Ten days in Norway: up the longest fjord by boat, back over the mountains by train

Bryggen is a row of tall wooden trading houses standing gable end to the water, on the site of the German merchants' quarter that ran the dried cod trade out of Bergen from the fourteenth century. What stands there now went up after a fire in 1702, on the same foundations, and it has been slowly leaning ever since. The alleyways running back from the front are the interesting part: overhanging galleries, sloping plank floors and doorframes no longer at right angles to anything.

Almost all of it is still in use as shops and workshops rather than kept as a museum, which is why it works. Walk the front, then the lanes behind, and give it ninety minutes.

In the evening take the funicular. It climbs from a station just behind the fish market to a wooded plateau three hundred metres up in about seven minutes, and at eight at night the queue that stretches down the street at midday has gone. Marked paths run off into the forest from the upper station, and the whole bay is laid out below.

The Hanseatic Museum is a merchant's house on the wharf from the early 1700s, the only place on Bryggen where the interiors survive. The German traders kept apprentices from around fourteen in a building with no heating and no open flame, because of the fire risk, sleeping two to a bunk in cupboards off the counting room. The assembly rooms round the corner at Schøtstuene were the only buildings allowed a fire, and they are where the men of each tenement ate and held their own courts. One ticket covers both, and parts of the complex close periodically for restoration.

Bergenhus, ten minutes along the water, was the royal seat when Bergen was the capital of Norway. Håkon's Hall was built between 1247 and 1261 as the king's banqueting hall and still hosts state dinners; the roof is a reconstruction, because a Dutch ammunition ship blew up in the harbour in 1944. The Rosenkrantz tower beside it began as a keep in the 1270s and was rebuilt as a governor's residence in the 1560s. The grounds are a public park with a view of the bay.

In the afternoon, the art museums on the town lake. The reason to go is the Norwegian nineteenth century, the romantic landscape painters who invented what the world now thinks Norway looks like, plus a substantial group of Munch and, unexpectedly, one of the best collections of Chinese art in Europe.

Edvard Grieg built a villa on a promontory south of the city in 1885 and spent the last twenty two years of his life there. Troldhaugen is kept as it was the year he died: the piano, the small rooms, and the composer's hut down on the rock at the water's edge, which is roughly the size of a garden shed and contains a desk, a stove and a view. He and his wife Nina are buried in the cliff on the estate. There are recitals every day through the summer in a hall dug into the hillside, with the villa framed in the window behind the piano.

It is twenty five minutes on the light rail from the centre and then a signposted walk, and it is the best half day Bergen has outside the wharf.

In the afternoon, if the tops are clear, take the cable car up Ulriken. It is the highest of the seven mountains at six hundred and forty three metres, and from the summit you get the city, the islands, the open Atlantic on one side and the mouths of the fjords on the other. Go only in good visibility, because in cloud there is nothing up there at all. Pack in the evening: tomorrow's boat leaves early.

The catamaran leaves Bergen in the morning and does not reach Flåm until the middle of the afternoon, and the whole day is the journey. It runs out through the islands, turns inland into the Sognefjord, which is two hundred and five kilometres long and over thirteen hundred metres deep, and calls at a string of villages, several of which no road reaches at all. Watching a boat tie up at a wooden pier so that two people and a crate of groceries can get off is the trip in miniature.

The last hour is the best. The boat turns south into the Aurlandsfjord, the walls close in, the water goes from grey green to black, and the waterfalls come off the plateau above in single unbroken drops. Sit outside for this even if the weather makes it uncomfortable, because through glass it is a different and much lesser thing.

Flåm itself is small: a pier, a station, a handful of hotels and a brewery, with a valley running up behind it. Drop the bags, then walk fifteen minutes to the railway museum by the station, which is free, better than it needs to be, and has one of the original locomotives in it. The cruise ship, if there is one, will be gone by six and the village becomes an entirely different place.

The Nærøyfjord is the reason this area is on the World Heritage list. It is eighteen kilometres long, drops to five hundred metres wide at the narrowest point, and the walls go up more than a kilometre on either side, which makes it one of the tightest navigable fjords anywhere. Farms hang on ledges partway up the rock. Several were reached by ladder within living memory.

The standard trip is a two hour sailing to Gudvangen at the far end, either direction, with a twenty minute bus back through the tunnel to close the loop. Take the first sailing rather than the middle of the day, when the cruise passengers are on it. The electric boats now working the route are almost silent, which changes it completely: you hear the waterfalls and the birds instead of a diesel.

In the afternoon ride the Flåm Railway up and back. It climbs from sea level to eight hundred and sixty six metres in twenty kilometres, a gradient of one in eighteen, and opened in 1940 after seventeen years of building. Almost all of its twenty tunnels were cut by hand. At one point the line stacks three levels of track above each other in the same stretch of valley, with one hairpin turned inside a tunnel, and there is a scheduled stop at the Kjosfossen waterfall where everybody gets out into the spray. Doing it today as a return, with no luggage and no connection to make, is better than doing it once tomorrow in a hurry.

Back down for the evening. Once the last day boat has gone, Flåm is four hundred people and a valley.

Today is entirely spent moving, and it is one of the best days of the trip.

The first hour is back up the Flåm valley on yesterday's railway, this time with the bags, as far as Myrdal. There you change onto the Bergen Line and the landscape changes with it. The train runs west to east over the Hardangervidda, the largest mountain plateau in Europe, above the treeline the whole way, past Finse at twelve hundred and twenty two metres, where there is a glacier, no road access at all, and the snow planet scenes in The Empire Strikes Back were filmed.

It comes down through Geilo and the long Hallingdal valley and reaches Oslo in the evening. Get a window seat on the north side, eat on the train or during the change at Myrdal, and do not sleep through the middle two hours.

The Munch museum opened in 2021 in a tower that leans out over the harbour and was widely disliked in drawing form. Inside is the collection Munch left to the city in his will, over a thousand paintings plus many times that in prints, spread up thirteen floors that get quieter as you climb. He made several versions of The Scream and they are rotated rather than shown together.

The point of a whole museum rather than one room is that Munch stops being one picture. The sickroom paintings, the frieze of life sequence and the late self portraits made in his seventies are all here, and the last of those are the ones people stand in front of longest.

Then walk five minutes to the opera house and go up the outside of it. It is faced in white Carrara marble laid on slopes that start at street level and run to the ridge, with no ticket, no barrier and nobody telling you not to. Go in the last hour of light.

Bygdøy is a wooded peninsula ten minutes across the water, and it holds most of Norway's national story. Take the boat from behind the City Hall rather than the bus.

The Fram first. Nansen had it built in 1892 with a rounded hull designed to be squeezed upward rather than crushed when the pack ice closed, then deliberately froze it in and drifted for three years to find out where the Arctic current went. Amundsen later took the same ship south and left from it for the Pole in 1911. It is indoors, complete, and you go aboard and down into cabins considerably smaller and darker than the accounts suggest.

Next door the Kon-Tiki museum has Thor Heyerdahl's raft of nine balsa logs, which he and five others sailed four thousand miles from Peru into Polynesia in 1947 to argue that the Pacific could have been settled from the east. Most archaeologists think he was wrong about that. The raft in the room is very small.

Finish uphill at the open air museum, some hundred and sixty relocated buildings including the Gol stave church of around 1200, with dragon heads on the gables, and a street of apartments each furnished to a different decade between the 1850s and the 1980s. If you have already seen the Undredal church this week you will find yourself comparing them, which is the point.

Gustav Vigeland spent the last twenty years of his life on one commission and the city gave him a park for it. Frogner park is free, never closes and holds around two hundred figures in bronze, granite and wrought iron, all by him, arranged along an axis climbing to a seventeen metre monolith cut from a single block of stone with a hundred and twenty one bodies twisting up it. Subtle it is not. There is nothing else like it in Europe, and children climb the statues while nobody objects.

In the afternoon take the metro up line 1. It climbs steadily out of the city until the last stations are in pine forest four hundred metres up. The ski jump at Holmenkollen first opened in 1892, has been rebuilt many times over, and the current steel structure went up in 2010; there is a lift up the tower, and the oldest ski museum in the world is dug into the hill beneath it.

Stay on to the end of the line for waffles with sour cream and cloudberry jam at Frognerseteren, a dragon style timber lodge from the 1890s with the whole city and the fjord below it. In winter the ski trails start at the platform, and people commute out in the evening to use them.

One last thing, ten minutes from the station. The National Museum opened in 2022 and absorbed four older institutions, making it the largest art museum in the Nordic countries. Stick to the second floor: Norwegian and European painting from the fifteenth century onwards, a room of Munch including one of the painted Screams, and before it the nineteenth century landscape painters whose pictures of exactly the fjords you have just been in are the reason the rest of the world started coming here.

That is a neat way to end this particular route, because you will recognise the water.

The airport trains leave Oslo Central every ten minutes and take about twenty.