When you travel to the Norwegian fjords you have to be prepared for any kind of weather. You can’t be one of those people who hit Facebook groups and says “We’re going to Norway in June so what will the weather be like?” because nobody knows. You can only hope for the best, but prepare for the somewhat less good than that.

It was raining in Skjolden. Some of that rain was coming from the clouds above us, but some seemed to be coming from the clouds that had decided it was nicer down near the water and had descended to save themselves some time and effort in getting people damp. That’s laziness from the clouds, but it did make for some interesting scenic views, even if they weren’t the ones we might have wanted.

We particularly enjoyed the views from the top deck as we came back from breakfast, not of Skjolden itself, but of the fjords around the ship and the way the clouds pushed fingers of themselves around the landscape. Something delightfully mildly threatening about it all.

Our day in the port of Skjolden was one with an excursion booked. We like excursions and will almost always book one if it’s our first time anywhere, and that was certainly the case here.

Our trip would eventually take us far from the fjords towards Lom, and the route would lead up over mountain passes, quite some height up. To break up the journey we had a few stops for photos on the way. While it’s true that you can’t guarantee the weather in Norway, you can at least guarantee some stunning views and old, impressive landscapes, and…

Ah.

The first stop was at the Nedre Oscarshaug Viewpoint. Perhaps on a clear day it would be a place from where you could see for tens of kilometres and bask in the sense of scale of the world around and your smallness within it. We simply got up and personal with more cloud. Many people didn’t bother getting off the tour bus, but I’m pleased to say that the majority of us laughed and headed outside for that chilly, drizzly experience you can see in the photographs below. There was a lovely dullness to the sound; the cloud really smothered the ambient noises.

A more interesting photo stop on the drive from Skjolden to Lom occurred next, both in terms of what could be seen and in terms of what the place represented.

In March 1813, six men with ages ranging from 20 to 57 from the Boverdalen valley, along with horses, tried to cross the mountains in search of grain. They didn’t succeed and succumbed to death by freezing. Memorial stones were erected at the Mefjell crossing for them.

The highest point of this mountain pass in Norway is almost one and half kilometres and we were still seeing snow and packed ice on the ground in late June, so it’s not hard to imagine what those men were facing towards the end of winter two centuries earlier. Arguably, the low visibility and quiet, chilled air lent this point of interest even more solemnity than it already had. The Mefjell Crossing Memorial Stones proved to be a very poignant stop on this excursion.

In the next post in this travelogue series we’ll continue through Lom to see a stave church, museum, and controversial column.

The Sognefjellet Road is known as Sognefjellsvagen or the less exciting Norwegian County Road 55, and it incorporates the highest mountain pass – nearly one and a half kilometres – in northern Europe. It’s renowned for its views which were spectacular even on a day of low, full cloud cover like we had.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like taking photos through the windows of buses when we’re travelling but the urge took hold of me as we headed for Skjolden. I upped the ISO levels and set the aperture to get a decent chance at fast (and therefore sharp) shots and clicked away as we passed by mountains, valleys, waterfalls, trees, fields of snow, lakes, and tendrils of cloud clawing at all of it.

Excitement on the journey back came as we were negotiating the hairpin bends and narrow road down the mountains on the approach to Skjolden. There were passing points on the road, but not many of them, and the problem was the cloud was thick and clinging to the ground dropping visibility down to very little indeed. Our bus driver drove sensibly, which was nice on account of none of us wanting to die, but we suddenly reached an impasse where cars and vans coming up couldn’t get past us. Now, if you drive then you know that the general rule is that traffic coming up a hill has priority over that coming down, but if you’ve ever seen a bus then you know that traffic that isn’t a bus can take a hike as far as the bus is concerned. Numerous attempts were made for everyone to squeeze over as much as possible; I had some nice views of the rock face a few centimetres from the window for a while too. But ultimately, the wider vehicles trying to come up had to back down until they felt safe enough to pull over onto ground that wasn’t falling away precipitously. When we eventually started driving again we were already overdue getting back to the ship, although we knew we still had time to spare before it left.

Despite our extended jam on the road we still had time to make a final stop, albeit an understandably brief one, and this was the Åsafossen waterfall. From parts of Skjolden it’s actually visible along the road, and it was a very fine example of a waterfall. You can never get tired of seeing waterfalls, and that’s part of what makes Norway such a fabulously beautiful country to visit.

There was a small incident while we were at this stop when one of our fellow passengers on this cruise excursion fell over and smashed his face in quite nastily on the stony surface.

In addition to the waterfall and the wonderful landscape and the cows there was one other point of interest where our bus stopped, and that was a sculpture known as The Hand, but more formally The Wittgenstein Monument.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein retreated to Skjolden in the early twentieth century – and his life is a very interesting one, worth a read – learning Norwegian to talk to the locals while there and away from academics that he felt were affecting his thought processes. This monument is only a few years old, made from pine, and contains a speaker in the wrist section that started talking while we were there, almost making a small child fall over in fright before running away crying. Great stuff.

In the next part of this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover our cruise away from Skjolden and what we got up to aboard Sky Princess in the evening.

This post, for the most part, will simply be photographs of the view from our balcony on Sky Princess as we cruised away from Skjolden and down the fjords.

There’s not a lot to describe that was new in the evening aboard Sky Princess either. At some point when you’re cruising – or just travelling in general – you do get into a rhythm and find what it is you like so just keep doing it. The good thing about cruising, though, is that the outside keeps changing while you’re doing that. We had a very good dinner in the main dining room, took part in the movie quiz where we finished second, then drank and danced until gone two in the morning.

With this cruise on Sky Princess taking place this far north in the height of summer, the sky never got dark so before we headed back to our room for the night we popped out briefly onto the ship’s (admittedly underwhelming) promenade deck just to snap a shot.

On the way back through the ship towards the elevators that would take us to our room I decided to capture some photos of some of Sky Princess’s interior spaces with nobody around. I find these sorts of pictures a little unsettling. I’ve seen a lot of cruise bloggers going out of their way to take photos and videos without people in them, and it never feels right to me. Not only that, but it’s not really representative of what being on a cruise ship is like. Ships aren’t wall-to-wall with noisy people (the lazy “Butlins at sea” trope spouted by the bigoted sub-moronic), but they aren’t ghost towns either, and I prefer to see what they’re like and give people a better expectation for what travelling by cruise is like. It’s also why I don’t like a lot of the TV adverts you see for cruising either, showing the happy family on a ship with a capacity of several thousand, apparently blissfully happy with perhaps just a dozen others; you’re going to upset some people with those misrepresentations, you know.

The next port of call on this Sky Princess cruise would be one we’d cruised to almost a decade before: Olden.