Waterfall along the fjord
It poured rain last night in a heavy thunderstorm. I didn’t sleep well at all. I initially went to sleep right away, but then woke up at midnight — which would be about 6 pm and suppertime in Saskatchewan — and I was so terribly hungry that I couldn’t relax and get back to sleep. I think I finally did about 5 am.
After a good breakfast at the hotel we walked to the train station to pick up our tickets. After that we walked to the Hanseatic League Museum. It was nice and sunny when we started the walk, but it soon got cloudy and was sprinkling rain as we entered the museum. By the time we finished the tour it was a real downpour. Fortunately we had both raincoats on, and umbrellas.
The Hanseatic League Museum is pretty simple. However, it does have a few displays of artifacts from the middle 1200 to 1300’s. I thought the best of these artifacts was the stone seals that were carved for each of the towns from which the ships came. It was very dark in the museum and hard to see. The beds were very small little cupboards, maybe five feet long, so you can tell that the people were very small.
After this museum we also went to it’s companion building a couple of blocks away. We had been in it at the very end of the day, but it was just closing yesterday, so we didn’t see much of it then. This building is the living quarters. The fires of the living areas were separated from the commercial buildings, because of the constant danger of wildfire in the cramped and closely touching wooden buildings of the period.
After that we walked back to the hotel, and checked out. Fortunately it had now stopped raining, so we got our suitcases to the train station without getting everything soaked. We ate our lunch at the station, then got on the train to Voss, which left exactly on schedule at 12:59.
The train travels through many very long tunnels. In fact, at least 1/3 of the trip must be underground. The rest of the train ride skirts along the edge of the fjords as it stops along the way to pick up or disembark passengers. At Voss we had a few minutes to catch our bus to Gudvangen.
However we couldn’t find any bus of the several that were there labelled for our destination. I asked another driver and he pointed out the bus. The driver had just opened up the storage doors, so I put our suitcases on the bus, and then asked the driver if it was the right bus to take. He didn’t know! Part of the problem was that our tickets are printed in reverse order for some reason, so the tickets said Gudvangen to Voss, instead of the other way around. I went into the ticket office to check, and the clerk said that it was the right bus. We left at 14:40 sharp.
However we were not at all sure that we were on the right bus, especially when it stopped very soon and picked up a bunch of school kids — which it then stopped all along the way and dropped off. We were very concerned that we wouldn’t get to the boat on time, as the bus seemed to be travelling very slowly. But we did arrive at the ferry dock exactly on the scheduled time and the five or six of us still left on the bus, tourists all, got off and were relieved that we had made it in time.
Waterfall along the fjord
The ferry was very nearly empty, though it had just dropped a large number of tourists going the other way (from a cruise ship we assume). We travelled down the beautiful fjord in a rather heavy rainstorm. The clouds did break though, and we saw a rainbow low over the water. The mountains are still snowcapped, and with the rain, and the snow melting, the rivers and hundreds of waterfalls were overflowing today.
Rainbow on the fjord
Fortunately the rain stopped again before we disembarked at Flam. There were three cruise ships in the harbour when we arrived, but they all left as we ate our supper (only to be joined by another that had been waiting for the dock to clear). So there were at least four cruise ships, plus other cruise passengers from Bergen, in this very tiny town of Flam today.