The road to the fjords- by the guest writer K

Hello, this is my first entry on our joint blog in 3 years! We set off from London on September 1st, knees buckling at the weight of our rucksacks, with a week to get to Bergen for the ferry. taking the Eurostar from st Pancras for the first time. By the time we arrived in Brussels early in the afternoon it was raining. Fortunately, we had spent a few days in the city quite recently, so were happy to not do very much, just go to a few old favourites for Moules frites, cherry beer and Belgian chocolates. The large number of noisy teens we were sharing the youth hostel with quietened down early enough that we got a decent night's sleep. Next day, next stop - cologne. I found it to be a very attractive city, easy to walk around, with some very pretty riverside cafes in restored wharf houses, and easy to find your way around with the large cathedral dominating the city centre as your reference point. the local brew - kolsch goes down very easily, and there are many sausages to choose from to eat! the next day we took a tour of the cathedral, which did well to survive the bombing. It helped that they took the stained glass out and stored it for safe keeping, except for some of the 19th century windows they didn't like, which of course got blown out and have been replaced with a contemporary pixellated design.

that night, we caught our first overnight train of the trip to copenhagen. It was pretty cosy but still took me a while to get to sleep, and the border police kindly provided a 5am wake up call. We just had enough time in Copenhagen to get breakfast (danish pastries, of course) before getting another train over the Oresund bridge into Sweden. By mid-afternoon we were well up the west coast, and the rain had returned. We got out at Tanum station, which doesn't even have a station building to shelter in so were relieved to find a waiting bus that dropped us just outside our accommodation in the fishing village of Grebbestad. We had arrived just in time for the next day's oyster festival. As Adrienne loves oysters, I of course explained that that was the plan all along. We had a sneak preview of the local catch that evening in a cosy harbourside seafood restaurant.

the next day dawned bright and sunny, which was perfect for our walk inland to see the local rock art. dating from the bronze age, there are several sites, all carved into sloping rock that has water permanently running down it, and pained with red pigment. As usual with rock art, some was better than others, but it was very extensive, and interesting to see the key symbols that are represented: boats, sun, deer, warriors (usually ostentatiously male), horsemen and so on. We got back to Grebbestad for the festival only to find that the oysters had run out! We had some champagne sitting on the edge of the boardwalk and watching the jellyfish,and then they got a fresh btahc in. We had to have more champagne to accompany them, of course.

Next day was Sunday, and sorting out public transport up to Oslo, even though we were close to the main road up to Norway from West Sweden was a bit of a headache. We managed it, with a 90 minute break in another fishing village further up the coast, Stromstad. At Oslo, we met up with our friends Scott and Gill, who had arrived the previous night. There was little time for sightseeing, so I went for a run, and saw all the major ones very quickly! Oslo (and Norway as a hole) is gob-smackingly expensive - 6 pounds a pint of beer, 25-30 for main courses in a lot of the restaurants and a tenner for a mile in a taxi to get to the station (we had all our luggage with us, if you're wondering why we're too lazy to walk), so we didn't paint the town red. Anyway, it was an early start the next day, for the train to Bergen.

The train goes across the middle of Norway, through the mountains, and is incredibly picturesque. Bergen, too is very pretty, with lots of little cobbled streets and wooden houses, including the old Hanseatic merchants' houses, which are now preserved as a world heritage site. The Hanseatics were German traders who bought and sold fish and other goods (only they knew how to sort the dried fish into the 23 different grades for different markets, apparently), who were officially celibate - they returned to Germany when they had made their money at about 30 or so, when they could settle down and have a family - but the largest concentration of prostitutes in Bergen were in the street behind the merchants' houses, and had some fairly brutal initiation rites involving getting the apprentices drunk and then beating them with big sticks or keel-hauling them off the boats. They paid fines for misdemeanours in beer, which encouraged a culture of telling on your fellow apprentices, as you got to drink a share of the fine!

We were staying in little apartments, so decided to save money by self-catering. The cheese we bought turned out to be brown in colour, and rather sweeter than expected. turned out brown cheese (goats cheese flavoured with caramel) is a Norwegian delicacy, along with Lutefisk - which is dried fish rehydrated with lye (an alkaline, soapy, poisonous substance, which then needs to be thoroughly rinsed away). Fortunately they also eat normal food. The next day we explored Bergen some more and then made our way down to the ferry terminal to board our Hurtigruten ship.