Quotes of the Day

It's Saturday morning at Bergen station, and the awaiting train fills with two species of passenger. First, there are the young (and not-so-young) Norwegians kitted out in salopettes, skis slung over shoulders, off for a day's sport. Then there are the foreigners — Europeans, Americans, Japanese — who scramble for a window seat for the journey to Voss: the first stage of the round-trip a local tour operator calls Norway in a Nutshell.

Incorporating train, bus and boat, this journey showcases, in one day, the Norway of everyone's imagination. First, the train whisks you past Bergen's genteel suburbs to Osterfjord, its whitewashed timber churches and huddled fishing villages mirrored in still waters. Inside the train, the skiers, nonchalant, peruse the weekend papers as the tourists gaze out, rapt at the landscape.

The prettiness of the scene is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Until the transformation of Norway's fortunes that came with North Sea oil in the 1960s and '70s, the communities glimpsed through the train window were dirt poor, eking out a precarious living in one of Europe's harshest terrains. These days, however, Norway's citizens are the world's wealthiest and this is holiday country.

At the mountain resort of Voss, the skiers pile into buses taking them to snowy peaks while the tourists board coaches for Gudvangen, at the tip of Naeroyfjord (Narrow Fjord). There, they take a workaday ferry doubling as a tourist boat. It plies the 18-km fjord, in places measuring just 250 m wide. Farming settlements cling to the shores, and waterfalls plunge sheer into glacial black waters from snowcapped mountains.

Two breathtaking hours later, the ferry reaches Flam, where the day-trippers browse souvenir shops before embarking on the most spectacular part of the journey: the Flam Railway, which has connected the isolated hamlets of Sognefjord with the main Oslo-to-Bergen line since it was completed in 1944. It chugs through the lush Flam valley before clambering up 20 exhilarating kilometers of mountainside and passing through 20 tunnels (including one that hairpins 180 degrees inside the rock face).

At Myrdal, a commuter train whisks day-trippers back to Bergen, arriving just as the exhausted skiers return from Voss. So ends a slice of Scandinavian splendor made possible by an audacious feat of Nordic engineering. See more at norwaynutshell.com.

• GAIL SIMMONS
• How to get a feel for Norway in a single day