At some point I will probably stop banging on about Norway, but I am hysterically overexcited about this trip as, for a combination of reasons, I haven’t left the country since Budapest at Xmas and clearly this should not be allowed to happen again, because it makes me CRAZY.
As we are visiting at the height of high season, and as I will be accompanied by my boyfriend, who is a more nervous traveller than me, and because I don’t fancy spending my 30th birthday wandering the streets, I have done far more pre-booking than I normally would. Booking train and bus travel has been pleasantly easy: with the help of NSB, I’ve booked train travel from Oslo to Bergen, and from Åndalsnes to Oslo; they have a rather fabulous system that allows you to pick up the tickets on the train itself, which will save last minute weeping and thrashing about on the platform as the train chugs off into the distance. I’ve also booked the bus from Ålesund to Åndalsnes through Nor-Way. However, annoyingly enough, Hurtigruten’s online booking form doesn’t seem to work, and won’t let me book passage from Bergen to Ålesund; I’ve emailed them and hopefully they will get back to me eventually. (As an aside, Hurtigruten’s website fills me with intense travel-longing: I would love to do the trip all the way up the coast from Bergen to Kirkenes*, or even on to Spitzbergen, but that is for another day, possibly when I am retired and have nothing to do but take slow boat rides all over the world (by which point Spitzbergen will be a tropical wonderland, if all we’re being told about global warming is true).
Accommodation has been more tricky to find, but I have prevailed. Part of me feels too ancient for hostels, at least when I am travelling with my boyfriend (when I’m alone I’m still happy to bed down in a dorm), but Norway’s insane expense has conquered me, and so we are booked into the Anker Hostel in Oslo, and the HI Hostel in Ålesund (I haven’t stayed in a HI Hostel since Reykjavik in 2004, and admittedly that was lovely, rather than grim and institutional as HI Hostels tend to be in my head, so my hopes for Scandinavian HI Hostels are high). Still, we have double rooms and en suites in each, and both seem very well located and, most importantly, are CHEAP, which will hopefully enable me to scrape together enough spare kroner to have a beer on my birthday. In Bergen we are going comparatively upmarket and staying at the Alkoven Guesthouse, which, with disarming modesty, describes itself as “a nice place to stay in Bergen”. And of course we will have a night on the Hurtigruten (if the bastard booking agents ever call me back), which will be fantastic because one of my great loves is sleeping on transport (in proper beds, on long-distance transport, I mean, rather than dozing off on the bus to work) and we will GO TO SLEEP IN ONE PLACE and WAKE UP IN ANOTHER, like magic. Hurrah!
*Possibly untrue, possibly fascinating fact, which I was told by a Norwegian bloke I met in Girona a few years ago: the easternmost point of Norway is further east than Istanbul…
