Getting around
Getting Around Norway: Roads, Rails and the Hurtigruten
Norway's transport network does more than move people between places — several of its routes are genuine destinations in their own right, engineered specifically to showcase terrain that would otherwise be inaccessible, and one of them, the Hurtigruten, is a real working supply line as much as a scenic cruise.
Updated 2026-08-15
The Atlantic Ocean Road: eight bridges, half an hour
The Atlantic Ocean Road (Atlanterhavsveien), just 8 kilometres long between Kristiansund and Molde, condenses Norway's relationship with the open sea into a single short drive — eight bridges arching from islet to islet directly across exposed North Sea water, with no land shelter breaking the waves on either side. It's routinely named among the world's most photographed drives specifically because of that exposure: on a stormy day the road appears to disappear directly into breaking waves, an image that's become genuinely iconic in Norwegian tourism precisely because the engineering makes no attempt to hide from the sea it crosses.
Trollstigen: eleven hairpins up a mountainside
The Trollstigen (Troll's Path) climbs roughly 850 metres up an 11-hairpin mountain road to the Stigfossen waterfall and a viewing platform cantilevered directly over the valley floor below — a genuinely engineered spectacle rather than simply a practical route over difficult terrain, since the road's builders clearly designed the switchbacks and the platform with the view in mind as much as the crossing itself. The road is seasonal, open roughly mid-May through October and closed by snow the rest of the year, so a Trollstigen crossing needs to be timed into a summer or early-autumn itinerary rather than assumed available year-round.
Bergen Railway and Flåm Railway: two trains, one connection
The Bergen Railway (Bergensbanen) crosses the Hardangervidda plateau at 1,222 metres on its roughly seven-hour run between Oslo and Bergen — treeless, high-altitude terrain that gives the journey a genuinely different character from typical European rail travel, closer to crossing a polar landscape than a conventional countryside route. At Myrdal, partway along, the connecting Flåm Railway (Flåmsbana) branches off and descends 866 metres through 20 tunnels to the fjord at Aurland, engineered as one of the steepest non-rack railways in the world — a single connection that lets travellers experience both a high mountain plateau and a rapid descent to sea level within the same day.
The Hurtigruten: a working ferry line, not just a cruise
The Hurtigruten coastal voyage runs daily between Bergen and Kirkenes — roughly six days northbound, five southbound — calling at 34 ports along the entire 2,500-kilometre Norwegian coastline. What makes it genuinely distinctive among the world's scenic sea voyages is that it isn't purely a tourist product: the Hurtigruten functions as the actual mail and supply line for coastal communities that depend on it, meaning the ships run on a real logistics schedule year-round rather than a seasonal cruise calendar, and passengers travel alongside genuine freight and local commuters rather than a purely tourist-facing operation. A newer hybrid-electric competitor, Havila Voyages, has run a parallel coastal service on the same route since 2022, giving travellers a choice of operator on the same working corridor.