A Day on a Bus in Norway

6:15am: I wake up extra early in my bed in Bergen because I’m not sure how long it will take me to pack everything up and get to the bus station. Yesterday, I slipped while following a Norwegian boy (boy is the wrong word because he's twenty-seven, but he has boyish energy) out onto some wet rocks, and I ended up with a hairline fracture in my right wrist. Norwegian Boy took me to the ER, and I now have a cast on my forearm that I can't get wet. Then we went to the grocery store to buy painkillers and some plastic bags to keep the cast dry while I showered. He carried my backpack for me.

7:07am: My ridiculously overpriced taxi arrives at my hotel to take me to the bus station. I usually avoid taking taxis when I travel because they’re too expensive, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do the ten-minute walk carrying my luggage with only one arm, so I blow $20 on a ride that takes maybe five minutes. That might hurt worse than my wrist—which doesn’t hurt much, as long as I don’t try to do anything ambitious. I don’t think I’ll need another taxi. My biggest problem is that I can’t put my hair in a ponytail.

7:16am: I plop myself down on the bench to wait for the bus, which isn’t here yet, because it’s scheduled for eight. I may have slightly overestimated the time it would take to get here, but better early than late. It’s cold, but I don’t want to try to get my jacket out of my suitcase.

7:40am: The bus arrives, and the driver is an old man with very light blue eyes, even icier than sky blue. I’m the first one on the bus, and I choose a seat on the second level at the front, so I can watch the landscape as we drive by. A budget fjord cruise!

8:00am: The bus pulls out precisely on time, and a very light rain spatters the windshield. I’m sleepy, so I put in an AirPod, start a podcast, and try to get comfortable. The sights aren’t all that exciting yet.

8:30am: We stop in Åsane, a town that's a suburb of Bergen, to pick up more passengers. This is where Norwegian Boy lives, and I wonder if I’m ever going to see him again. As I told him last night, if this were a movie, we’d meet again in five years, by chance, and end up getting married. Don't worry, we both knew it was a joke.

9:50am: I wake up when we stop again, and I realize that the bus is about to drive onto a ferry to cross the fjord. I’m excited—ferries are cool and different—and also am still regretting not having a jacket. The bus is too cold and outside on the deck will be even colder. I follow the other passengers off the bus, pretending that I know what I’m doing. We enter a small indoor sitting area that smells like bacon, although I can’t smell too well because I currently also have a cold. The ferry is quick, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and I follow the other passengers back out to the bus, where I pull out the oatmeal I’d packed. It’s made with oats and milk that I smuggled out of the hotel breakfast buffet in a mug a few days earlier.

on board the first ferry

10:45am: I’m reading a very strange book, written by a Norwegian author, called Doppler, about a man who leaves his family in Oslo to live in the woods with only a baby elk for company. He does this because he hates people. The book is so odd and the landscape is so beautiful that I keep getting distracted. For the past hour, the view out of the front window has been absolutely stunning: tall, rocky hills carpeted in forest and moss rising up over deep fjords with waters that seem impossibly still. Clouds actually cling to the sides of the hills.

11:25am: The blue-eyed driver mumbles an announcement in Norwegian over the speaker, and I have to ask the kid sitting next to me—who hasn’t stopped eating since he boarded the bus in Åsane—what the driver said. He explains to me that we’re going to take a thirty-minute rest break. So you can take a walk and stretch your legs! Aw, this is nice. This wouldn’t happen in the U.S.; there, we’d rather get to our destination thirty minutes earlier. We’re in the town of Førde, a cluster of shopping malls and houses in between the mammoth hills. I walk to the river and notice an old man in a windbreaker staring at me. I’m holding my cast to my chest, using my left arm as a sling, and it’s noticeable. People probably think that my cast is somehow related to my fingers being gone. I can see how that would be disconcerting.

12:30pm: The fjords may be eerily calm, but the rivers are not. The water is loud and white and it moves quickly, crashing over rocks and against the banks. I also see some cows grazing on a hillside so steep it’s nearly vertical.

1:45pm: I take some more pain medication and blow my nose. Norway is kicking my ass.

2:15pm: Ferry number two out of three; this one only takes about seven minutes to cross the fjord. I’ve struck up a conversation with the kid who has been translating for me; he’s sixteen, on his way to a family wedding, and has been riding this bus route for years. In Norway, you can’t drive until you’re eighteen, so, the kid tells me, he’s gotten very familiar with the bus system. The roads in Norway are “never boring,” he says, and he’s right. The roads skim the sides of mountains and duck through rocky tunnels and are never, ever straight. “I never sleep in the car,” he says, “because there’s too much to see!” But don’t worry, our driver has been driving since he was in his twenties or thirties, so he is extremely experienced. I also learn that, in Norway, commercial drivers are only allowed to drive for four hours or so before they have to take a forty-five-minute break. That explains our little sojourn in Førde. The kid gets off at our next stop and wishes me a good day.

3:15pm: I see a rock pattern on the side of one of the mountains—it looks like a frowny face. I tried to take a picture, but we drove by it too fast. Maybe it was a troll.

4:45pm: We’re on our third and final ferry of the day and I’m standing by the window looking down at the water. The ferry just seems like it skims the top of the fjord, barely causing ripples, and I decide to Google fjords. They’re essentially what is left when a glacier melts, and they can be thousands of feet deep, that’s why they’re so still. Fjords also are a mix of salt and freshwater, and they aren’t affected by the tides.

5:27pm: The bus driver drops me off in the center of Ålesund, which looks far more European and less Scandinavian than Bergen did, with wrought-iron gates and cobblestoned streets. I have to walk uphill to my hotel, only using my left arm to carry all my stuff. It is very difficult, and when the guy at the front desk hands me my room key, my left hand is so fatigued that it hardly remembers how to hold it.

7:50pm: I’m watching the sun set in pinks and oranges over the ocean, and can’t help wishing that Norwegian Boy was here with me. I also still need to get my jacket out of my bag.