Åndalsnes and the Romsdalsgondolen, three hours on top of a mountain

We woke up outside Åndalsnes with no plan and a very large gondola sitting in front of the window, which is either a problem or an invitation depending on how you travel. MS Midnatsol came alongside at 9 in the morning. We had not booked anything. There was a bus heading up into the hills and there was the train, and there was a gondola ride with a guided walk attached to it, and we stood there for a minute the way you do when everything sounds good and none of it is decided. Then Mark and I got to talking with a woman from the Romsdalsgondolen team, and about ten minutes later we had bought tickets at the base station and were getting on. The base is a five minute walk from the dock, if that. We were riding up by 9:30. That gondola is steep. Steeper than it looks from the water, and there is a moment partway up where the floor of the valley drops away underneath you and the whole thing stops being a ride. Then you are at the top and you get that small voice in your head that just says, this is Norway. We spent close to three hours up there behaving like children. On the paths, off the paths, around one more corner because surely that was the better viewpoint. Every single one was the better viewpoint. Different side of the mountain, different fjord, a different reason to stop walking. There are signs along the trails explaining what you are looking at, which is how we learned about the wild blueberries growing right there at our feet, low and scrubby and unbothered by the fact that it is a mountain. Remember the blueberries. They come back later. We heard bells before we saw anything, and then we found the sheep, standing on the edge of a cliff with the casual confidence of an animal that has never once considered falling. The river valley below is the Rauma, and the story of that water is better than I understood when I was standing over it. It was one of the great Norwegian salmon rivers, and it was one of the first that English fly fishermen came to in the 1800s. Then in 1980 a parasite called Gyrodactylus salaris turned up in the system, and by 1988 salmon fishing was closed entirely. What Norway eventually did about it is remarkable. They treated the whole watercourse to clear the parasite out, twice, in 2013 and 2014, and the Rauma was declared free of it on the first of November in 2019. The salmon are coming back now, slowly, with the run growing year over year and still well short of where it needs to be, and there are catch restrictions in place while it rebuilds. So when you look down at that valley you are looking at a river that people decided to fix and are still fixing. No coffee stop, no sweets, nothing. Warm, clear, perfect weather and we could not make ourselves come inside. We rode down around 1 in the afternoon and sailed a little after 2. Lunch was at Árran, the chopped beef burger, eaten quickly because we were still buzzing. Dinner was in Flora and it was one of the best meals of the trip so far. Smoked reindeer to start, duck for the main, and then a blueberry mousse on a cake, built to look like a cupcake, which arrived at the table roughly nine hours after I had been standing on a mountain looking at wild blueberries growing out of the rock. That is what Hurtigruten is doing with food, and it is easy to miss if you are not paying attention. Sail out we spent on the observation deck, running from one side to the other trying to decide which view was winning. Mountains on both sides, fjord down the middle. We never did decide. Here is the part I want to be useful about, because this is the question I get asked most and there is no single right answer to it. We did not book an excursion in Åndalsnes and it was the best day we could have had. But that worked because we are wanderers, and because the weather was clear, and because the walk from the dock is five minutes and the tickets are sold at the base. It also worked because Hurtigruten sets you up for it. There are daily gatherings on board that walk you through the next day's port, and there are lectures, so you arrive knowing something rather than guessing. The guided gondola option would have given us a lot of history we had to piece together ourselves from trail signs, and for some travelers that trade is worth it. Excursions add up quickly, and part of my job is helping people decide which ones to spend on and which ports they can handle on their own. Some people also just want the day handled, no decisions, no research, and there is nothing wrong with wanting that on vacation.