Norway 2024 London to Balestrand 8–15 May 2024

Warning

This blog has lots of photos and videos, but I will put them below the text.

We  booked a weeks holiday in Norway with Newmarket Travel, a company we had not used before. We flew from Gatwick Airport, which was very quiet at about 11am. with Norwegian Airlines. It was our first time doing an online check in and having our boarding pass on an app, also the first time booking in our own luggage but it all went smoothly and efficiently, The first time we needed our passports was when we went to our gate ready for the flight.  We arriving in Bergen about 2pm local time. Of course now we are no longer a member of the EU we had to have our passports stamped, there were 4 booths open, two for EU passports and two for others. Needless to say there were only two queues, but the officers soon had us using all 4 lanes and unlike most Countries seemed very friendly. 
Steve Parry, the Newmarket holiday rep was waiting for us at the airport with a coach ready to take us to our hotel. When we arrived the weather was warm and dry, this came as a surprise as the weather forecast indicated that it would be a maximum of 8 °C and rain every day. You will see the actual weather from the photographs.
It was about a four hour coach journey to our hotel, this was an excursion in itself. through some spectacular scenery passing over one mountain well above the snow line at 1000 mt.  We stopped for a comfort break at  Vossevangen about half way to Balestrand where our hotel was situated right on the banks of Esefjord and Sognefjord. As we had a little bit of time in hand due to the fact we had to catch a ferry near the end of our journey, our rep and coach driver thought it would be nice to go through a very small village and visit one of the few remaining stave churches.

This nearly all went pear shaped as when we left the church to re-join the main road the road was blocked by road works. Luckily one of the locals came by and advised the coach driver of another route out of the village, this meant that we arrived at the ferry just before the barrier went down, literally two minutes longer and we would have missed the boat. There are three electric ferries that work this route, they are roll on/roll off and can each carry 80 cars and visit 3 locations, Vangsnes where we were getting on, then a ten minute trip to Hella followed by twenty minutes to Dragsvik where we would get off. One thing we were told not to be worried about was our coach getting off at Hella without us, as it needed to turn round and come back on so that it faced the correct way for Dragsvik. From here we would drive round the banks of Esefjord, a very small Fjord past a small avalanche to the Kviknes hotel in Balestrand where we would be staying for the week. 

The Google map above shows all our coach and boat routes for the week. The coach route is in blue and the boat route reddish. As you can see we covered quite an area and the map is fully zoomable.
We went from sea level to over 1000 mts by coach way above the snow line, saw loads of waterfalls and frozen lakes. Most are not in specific places so are just grouped below.