Sunday on the fjord

Penetrating 205 kilometres (127 miles) inland, with an average breadth of five kilometres – in places far less – and reaching a depth of 1300 metres (0.8125 miles) Sognefjord is the longest and deepest in Norway. The PR folk have dubbed it the King of Fjords.

Norway’s second largest, a little to the south, is – you guessed it – the Queen of Fjords.

Jackie and I stepped aboard our saucy ship at 07:30. At 08:00 we hauled anchor, bade a Bergen still abed adieu …

… and set off for faraway Flam. It sits at the tip of Aurlandsfjord, the fjordic offshoot stretching southways from a Sognefjord still several miles shy of its easternmost point.

After exiting the sound at Bergen we steamed northwards maybe half an hour, the coast never out of sight, then took the 90 degree turn into Sognefjord. Our king of catamarans – note the twin wakes – sliced through the water …

… and though we were disembarked at Flam for under two hours – to allow beer ‘n pizza, and stroll round the ridiculously pretty village and quay – we weren’t back in Bergen till 20:45. Not once had our thirteen hour adventure palled or pulled its visual punches.

We were afloat under the Norwegian flag of course. Goes without saying.

Cost an arm and a leg, mind, but we got our money’s worth. Here’s a tiny fraction of the 500 or so pictures I took. Though the boat zipped along – except when we lingered close to land for a particularly thrilling ooh-ah moment, or to let passengers embark/jump ship at ports along the way – the day’s sunlit brilliance allowed high shutter speeds even with narrow apertures for depth of field, with ISO never topping 200. If you can spot camera shake in any of these snaps, yours is a sharper eye than mine, Gunga Din.

But that’s quite enough of me rabbiting on …

Those neat rows are apples, their pretty flowers of red, pink and malic white easily identified using Jackie’s binoculars. They make cider round here you know.

If the stuff isn’t bottled to perfection, it won’t be for want of irrigation, will it?

My last waterfall, I promise …

I lied about the waterfall.

A few of our fellow passengers …

… for whom I graciously widened my aperture to allow sharp focus on the face while reducing visual ‘noise’ from so stunning a backdrop …

As I may have intimated, the time just flew by. Here we are, re-entering Bergen Port, contented souls one and all.

* * *