Key takeaways
- Gudvangen sits at the head of the Naeroyfjord and Flam at the head of the Aurlandsfjord. The boat runs between them and the day is built around that.
- Gudvangen gets three quarters of an hour before the boat; Flam gets half an hour after it. Neither is long enough to explore properly.
- It is the terminus of the Flam Railway and a regular cruise-ship call, so it has more places to buy lunch and a great many more people.
- Small, hemmed in by mountains on three sides, and there mostly because the fjord ends. The walk to the quay is the walk through the village.
Why the day has two villages in it
They are the ends of the boat. A cruise on the Naeroyfjord has to start where the fjord starts and finish where the road can meet it again, and those two places are Gudvangen and Flam. Everything else about the itinerary follows from that geography.
This is why the stops are the length they are. Gudvangen's forty-five minutes exist because a group has to be assembled and boarded; Flam's thirty exist because a group has to be collected and moved on to Stegastein before the day runs out.
Understanding that changes what you expect from them. These are not sightseeing stops that happen to be near a boat. They are the boat's terminals, with enough time attached to be pleasant rather than rushed.
Gudvangen
A very small settlement at the absolute head of the Naeroyfjord, with steep ground rising on three sides and the fjord as the fourth. The setting does the work: you step out of a vehicle into a place enclosed by rock walls over a kilometre high, which is a striking arrival regardless of what is actually in the village.
There is a quay, a hotel, a shop, and in recent years a reconstructed Viking settlement that operates as a visitor attraction and is not part of this tour. Forty-five minutes gets you a walk to the water, a look up at the walls and a coffee if you want one.
The name has a pleasing directness to it: it is the place at the head of the fjord where the boats go from, and it has been that for a very long time. The old road down to it, the one that came over the Stalheim escarpment, is one of the more alarming pieces of engineering in Norway.
The quay at Gudvangen with the walls of the Naeroyfjord closing in
Flam, and what it is for
Flam is a different proposition. It sits at the head of the Aurlandsfjord and it is one of the busiest single points in fjord Norway, because it is where the Flam Railway terminates and where a large number of cruise ships call. On a summer day the population multiplies many times over.
That brings infrastructure: cafes, restaurants, a substantial shop, a railway station, a brewery, and the general apparatus of a place that receives a great many visitors. If you want to buy lunch at any point in this eleven hour day, Flam is your best opportunity.
It also brings crowds, and thirty minutes in high season is thirty minutes among a great many people. This is not a criticism of Flam so much as a description of what it is: a working terminal for the whole fjord tourism system.
What half an hour in Flam actually buys
One thing, chosen deliberately. You can eat, or you can look at the railway, or you can walk to the water and back and photograph the village against the mountains. You cannot do two of those and you certainly cannot do three.
The most common regret is queueing. Thirty minutes spent in a line for a sandwich is thirty minutes not spent anywhere, and in high summer the queues in Flam are real. Anybody who has brought food with them has effectively bought back their own stop.
The second most common is the railway. Flam Railway trains are frequently in the station and are genuinely worth looking at, but riding one is a separate excursion of an hour each way and no part of this tour.
Which is the better stop
Gudvangen, for most people, and it surprises them. It has less in it, which is exactly why it works: with nothing to queue for and nothing to decide about, the forty-five minutes go on standing in an extraordinary place looking up.
Flam is the more useful stop and the less memorable one. It is where the practical business of the day gets done, and the setting, while very good, is a wider and gentler landscape than the one you have just sailed through.
The people who get the most out of the pair are the ones who treat Gudvangen as the experience and Flam as the errand. Doing it the other way round is how you end up remembering a queue.
Practical notes for both
Food and drink are not included at either village, or anywhere else on the tour. Both have places to buy something; Flam has considerably more of them and considerably more competition for them.
Be back at the meeting point early rather than on time in both places. In Gudvangen the consequence of being late is missing a boat that has no alternative; in Flam it is holding up a vehicle that still has a mountain road and a long drive ahead of it.
And use the toilets. There is one more stop after Flam and it is at the top of a hairpin road, which is not where anybody wants to discover they should have gone earlier. Both villages have facilities and the vehicle does not.
