Flam

Flam is a tiny town of 400 people at the end of the Sognefjord, the longest fjord in Norway. We wanted adventure and got it in spades. In my eternal wisdom I had planned to spicy it up a bit with a ride in the famous Flambana, an incredibly scenic train ride from Flam to Myrdal, and a bike ride back to Flam.

The train ride was awesome, more waterfalls than we could count flowing down to a gorgeous valley dotted with colourful houses, farms and cottages.  We got to Myrdal, the end of the line, and picked up the bikes I had reserved beforehand from Rellaren Cafe. They fitted us with helmets and sent us on our way; I asked which way to go and was told “there is only one way”. Famous last words.

Following a really steep and tricky path (of this they had warned us) to begin the approximately 2 hour, scenic and leisurely ride, we got to a spot where some tourists were taking lots of selfies. While navigating the crowd we must have missed a sign;  thus began the most torturous, rocky, steep, uphill bike ride imaginable. Mind you, other than some really neat e-bikes we rode along the Danube a couple of years ago, neither of us has ridden a bike in probably four decades.

We pedalled, we pushed, we prayed, we cursed. Every time we got to a bend in the path we thought it would turn downhill from there (Myrdal is at over 860 metres above the sea, Flam is at water level), but no; it just kept going up. The scenery was fantastic, at some point it seemed we were at the water head of a wondrous waterfall and I briefly considered stopping to take a picture of Blake with it in the background. I then decided that we were going to die anyways so who cared about another stupid picture.

Conserving our water (all two little bottles of it) we rode for almost two hours, not knowing how much farther we needed to go. It seemed so wrong, but the bike rental guy had said there was only one way. Eventually we came to a cross-roads and stopped to ponder our fate. Suddenly some other bikers came from the opposite direction and we asked where they were going; well, they were going to Flam!!

It appears that there is indeed another bike trail from Myrdal going to a town called Finse, but people usually do it in reverse (like our wise newfound friends) to get from Finse to Flam through Myrdal, given how hard it is. We asked the nice young Norwegian couple if we could just follow them, pretty please. They were experienced riders and we had a hard time keeping up, this time going downhill most of the time (I only wiped out once). We finally made it to the train station just before Myrdal and hopped on the train. We made it back to Flam with time to spare before sailaway, but had it not been for our chance encounter and resulting change in course we might have ended joining the ship in Geiranger the next day, or died trying.

We are now sailing through Sognefjord; no plans for tonight, in-room dining seems in order and Crystal’s is pretty great.