ʕ̡̢̡ʘ̅͟͜͡ʘ̲̅ʔ̢̡̢ A version of this story was originally pub’d in Loose Ideas.
We wait at the border checkpoint behind a ‘90s blue Audi Coupe with Estonian plates, and I make note of it in my pocketbook.
Estonian plates… at Nor..wegian border..
Estonian plates. I think of seeing Hawaiian plates in the mainland USA. Two officers emerge from rainbow smoke bombs and approach the car. Like a couple of spoilt house cats with a taste for blood, they circle the car, peering up into the wheel wells, checking the trunk and reaching into the back seat. Suddenly, it’s on: one of them radios the Mothership, motions to an enormous freight garage on the right and steps back. In one swift moment the massive garage door rises, pulls the Audi into the darkness and closes again. We’re next. We roll up cautiously, passports in hand.
“Where are you coming from?” one officer asks. The other watches our expressions.
“Sweden!” we say through nervous smiles.
The officers take our passports. They look in the trunk, down at their palm computers, at the license plates and back at their screens. They radio a little, dig through our backpacks, and with suspecting eyebrows, they ask us once more. They’re confused. We’d actually started the day many hours earlier in Helsinki, where we caught a quick 75-minute flight back over the Baltic to Stockholm’s Arlanda International, grabbed our Danish rental from airport parking and made it well into the seven-hour drive to Oslo. We hadn’t planned to do laundry until Bergen, but we had been drinking in Finland all weekend. A few minutes pass, and the cops seem to figure it out. They return our passports, welcome us to Norway and send us away. The Guy With Estonian Plates never emerges.
Norway is moody, mossy, lush and layered, like an oil painting come to life. When we get to Oslo it’s sunny, breezy and under construction. High school seniors wearing red russefeiring jumpsuits walk past electric cars charging in city ports while sky blue trolleys slide slowly up and down the street.
The westward route from Oslo heads into Norway’s Scandinavian Mountains, through the ski village of Hemsedal and other off-season mountain towns. Minimalist vacation homes on plots without trees or driveways speckle the gritty hills and I imagine how drastically the area must transform when the winter sporting season is in full swing. As we drive, the black hills grow snowy, and the snow soon turns to forest, revealing young, opportunistic trees growing from half-fallen timber sheds deep in the roadside. Tunnels take us from one season to another, from Earth to Mars and back again, until finally, Lærdalstunnelen leads us to a pristine little village attracting some 160 cruise ships each year.
Lærdalstunnelen is a 24.5-km stretch of neon lights and intentional design that connects the towns of Lærdal and Aurland in Vestland County, Norway. The tunnel carries two lanes of European Route E16 and was the final step in creating a more winter-proof and ferry-free highway between Oslo in the east and Bergen in the west. The tunnel’s divided into four sections separated by three mountain caves. The main tunnel has white lights and the caves are lit in blue and yellow along the fringes, which is said to imitate sunrise and relieve the eyes. Construction began in 1995 and the tunnel opened in 2000. It’s the first tunnel in the world equipped with an air treatment plant. Great job!
We spend the night in Aurland, where I imagine Flåmsbana workers seek respite from the hoards of cruise ship tourists. Aurland’s a postcard town with velvety emerald hills carved away by two southern branches of Sognefjord, the world’s largest & deepest fjord. Spring comes early to the village and the summers are warm, and deep in the Norwegian winter when the sun glows just beyond the peaks, you might always keep a log in the fire. It’s the kind of town with a cemetery right out in the middle, where the doors of a small, old church are always open, and a round calico cat greets those who walk through the central courtyard.
The next day we make the trek to Norway’s second city, and Bergen feels like a birthday. We watch the city wake up over coffee and then head to the harbor. The morning is cool and mild, but the day warms quickly. Bergen’s fish market is bustling. Handwritten signs advertise Norwegian sashimi lunch deals while sea urchin, clams and lobster float around centrally located tanks. Whale meat, caviar, crab and prawn lay on angled ice mounds. If it’s somewhere in the water around us, it’s available here. We wander past the tourists, past the shops and cable car lines and make our way up into the hilly, quiet Fjellsiden (mountain side) neighborhood. Here, houses sit up above the city, pressed into the rock, with hidden gardens and electric cars in first-level parking spaces. Narrow streets lined with flowering trees wind ever upward, with a view pulling in more and more of the city below as you wander closer to the sun. The descent is steep, and by the time we reach the bottom I’m gripping a small bouquet of planty bits I’ve plucked from in-between the cobblestones.
We leave Bergen early the following morning and backtrack a bit to get on Norway’s scenic National Road 13. We stop in Kinsarvik and picnic along the Hardangerfjord, munching on Norwegian strawberries, tomatoes and fjellbrød (mountain bread) with packaged hummus. We watch cyclists board the nearby ferry and smile as the occasional passing vehicle slows to snap photos of our landscape painting picnic backdrop, but when the ferry departs and the traffic clears, we are completely alone in the Scandinavian paradise.
After this pit stop nature really explodes. Fields of flowering fruit trees span in every direction, all yellow, purple, pink and red, wiggling in the breeze like a patchwork quilt on a clothesline. The water’s like mirrors. We follow the bends of Hardangerfjord, winding and turning, until the smooth, perfect reflection breaks and begins to ripple and move, and when the road turns, there it is: Låtefoss. We pull over to the small parking lot along the road and run across the highway giggling like kids. I climb up to the cold, rushing water and bring a handful to my face. Laughing hysterically with my big American mouth, I push up my sleeves and splash my arms. Tears well in my eyes and mix with the water. It feels like I’m sparkling. I am baptized. I am tourist.
We spent a total of 17 days road-tripping across Scandinavia, and if I were to do it again with a few changes, I’d include at least one day of intentional rest free from the obligation to experience life, a few more days of eating as much as possible in Copenhagen, and a horse dose of dramamine for the ferry between Norway and Denmark. If you’d like to learn more about the 10/10 A+ route including some local faves that appear to have survived the panD, I invite you to become a paying subscriber.
📓 You can peruse three hefty film diaries here.
Okay, let’s get to it–