The experience of going to and being in Bergen, the second biggest Norwegian city and gateway to the western fjords, made me yearn for the past–my childhood and the kind I’ve only known in movies and books. The six-hour train ride from Oslo to Bergen was more amazing than enthusiastic endorsements from anyone I talked to about it. The journey, which has been voted one of the best in the world, is one through a snow-capped mountain-scape dotted with snowboarders being pulled along by kites and crosses paths with running streams and then through mountains with covered in lush green.
It was like being in a real-life intersection of Michel Gondry music videos. If you took the musical train ride in Chemical Brothers’ “Star Guitar” and implanted the scenery in Bjork’s “Jóga,” this is what it would look it. Those are two lofty works to hold something up to but really, that comparison is just a starting point to describe the visual experience that is the train ride. It’s been a long time since I just sat gaping at something new. It was nice to know I’m still capable of doing that. In the age of discount flight, we forget or have never experienced the joy of train travel. For the first time I thought I would have loved to lived in the golden days of the steam engine. The idea of picking up rectangular luggage, covered in locations stickers, off the train and being waited for at central station has never been so appealing to me. The dining carriage, the hat box, the view to keep me company: those were the days.
While I already knew about Norway’s long, dark winters, I got my first real glimpse into the short, intense summers. Bergen is one of the rainiest places in the world; it rains three out of four days there. By some crazy stroke of luck, it was sunny both days I was there. On my last night in Bergen, I climbed a mountain, or at least third of one. We were slow to get a move on and didn’t leave until about 11 p.m. to start walking to Lovstakken Mountain. It was still light out when we left, but by the time we abandoned the mission in the thick brush of the forest about an hour later, the sky was a dark, rich blue. According to my fellow climbers, in some places north of the Arctic circle, this blue would be the closest to daylight some places would get above the Arctic Circle in the winter. Standing partway on Lovstakken, looking onto more outlying mountains, the world has never looked so round and I’ve never felt so on top of the world (literally.)
After disembarking from the mountain, we made a detour to the nearby fjord. The king’s summer residence, a modest home that you can walk right up to, is next to the fjord. My fellow climbers and I lay on a dock in the fjord waters and stared up at the big dipper, the only constellation our collective educations enabled us to identify. I’ve never considered myself a nature person but Bergen has helped me turn a corner. I found myself making mental plans for a future camping trip on a Bergen mountain top. Hiking, canoing, biking–suddenly nature has a new appeal to me, one that perhaps it never did before. Maybe I was never interested in doing these things and these activities incidentally went along with being a kid. Despite all the rugged and varied terrain in Canada, somehow it took going to Norway to discover it.
