Voss is a beautiful town sitting right on an equally beautiful lake. Snow capped mountains in the background. Apparently it's quite a popular ski resort in the winter.
Fleischer's Hotel was built in 1846 and is as beautiful as the town around it.
We went for a walk around town and through a caravan park, stopping to talk to some Norwegian travellers in their motorhomes. Caravanning is very popular in Norway. There were some beautiful parks and free-camp sites. The park in Voss is owned by some New Zealanders... !
Meals in the hotel were very good and we sort of developed a bad habit of eating all the wrong things. Desserts, cheeses. A habit that did not improve on the cruise ship.
Monday 21st May
After breakfast we got on a bus for our first official Excursion. The bus took us along the main road to Vossestrand, through open farming country and past a string of beautiful lakes.
The road down through the Stalheim Gorge is a gradient of 18%. That's almost a 1 in 5 gradient. Every 5 metres we travel we drop 1 metre. I couldn't help thinking about how I would cope taking the van down here. They also drive up the hill too.
At the end of the coach section of this excursion we got onto a ferry at Gudvangen. We cruised down through the very narrow Naeroyfjord. There were some delightful little villages hugging the mountainsides and edges of the fjord.
A local resident was building a viking ship.
Imagine the view from these two houses. I can't work out how they got all the building material up there.
We arrived at Flam. So had the Oriana.
We stayed here for an hour or so, had some lunch and looked around. Like all the places we had been to so far, it was very, very nice. And we had been blessed with fine, hot weather which was surprising the locals as well.
We then boarded the Flam railway train for our trip via Myrdal, back to Voss.
Green pastures, little villages, steep mountains. The Flam railway has it all.
This zig-zag road was used while the railway line was being built. It is now a popular walking and bicycle riding track.
The train stopped at the Kjosfossen Waterfall which supplies the water for a hydro-electricity scheme.
At Myrdal we changed trains for the section back to Voss where we had another night in Fleischer's Hotel.
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