't really help too much in a place full of rocks. My mum got a bit upset with me, but seeing as we were already wet and tired I was quickly done with this cache. We had geocached our way to this path, so we'd already walked in the rain for an hour or two at this point and it turned out our raincoats were not waterproof enough for this weather. And seeing as we had just arrived at these "stairs" we had a long way to go. Stoltzekleiven is a path of rocks going up the side of the mountain, basically rocky stairs. But a lot of it looks more like a pile of rocks than actual stairs.
Walking this in the rain while wet was not too much fun, although we were passed by many locals walking up, and some back down the same way, for exercise. I'd say they're slightly insane. I won't recommend walking these stairs in the rain! And towards the top the wind was pretty heavy too. I felt the wind push me forward so hard I ended up running up the wooden deck at the top of the path, I'm almost certain I would have flown forward if I'd put my arms out to the side. There is supposed to be a geocache at the top too, but we couldn't find that either. It's really annoying to have walked this whole thing without finding the geocaches. But it was getting late and we knew it would be dark soon so after looking for the cache for a few minutes we needed to get a move on. The paths up top are really great, they're (mostly) wide gravel roads and the scenery is great. We ended up on a rocky path for a little bit before reaching our destination though, and by then it was dark. Luckily we knew we might take longer to walk these paths than we wanted to, so we had brought headlights with us. Some of the wider paths were lit up, but not all, and certainly not this rocky bit we ended up walking. By the time we arrived at our destination, the top of Fløibanen, the funicular, where there is a cafe and a restaurant, it had just about stopped raining. Just enough for me to dare take my good camera out to get some photos of Bergen at night.
It really is a fantastic view. We found a couple of geocaches in the area and met the people at the event, my first geocache event. Then we took the funicular down to the city centre and made our way to the hotel quickly. We were completely soaked and I'd started to get cold too, not good, especially since we both already had colds. This was not helping. We were getting really hungry too, so we showered and got some nicer, dry clothes on, then we headed to Fridays for dinner. And a drink! I really wanted a glass of wine at this point. We had a nice meal and after dinner we went to the bar next to our hotel for some cocktails, it was Saturday night after all and I really wanted a tasty cocktail or two. The bar wasn't exactly busy, but they had an interesting cocktail menu and 2 for 1 until 11 pm. So we ended up with 3 cocktails each, since the 2 for 1 meant 2 of the same drink, and I wanted to try several. Then it was bedtime, after all we didn't want to start our second day too late.
On day two our plans for the day were just as clear as our first day, so we headed out for our walk and the first geocaches a little before 10 am. The first caches were found round Nøstet and the terminal for Hurtigruten, a boat I can recommend for anyone wanting to see the whole west coast of Norway. Nøstet is a lovely little neighborhood with narrow alleys and funny old houses, it was lovely to walk through this area.
We found the caches and continued towards Nordnes with the goal of getting just about all the caches in the area, and I think we did a pretty good job, finding most of the caches we looked for. We were luckier with the weather this Sunday too, there was a little light drizzle in the morning but that was it, the rest of the day was overcast without rain. The tip of Nordnes is a nice area with a park. And then there is the aquarium, and of course we had to check that out too. So we spent a couple of hours looking at penguins, seals, otters, crocodiles, fish and lizzards. And with the exception of accidentally looking into a display window where a spider lived (I was tormented by the image for several nights), it was a really nice visit.
Honestly I could watch some of these animals for hours. But we had more things to see and caches to find, so after about 2 hours at the aquarium we left and headed back towards the city centre, slowly geocaching our way back on the other side of this area. By the time we got to the city centre the sun was about to set, it was still overcast but the clouds didn't look too thick so we decided to walk up to Skansen for a geocache and the view. The clouds were too thick in the west, but the light was actually coming through nicely in the east, so I got a couple of nice shots of that.
We walked through Bryggen on our way down, I really like the eerie feeling you get walking through here just after dark. With that said though, I'm not sure I'd like walking through here alone at night. Then we headed towards a restaurant we'd found on the map for dinner. This restaurant seemed sort of cool online, getting there though, our expectations were exceeded. Roll og Rock American Diner is such a cool place. In a way it's a bit gimmicky, but it's executed so well it's really cool. There is a car, a Cadillac I believe, inside the restaurant, and when the waitress said we could sit anywhere I looked around and quickly realised there was a table in the car. So we had dinner in a Cadillac! I loved this place, but my mum was beaming!
The walls are decorated with license plates, old adverts and some cool memorabilia. They have a bar area too, it seemed to be closed when we were there, it was a Sunday so that wasn't a surprise, I really want to hang and have drinks there one day in the future. The bar is decorated with vinyl records and has the most amazing vibe. After eating our burgers and having adult milkshakes, I had two because they had so many milkshake flavours, we discovered more cool decorations outside. Like a taxi, which also seemed to have a table inside it. We found a few more geocaches on our way back to the hotel and our total of the day ended up at 21, after giving up on the 22nd.
On our last day in Bergen we got up super early and was out the door round 8 am. We caught the last bit of the sunrise with the first two geocaches of the day and headed towards water and a part of the city we hadn't explored yet. This morning walk gave us some really nice views, but we also saw some not so nice things. One of the geocaches was at a bus shed behind which we saw several syringes. Other than that and all the roadwork it was a lovely walk. And when we passed a gate with no fence around it and a sign that said to "keep the gate closed" we had a little chuckle. And then one of the workers claimed I couldn't just walk around the gate, before saying to a colleague "Maybe we should close the gate?" Made my day!
We got back to the hotel after about 2,5 hours, quickly finished packing our luggage and checked out. Then we got some nice baked goods from Godt brød before finding the last physical cache of the trip. We made it to the train station with about 30 minutes to spare, which I think is nice with long distance trains like this, leaving from the starting station means the train is there well before departure and it's nice to get settled before departure. When booking this trip my mum initially suggested we take the overnight train back to Oslo too, but luckily I convinced her we should do this while there was daylight. I would really recommend this train ride to anyone having little time who wants to see what this country really has to offer in terms of nature. From Bergen to Geilo it's absolutely breathtaking. Since we did this the first week of November we got the nice fall colours for the first hour or so and soon after passing Myrdal we started seeing snow on the ground.
By the time we reached Finse, the highest point of this train journey, winter was in full swing, with a beautifully frozen lake, the sun peaking out from under clouds and the snow covering the ground. I think some of the other passengers though my mum and I were a bit crazy for taking photos all the time. Especially when we stopped at Myrdal and we tried to get good selfies with the station sign in the background, but it's a virtual cache so it had to be done. After passing Nesbyen it was getting dark and the view isn't too exciting after that towards Oslo anyways. So lets sum up: It was a great trip, despite Saturday afternoon being miserable. Bergen is, as I already knew to an extent, a nice little city with loads of history and culture. It is "the city between 7 mountains", and as we discovered also a city that loved stairs. After walking up Stoltzkleiven my mum seemed to develop an allergy against stairs, an allergy she had to defy quite often over the course of a couple of days. And traveling with a train like this is quite nice, we calculated it; and flying probably would have saved us a couple of hours, but this was cheaper and so much more relaxed. I'm not always too impressed by NSB, the Norwegain train company, but they seem to deliver on long distance trains. The train to Bergen was only a few minutes late and coming back to Oslo we were right on time, like on the dot. Check out my galleries for more photos from my trips, and from the area I call home.
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