Even with cloud cover – some of it very low and forming interesting-looking streamers within the mountainous walls of the surrounding fjord during our 2013 visit – Flåm is very attractive, but being a village with only a few hundred inhabitants it does suffer from not having a whole lot to do and on our arrival it all seemed very quiet indeed even allowing for the serenity emanating off the scenery. I will make some allowance for the fact it had been raining for most of the day on this occasion, too.

Certainly, businesses have sprung up to cater for the influx of tourists, increasingly from cruise ships, but generally these are simply shops and cafés plus a couple of small museums. There is a local railway line running from the village that provides for some spectacular views (we’ve not done it but it’s supposed to be excellent) but if you’re thinking of visiting this village port on a cruise ship then it’s probably best you plan to take a trip inland when you’re there if you want to see something more of interest than wooden buildings and souvenir shops selling sweaters. This lack of captivating attractions can completely skew the financial benefits that a cruise ship can bring to a port especially when the ship is as easily accessible as it is in Flåm; given a choice between spending some money to buy food ashore – and in Norway that can be a lot of money as you’ll see further down – or eating as much as you want for no additional cost aboard, a significant proportion of travellers will choose not to support the local economy and to channel their inner-tightness to save a few quid on their multi-hundreds of pounds holidays. Well, we’ve paid for it already, haven’t we? they’ll say, and we’ll smile tightly and nod and think dark thoughts. Yes, I know that anecdotally some people have real reasons to act that way. We’ve just never met any and this is a site about cold, hard facts, damn it!

Now, that being said about there not being a lot to do in Flåm, there is one thing that leapt to the forefront of our attention when our guide mentioned it on the bus back to the port: Flåm has a brewery. Thus is was that we had exactly one thing on our mind as we jumped down from the vehicle by the water. Let’s buy a sweater! No, wait, that wasn’t it. To the brewery! That sounds more like us. Long story short, we went and we had a fabulous time there.

Here then is our recommendation for the top thing to do in Flåm: make sure you’ve got plenty of money and spend a couple of hours in the gorgeous Ægir BrewPub. You can get some food there too if you want but the beers are the stars of the location. We love frequenting microbreweries back home because there’s nothing nicer than beer freshly-made and we always seek them out when we travel too. For as good as the cocktails are on a cruise ship, it’s fair to say that beer quality is an area where all the lines do disappointingly for our tastes (P&O usually keep a decent range of bottled beers in theory, but good luck with them being stocked) so a chance to get something malty and amber-coloured or darker and with a connection to the port of call on the cruise is something we jump at. In this respect Ægir excelled. Three drinks each set us back fifty-four pounds in 2013 so factor that into your budget plans if you must but also consider that we were well-aware of the price and ended up spending that amount anyway.

In addition to the brewery having a lovely, wooden interior it also sported some fabulous chairs with rotating, cupped seats. Interesting enough when we first arrived they provided even more spinning-based enjoyment as each drink slipped down and it was all I could do to convince my wife that buying and/or stealing one of them and trying to get it back on the ship was not the most sensible of things to be considering.

We did take a look at the shops in Flåm but didn’t see anything to make our souvenir-spending juices run and concluded our time in the pretty village with a slow wander back to the ship.

With our cabin being located on the starboard side of the ship we had a view of the landscape opposite the village from our balcony. This was effectively just the innermost part of the Aurlandsfjord and the few buildings along its shoreline; mostly the village marina and rental cottages. It was nice to see the wispy string of low cloud level with it in the fjord valley.

The next day would see us visit the final port on this Norwegian fjords cruise, that being Stavanger.

We’d last visited Flåm about a decade before when we’d taken our second ever cruise and hit this part of the world on Crown Princess. On that day in 2013 we’d gone off on an organised tour but had been left with enough time at its conclusion to look around the local shops, admire the views of the fjords, and discover a small brewery with fabulous, if expensive, beer (see: The Village And Cruise Port Of Flåm, Norway). The main thing we’d been looking forward to when we booked this week’s cruise to Norway on Britannia was returning to Flåm and seeing if the beer, the glasses, and the fabulous chairs in the brewery were just as we remembered them.

But, other than that desire to have a drink in a fancy pub – don’t sneer at something like that; it’s engaging with locals culturally and spending money locally, and more cruise travellers should do that instead of sloping back to the ship for lunch or not even getting off in a port – we had no plans at all for Flåm.

We’d booked this cruise fairly late – late enough for the more interesting excursions to sell out – so we’d decided that we’d simply see what we could see for ourselves in all the Norwegian ports for a change. It’s not something we normally do, and, to be honest, it’s not something we often really like doing either because we’ve found the things more of interest to us don’t tend to be walking distance from wherever the cruise ship drops you. Our expectation in Flåm was that we’d likely look around the village, see how far we could walk along the edges of the fjord, then spend some time and money in the shops and brewery.

From our balcony we could see Flåm spread out in front of us and in the distance, just visible in front of the ship from our balcony location, I could see a waterfall. We like waterfalls – and Norway’s certainly a good place to come and visit if you like waterfalls – and a quick check of the phone indicated it looked like a fairly easy walking route to it which gave us an additional activity we could enjoy on this day.

After breakfast we gathered our things for the day – camera, water, and sun screen because we’d switched from wearing multiple layers the day before to only needing t-shirts now (the answer to the question “What sort of clothing should I bring for a trip to Norway?” should always be a shrug and “All of them, maybe?”) – and disembarked straight into Flåm. We walked through the centre of the small collection of buildings in the general direction of that waterfall we’d seen.

We came upon a map of the local area pinned to the wall of a building, showing various walking routes that could be taken. What we would end up doing on this day, more-or-less, is the long, green route, number 3, shown in the picture below, walking in a clockwise direction. We didn’t really feel it was that long and with the exception of the ascent to the waterfall itself this was both easy on the feet and easy on the eyes.

One of the things we’ve still never done – and, admittedly, this was only our second visit to this place in Norway so this is not that surprising – is take the Flåm railway trip which, by all accounts, is supposed to be fantastic. It’s also very popular and likely rammed with people if you’ve just arrived on a cruise ship, though, so that’s part of the reason we didn’t consider it on this trip too. However, we did cross the rail tracks a few times while on this walk to the waterfall.

You can see for yourself just how beautiful the Norwegian landscape is around Flåm without me wittering on about it. There were frequent pauses as we enjoyed the late May sunshine in Norway for me to take a photo or ten and what I’ve included here is a small fraction of what I shot.

We eventually crossed over the water and made our way to the start of the climbing path towards Brekkefossen waterfall. This part of the hike was quite brutal on account of the uneven stone steps that led to the outcrop of rock at the waterfall’s base. By all accounts, this used to be a lot easier when it was just a dirt path, although I suspect that might have been only true as far as going up was concerned, and not particularly good for hikers in inclement weather conditions coming down.

The different heights of the steps didn’t allow us to get a good rhythm going and required frequent stops due to the tiring nature of them which I disguised as photo opportunities. My wife – whose dodgy knees, ankles, and hips have made it into many travelogues on this site over the years – made it about a third of the way up this steep climb then admitted understandable defeat and sat down on a step to wait for me to head up alone and return. While I was gone I’m pleased to say that a few other hikers checked to make sure she was okay and some people in another group ended up doing the same thing as us with some continuing and the rest waiting near my wife and having a chat with her.

The twisting, steep, uneven, and strenuous (for me) hike involved passing lots of people on the way down, each saying “Keep going, it’s not far, and the views are worth it.” I did keep going, it wasn’t far – although it took longer than you might think to complete it – and the views were definitely worth it.

Brekkefossen itself was thundering and fabulous from the small plateau on which numerous other hikers were resting or taking in the views, and with the sun out we were even treated to a rainbow in the gentle spray as the water hit the base near us. Gazing outwards and along the valley it was possible to trace the route we’d walked all the way back to Flåm and to see our cruise ship docked at the village port. Snow-topped mountains, fjords, a waterfall, wooden buildings nestled together: what more reason do you need to take the Brekkefossen waterfall hike?

I couldn’t spend too long admiring the scenery of the Norwegian landscape because I had a wife on the trail below somewhere, so once I’d stopped gasping for air and most of the more obvious sweat on my face had evaporated I turned around and completed the substantially easier descent to where she was waiting, passing goats and small cascades and stunning views on the way.

Back on level ground we then proceeded to follow most of the rest of the green walking route back to Flåm, although we crossed a bridge over the river earlier than it suggested and ended up retracing part of the way we’d come earlier in the day.

Overall, and with that weather we had in particular, this Brekkefossen waterfall hike is well worth doing if you like to get some kilometres under your belt and haven’t had enough of beautiful rocky landscape views already on your trip to Norway. As if you could. For the most part it’s a very easy walk but that ascent to the waterfall itself might take you by surprise with the exertion involved. But if I can do it, and you don’t have any debilitating injuries to contend with, then you probably can, too.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head into the brewery in Flåm for some well-deserved, post-hike liquid refreshments before we wave goodbye to this incredibly attractive port of call.

We’d checked to make sure that the brewery still operated in Flåm before embarking on this 2023 cruise on Britannia, so after our hike to the Brekkefossen waterfall it was to the Ægir BrewPub we headed. The wooden interior with its design reminiscent of stave churches or Viking halls was as we remembered it, only busier and a bit brighter thanks to the lack of heavy cloud and rain that had made up the weather conditions on our first visit. The beer was superb too with a range to suit all tastes, and with prices of everything in the UK having risen so much under an intervening decade of Tory corruption even the cost of the ales didn’t come as quite the shock to the wallet it had originally.

We had plenty of time to enjoy several drinks each in a place that got increasingly busier as more tour groups returned from their trips to see the Norwegian sights and some passengers similarly-minded to us headed for the pub. It’s always nice to see cruise ship passengers doing this sort of thing rather than heading straight for the ship, especially when, and especially so in the case of Flåm, the ship is so close. We had time for chats with people from the ship who we knew and had met before from elsewhere (the world of social media cruise blogging), and we got chatting with some Americans who were touring the country and had booked into the nearby hotel for a couple of days to use the village as a base. A very pleasant couple of hours.

As I’ve already mentioned, cruise ships dock very close to the village of Flåm, and in under five minutes from leaving the pub we were back in our cabin on Britannia. We grabbed a quick snack from the top deck then waited for the sail away on our balcony with a cup of tea – we can be sensible sometimes – taking in some final views of this most picturesque of Norwegian fjords locations.

After the mooring lines had been cast off we got to see the local port operators waving Norwegian flags joyfully to the passengers aboard, something we’ve noticed they do a lot in Norway. For all the talk there is of limiting the access of cruise ships to this part of the world, the locals, generally, seem to be happy enough to see visitors, and local businesses probably do very well from their visits.

For us then, and for you now, some photos taken from our balcony on Britannia as we cruised along the Aurlandsfjord. Aurlandsfjord is an arm of the longer Sognefjord, which is Norway’s longest fjord. If you like geology then you’d absolutely love cruising along this fjord and admiring the deep clefts, the sheer cliffs, the waterfalls appearing from between gaps in tree covers, the distant glacial peaks, and the colourful striations on the rocky faces as you pass. If you don’t like geology then you’d still absolutely love cruising along this fjord and enjoying the views of all those things because, seriously, how could you not!?

It’s entirely possible – indeed, very likely – that nobody in their right mind is visiting this website to see pictures of the food from the main dining room aboard Britannia in May 2023, but it’s also entirely possible – indeed, very likely – that people not in their right mind make up a hefty portion of this travel-related website’s visitors, so here’s what we ate that evening after leaving Flåm and cruising down the Aurlandsfjord.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll get to experience a new port for us in Norway when Britannia docks at Haugesund and we head off for a look at the Haraldshaugen national monument.