Norway is a country that resets your sense of scale. Everything you thought was large becomes small here.
Where the mountains
walk into the sea
The line between water and stone dissolves — and you see how old the world is and how new we are in it.
Norway begins where the familiar world ends. Mountains plunge straight into the water, the water climbs into the mountains — the boundary dissolves. Fjords are not simply beautiful scenery. They are a place where you understand how ancient the world is, and how new we are within it.
The word “fjord” goes back to an Old Norse root linked to a way through, a crossing. More than a thousand years ago the Vikings sailed out along the fjords in their longships. Today cruise liners travel the same waters — and the feeling has not changed. Everything is as vast as ever.
Geirangerfjord — narrow, winding, with waterfalls dropping straight off the cliffs into the water — was inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage together with Nærøyfjord. From above, the tiny village clings to the shore and an ocean liner looks like a toy in a bath.
A country
where trolls live
Rocks that were once trolls, a road they walk, and a sky where spirits do battle.
Trolltunga — literally “the troll’s tongue” — is a rock ledge jutting horizontally above Lake Ringedalsvatnet, some 700 metres up. The hike there and back takes 10 to 12 hours. Every year thousands make the journey — for one photograph at the edge.
In Norwegian folklore, trolls turn to stone in sunlight. The rock, they say, is a troll caught by the dawn. Whether to believe it is up to you. But standing at the edge, it is easy.
The Trolls’ Ladder — Trollstigen — is a mountain road with eleven hairpin bends climbing an almost sheer slope. It took eight years to build and opened in 1936. The workers cut the rock by hand, above the drop. Today it is one of the most famous roads in Europe — and only a few hours’ drive from Geiranger.
In Norway, nature is not a backdrop for people. Here a person is a detail of the landscape. Small, temporary — but necessary.Secrets Service · Norway
Not barbarians,
but seafarers
Leif Erikson, undersea tunnels, brunost and a proverb about bad weather.
The Vikings were not the barbarians of the films. They were seafarers, traders, explorers. They reached America almost five hundred years before Columbus: around the year 1000 Leif Erikson landed on a coast he called Vinland — and traces of a Norse settlement have been found in Newfoundland.
Today the Vikings’ descendants build some of the longest undersea tunnels in the world, eat waffles with brunost (a brown whey cheese that tastes of caramel) and believe that going out in the rain without a jacket shows character. “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing” — every Scandinavian knows the saying.
Norway’s longest and deepest fjord and the second longest in the world: up to 1,308 metres deep — deeper than most of the North Sea.
At the North Cape the sun does not set for about 76 days in summer, and in winter it stays below the horizon for about two months.
Friluftsliv — open-air living. Since 1957 the law has guaranteed everyone the right to walk and camp in nature, even on private land.
Three photographs —
and a whole country
Norway is one of those places you return to not because you missed something, but because something happens to you there. The mountains are too big to think about trifles. The fjords are too quiet to hurry. The air is too clean not to breathe deeply.
What to know before you go
Norway is one of the most expensive countries in the world. A coffee in Oslo costs 6–8 euros, a beer 10–12. But nature is free — and that is what people come for. Best time: June to August for fjords and hiking, January to February for the northern lights. Flåm, a small village at the end of the Sognefjord, is the ideal base — the start of the Flåm Railway, one of the most beautiful in the world: 20 kilometres and more than 850 metres of climb.
The Trolltunga hike starts at Skjeggedal near Odda. The route is 20–27 kilometres there and back, depending on which car park you start from. Take food, water and good boots, and don’t go in bad weather: the rock is slippery and there is no railing.
