Key takeaways
- Departure is 08:00 from outside the Tourist Information at Strandkaien 1, and the operator asks you to be there by 07:50 at the latest.
- Back at the same place in the early evening. It is a long day and about half of it is spent out of the vehicle.
- Tvindefossen 30 minutes, Gudvangen 45, the cruise 2 hours, Flam 30, Stegastein 30. The rest is road.
- Nothing is provided at any point across the eleven hours. Bringing lunch is the single most useful piece of preparation.
The start, and being on time for it
The bus leaves Strandkaien 1 at eight in the morning, from outside the Tourist Information with the Scandic Hotel Torget across the street. You are looking for a black Mercedes Sprinter minibus rather than a coach, which is the detail that saves people standing in the wrong place.
The operator asks for arrival by ten to eight at the latest and states plainly that it will not take responsibility for anybody who is late. On a tour with a boat to catch in the middle of the day, that is not a formality: the schedule has no slack in it.
Bergen in the early morning is quiet and the walk to Strandkaien from most of the central hotels is short. Give yourself the extra ten minutes anyway. It is a small hedge against an eleven hour day that never starts, and standing on a quiet quay at ten to eight in Bergen is not the worst way to begin one.
The road east, and the first stop
The first stretch runs east out of Bergen and inland, climbing away from the coast through country that changes character quickly from suburban to steep. This is the longest continuous driving section of the day and it is where the guide does most of the talking.
Tvindefossen arrives roughly a third of the way through the outward journey, which is well judged: everybody has been sitting long enough to want to be somewhere. Thirty minutes, a short walk to the base of a hundred and ten metres of water, and back on board.
After that the road runs on towards the Sognefjord system and begins the descent to Gudvangen, which is one of the more dramatic pieces of road in the day and worth staying awake for. The valley narrows, the walls close in, and you arrive at the fjord from above rather than along it.
The middle: Gudvangen and the water
Forty-five minutes in Gudvangen at the head of the Naeroyfjord, which is time to walk to the quay, look up at walls rising more than a kilometre on either side, and get a coffee before boarding.
Then the two hours that the rest of the day exists to deliver: the cruise out along the Naeroyfjord and into the Aurlandsfjord, arriving at Flam. This is the middle of the day by design, when you are awake, fed if you brought food, and not yet tired.
The minibus does not come with you. It drives round to meet the boat at Flam, which is why being back at the vehicle on time in Gudvangen matters more than any other instruction on the tour.
The black minibus at a stop somewhere between the waterfall and the fjord
The afternoon: Flam and the climb
Thirty minutes in Flam, which is the practical stop of the day. It is the busiest place on the itinerary and it has the most places to buy something, and thirty minutes is enough for one activity chosen deliberately rather than two attempted.
Then the road up from Aurland to Stegastein, a sequence of tight hairpins climbing the side of the fjord, and half an hour at six hundred and fifty metres on a platform that runs thirty metres out over the drop.
This is the last stop of the day and the highest point of it in every sense. After Stegastein the itinerary is finished and what remains is the drive back to Bergen.
The run home
The return is a long continuous drive and most of the bus is quiet for it. This is normal and it is the correct way to spend it: eleven hours of fjord, waterfall, boat and altitude is a genuinely full day and the run home is when it catches up with people.
Arrival back at Strandkaien is in the early evening, which leaves the evening intact for anybody who wants dinner in Bergen rather than collapsing. Most people manage dinner, and Bergen is small enough that wherever you are staying is a short walk from where the bus puts you down.
The schedule can move. Weather, road conditions and the boat's own timekeeping all affect it, and the operator states that the schedule may change if unforeseen events occur. Do not book anything tight against the return time.
How much of it is actually sitting
Roughly half. Adding the stops together gives about four hours out of the vehicle, of which two are on a boat, plus the time spent walking between things. The remaining hours are road, split into three main sections rather than one long haul.
That distribution is what makes eleven hours tolerable, and it is worth knowing if the number is putting you off. This is not a coach tour with two comfort breaks; it is four genuine stops and a cruise with driving in between.
The people who find it long are usually the ones who did not bring food and spent the boat and the villages thinking about lunch. The people who find it flies are the ones who packed a sandwich in Bergen at seven in the morning.
