Why sail the fjords
A fjord is a valley a glacier carved below sea level, and the only way to be inside one is on the water. The road along the Geirangerfjord shows you the fjord from above; the ship puts you at the bottom of it, with a thousand meters of rock on both sides and the Seven Sisters falling past the rail. There is no land-based equivalent of the morning your ship threads Nærøyfjord.
Norway is also the antidote to a hot-weather cruise. Sailings run in the long Nordic summer, when it is fifteen to twenty degrees, green, and light until midnight.
The fjords that matter
- Geirangerfjord: a UNESCO site and the postcard. Narrow, dramatic, and the approach itself is the excursion. Ships tender here.
- Nærøyfjord and Flåm: the narrowest navigable fjord in the world, and the Flåm Railway climbing out of it, which is among the most spectacular twenty kilometers of track anywhere.
- Nordfjord and Olden: the gateway to the Briksdal arm of the Jostedalsbreen ice cap, mainland Europe’s largest glacier.
- Lysefjord, from Stavanger: Pulpit Rock, if you have the legs for a four-hour hike on a port day.
Going further north
Itineraries that continue past Trondheim reach Tromsø and the Lofoten Islands, inside the Arctic Circle. In June that means the sun never sets at all; in September the same route is sold as a northern-lights sailing. Both are true, and they are different vacations; check the dates against what you actually want to see.
What to know before you book
Pack for fall, in July. Fjord weather is cool, changeable and often wet. Layers and a waterproof shell, not shorts.
Norway is expensive ashore. A beer in Bergen will surprise you. The all-inclusive lines make more sense here than they do in the Caribbean.
Cabin side matters and is unusually hard to call. Fjords are narrow enough that both sides get a wall of rock, but the ship turns around at the head of the fjord, so a balcony gets each side in turn. This is the one region where an inside cabin plus a good deck position costs you very little.
