Norway Part 2

Welcome to Bergen, Norway!

After an amazing few days in Tromsø (which you can read about in Part 1), I continued my journey through Norway by flying down along the coast to Bergen, a popular city on the West coast of Norway. Here I met up with my aunt and uncle and enjoyed telling them about my trip so far!

Unlike Tromsø, the sun did set (late) at night so sleep was a little easier to do :) Bergen is also said to be the most rainiest city in Europe- but it didn't rain a single day that I was there! I'm convinced I had an influence ;)

 Bergen was really nice with a big fish market and old colourful houses, but we moved on (gradually towards Oslo) and visited a few tourist attractions along the way- one being Preikestolen.

Now Preikestolen is what you can see in the photo. It's 604m over the fjord below. It was quite a long trek climbing up rocks and mountains with a few of the other tourists deciding to turn back along the way as it was too tough to continue. It was a real example of The Survival Of The Fittest to reach Preikestolen- and I made it! It was also a breath-taking view!



Here I am! The guy sitting on the edge got blown off the cliff soon after. Not really :P But the wind was so powerful up there that I definitely didn't want to get that close to the edge! A 604m vertical drop is gut-wrenchingly high, especially when there is nothing preventing you from falling!

Everywhere I looked there were just beautiful landscapes that were just crying out to be photographed- which meant that my camera certainly got a work out! The picture above shows the kind of terrain we had to trek through to get to Preikestolen. Norway is so attractive.

I went along the coast and visited towns such as Stavanger and Kristiansand before finally reaching Norway's capital city, Oslo! It was actually quite a long trip as fjords and mountains were in the way! I travelled on many ferries to cross the stunning fjords and drove through countless tunnels that cut through mountains and sometimes fjords. I drove through the World's Longest Road Tunnel which was a whopping 24.5 kilometres long! One of the tunnels I also drove through was 350m below sealevel- so in just under a week I had been on the top of mountains and deep below the sea! That sure is quite a change in altitude!



Ancient rock carvings of boats around 1500BC. This is way before the vikings.

 Of course being a tourist I visited many other interesting attractions, one being the rock carvings above, and a few viking-related stuff too. But after visiting things from Norway's distant past, I finally visited Oslo's newest and most popular tourist attraction- The Holmenkollen Ski Jump!

It is in fact the world's newest ski jump and was used for the first time early this year hosting the 2011 World Ski Championships. I got to stand on the top of the tower and from there you could see Oslo and its surroundings. 

 Just imagine sliding down that! Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to try it, because there wasn't any snow :( I was also told that if some one non-professional were to try it, they'd most likely get killed. What a shame. Sadly I neared the end of my Norway-trip, but the last thing I did before leaving was to go sight-seeing in the city-centre of Oslo!

This building is Oslo City Hall, which is where the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony takes place. I'm looking forward to revisit this place in the future when I come to collect my award ;)

 And finally, here is the Norwegian Parliament, or as Norwegians sophisticatedly call it Stortinget which literally means The Big Thing. My trip in Oslo was really nice, and it was shocking that is was only a day after I left the city, that those terrifying terror attacks happened. I was only a few hundred metres away from where the bomb went off the day before it happened! Scary stuff.

So that was the end of my trip exploring the wonderful country Norway! I really didn't want to go home! As soon as I crossed the border between Norway and Sweden, the clouds appeared and it poured down raining all the way home to Denmark. It was as if the weather knew I was upset about leaving. You can probably sense though that I thoroughly enjoyed my holiday and I experienced so many things that I am so grateful to have done! I'll never forget those 2 adventure-filled weeks of my life!

"But I don't wanna go home!"