The Fjord Road

The Lysefjord runs forty kilometres between thousand-metre walls, and halfway along it a slab of granite juts out of the cliff and stops dead, 604 metres above the water. It broke off straight, as if sawn, along a crack left by the ice ten thousand years ago. From the top the fjord is a green stripe between two walls, and the ships look like toys.

Here the Hardangervidda plateau ends abruptly and the Bjoreio river drops a hundred and eighty-two metres into a narrow canyon, a hundred and forty-five of them in a single leap. It is Norway's best-known waterfall, and since 2020 a steel footbridge crosses right over the lip of the canyon, with a staircase of ninety-nine steps down the wall.

Eight thousand square kilometres of rock, moss and water above a thousand metres, without a single tree. Here the water does not run in any particular direction — it sits in thousands of small lakes and drains every way at once. It holds Europe's largest herd of wild reindeer and it stood in for the ice planet Hoth in Star Wars. The Rv7 cuts straight across it and closes in winter in high wind.

Six hundred and fifty metres above the Aurlandsfjord, a platform of pine juts thirty metres out of the mountain and ends in a curved glass wall that bends down and away. There is no railing at the end, only glass, so nothing interrupts the view. Below you the fjord is two hundred metres deep and a colour that does not change from one year to the next.

It is seventeen kilometres long and, at its tightest, only two hundred and fifty metres wide, with walls of thirteen hundred metres on either side. The light reaches the bottom for only a few hours a day. It has been a UNESCO site since 2005 and it is the only place on the route where the ferry is not a means of getting somewhere but the reason you came.

The Geirangerfjord is fifteen kilometres of vertical wall down which the water falls directly into the fjord without touching ground: the Seven Sisters, the Suitor and the Bridal Veil, facing each other. Abandoned farms still cling to the walls hundreds of metres up, reached once only by rope ladder. It is a UNESCO site together with the Nærøyfjord.

The road climbs 405 metres up an almost vertical wall in eleven hairpins stacked one above another, with the Stigfossen waterfall dropping 320 metres straight across it. It was built between 1916 and 1936, by pick and shovel, and opened by King Haakon VII. At the top, a steel platform juts out over the whole staircase.