Following on from our cruise along the Norwegian fjords from Hellesylt to Geiranger it soon became the time for our Princess Cruises excursion: Hiking Westerås And Storseter Waterfall. This cost $119 per adult in 2013 and was actually the cheapest of the excursions offered on this port stop.
First thing, of course, was to disembark the cruise ship and since Crown Princess was at anchor in Geirangerfjord this meant the use of tender boats was required. As luck would have it we were able to sit up top on this occasion which on days as gorgeous as this one was turning out to be offered not only the benefit that we’d be allowed off the boat first on land (for safety reasons) but that we’d have some uninterrupted views of the staggeringly beautiful landscape around Geiranger.
The tender boat ride to shore allowed us to see the other ships visiting Geiranger that day – Celebrity Eclipse and P&O Adonia – plus some lovely departing views of our home for the week cruising around Norway, Crown Princess.
Geiranger is a small village, highly reliant on tourism and at constant threat of disaster should there be a large landslide anywhere along the fjord leading to it. Part of the port guide provided by Princess stated that Queen Sonja of Norway camped in the mountains around Geiranger and wrote a book about her experiences. She and future husband Crown Prince Harald dated secretly for nine years on account of her being a commoner and it was only the threat to his father that he would never wed at all and end the royal family dynasty that allowed Harald to marry Sonja in 1968.
All safely ashore we boarded the bus waiting for us. From the description of the excursion:
Your tour begins with a scenic drive through Geiranger, passing the small, octagonal Geiranger Church and the largest hotel, the Union, some 300 feet up the hillside. A series of hairpin bends brings you to Hole camping site.
This duly happened and we gathered at Hole to await the start of our hike. In the map below you can see Crown Princess at anchor (marker A) and Hole where the bus dropped us off (marker B) as well as the two destinations we would be making for on the hike, the waterfall (marker C) and farm (marker D).
There was plenty of opportunity for us to take some photos back along the fjord to where we could see Crown Princess and all around us at the rolling and jagged hills and mountains.
It’s at this point that I need to make an apology for the state of these photos. So, here’s what happened: We’d booked this cruise at fairly late notice for us and knowing that there would be a lot of incredible landscapes and vistas to photograph I thought it would make sense to put some effort into it. Landscape photography isn’t really my thing but you hope that nature can do most of the work for you in these situations. However, I’d seen some people recommending a graduated, neutral density filter when taking landscape pictures in order to get more saturation into the land colours without blowing out the white levels in the sky. This sounded sensible so I ordered some filters and an adapter for my camera and right before our holiday they turned up which meant I didn’t really get much of a chance to test them out. I tested them out on this trip and… ah.
Graduated filters work well when there is a mostly distinct line between the land and the sky. Mountains, though, especially when you’re close to them, form large peaks and troughs and what you end up with is sky that doesn’t have blown highlights (good) but rock that’s essentially all in shadow (crap). Recovering detail is an expensive waste of time afterwards and introduces noise into the picture, halos will inevitably form between light and dark areas of the image, and when your filter is the cheapest of the cheap you can also discover that far from being neutral you’re going to introduce horrible amounts of magenta and purple into the blue levels of the image. In short: yuk.
So, yes, the photos will look a bit weird. There may be purplish hues, the blues will look all kinds of wrong and will leak into the shadows in the middle third of pictures, and I really, really need to go back to the Norwegian fjords so I can take some better photos. A plan exists to do this in 2021 but the world has a way of tossing spanners around so we’ll just have to wait and see on this.
Back to the excursion description:
Now your adventure begins as you hike for Hole to Storseterfossen Waterfall. […] The hike to the fall is at times somewhat steep and strenuous and takes approximately one hour. Dress appropriately, sturdy footwear, layered dress and windproof jacket are recommended. Bring a bottle of water.
Right. Let’s start with the word strenuous. The Crown Princess Norwegian Fjords cruise was the second cruise we’d ever been on. Cruises had been recommended to us originally by my in-laws and my wife’s uncle and aunt. Our first cruise had been the staggeringly awesome Diamond Princess cruise in Asia. Our experience on that cruise was that, yes, we weren’t fit, but we still climbed steps and took part in the moderately active excursion events while most of the ship’s passengers, like our cruise-suggesting relatives, were all far older than us, less mobile, and in many cases asleep by early evening. We made a bit of an assumption that when a cruise line therefore says “strenuous” they really mean “might take the old folk a little longer” and we’d be fine. A terrible assumption as it turned out. We had our first suspicion things were not going to be quite how we’d anticipated when we’d met up in the Princess Theatre ahead of the excursion and spotted nearly everyone else with backpacks, hiking sticks, rugged boots, and the determined look of seasoned fell-walkers. We glanced at each other. We grimaced. We shrugged.
Secondly, our day before this stop in Geiranger had seen us arrive in rain in Bergen. It hadn’t been warm. Norway is not known for being warm. We would be hiking into the mountains. Mountains are not known for being warm either. It had been recommended we wear windproof layers. On the day of our visit it was ridiculously warm; it was seven degrees warmer than Bergen had been and the hiking guides who met us at Hole remarked just how lucky we all were to be getting such lovely weather with blazing sunshine to accompany us all the way. Well, lovely weather unless you’re just about to exert yourself far more strenuously than you’d thought up a mountain.
We started the hike.
If you’ve read other travelogues on this site where we’ve gone off on a hike – we do it more often than we should – then you’ll probably already know that my wife has a long-standing set of injuries to her ankles and knees that make certain angles of walking painful. She perseveres because life is about experiences and just putting up with discomfort is part of the package. This did mean, though, that we very quickly started to lag behind the main group of hikers. I would frequently stop to take some photos of the Norwegian landscape and to check with my wife that she was okay (she wasn’t but showing concern infuriates her to the point of continuing anyway) and offering to turn around and head back on our own (and if looks could kill I’d have been blasted into atoms on a hill in Norway in 2013).
There were a couple of stops on the hike which mostly served to just let those who’d romped ahead have a break while we would clamber up a few minutes behind for a handful of seconds’ respite until the group all set off again.
We weren’t the only couple who were holding up the pace, though, and one couple had already realised the Geiranger hike was going to be too much for them and had notified the guides they’d head back to the ship. Since we had two guides and there was a core of hikers who could ascend with no difficulty at all one lot went on ahead with one guide while the rest of us took more time heading up behind them.
Almost exactly one hour after being dropped off at Hole (marker B on the map up the page) we caught our first sight of Storseterfossen Waterfall (marker C) across a narrow gorge. We could also see people above and walking behind it down a ledge to give it a sense of scale. We would soon be doing the same thing.
We had to walk a little farther up before crossing over the gorge and coming back down towards the waterfall. It was here that we caught up with the rest of our fellow hiking tourists from the cruise ship, sitting around on the grass and admiring the view. As numbers of people who could get behind the waterfall were limited and there were other hiking groups ahead of them it wasn’t us who’d held them up which was something of a relief. “Well, that was worth you all hurtling up the hillside at a breakneck pace then!” I thought, but didn’t say out loud because I don’t like talking to strangers – especially fit, active ones – and I was still a little bit out of breath.
My wife very much appreciated the chance to sit still and reduce the pain in her legs while I snapped photos from this high point of the hike, of the tree-covered hills, of the rocky peaks, of a mountain stream feeding the waterfall, and of the people we’d joined on this strenuous trek.
We finally got the signal from our guides and took the chance to head behind the waterfall. This involved a walk down a narrow and rocky ledge, not too tricky, not too steep, and with poles and a chain to prevent anyone from getting too close to the edge. Behind Storseterfossen there was a shallow cave, large enough to get a decent number of people in at once, and incredibly noisy as you can tell from the video below. It was also quite shocking just how fast and powerful the torrent of water cascading down the mountain at Geiranger was; when you see waterfalls at a distance they can mislead you as to how much force they hold.
From the hiking excursion description one last time:
After taking in the view, you’ll head downhill towards Westerås Farm, perched on a ledge above Geiranger. You’ll take a break at the farm for complimentary coffee or tea and waffles before your return hike to Hole where your bus awaits for your drive back to the pier.
We started on the downward return leg of the hike, covering part of the same route up. This was not considerably easier than it had been on the upward leg simply because my wife’s old injuries are actually more affected by downward angles when walking. In addition, the steps that we were able to use at points, which had been laid by Sherpas from Nepal (a task only completed the year after our visit to Norway), seemed to be at just that awkward height that makes every step down slightly jarring.
We eventually angled away on a different trail and it wasn’t too long before we came to Westerås Farm (marker D on the map). This was a small grouping of attractive, wooden buildings and plenty of sheep grazing on the hillside. One of the buildings housed a restaurant in which we could get the drink and snack we’d been promised, rest our feet for a bit, and take the obligatory handful of photos of the surroundings.
The “hike” back to Hole and our bus meeting point was, I’m happy to report, more aptly described as just a “walk” with the ground being mostly flat and only slightly downhill. Perfect for the end of a more-strenuous-than-anticipated excursion in our opinion.
I snapped a few photos on the walk back and a few more as we waited for the bus in our spectacular surroundings with its lovely views down onto Geiranger and along Geirangerfjord.
Reflecting on this excursion, we had a wonderful time and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. Yes, it was harder than we’d thought and that’s certainly something you should consider if you’re thinking of booking this during a cruise to Geiranger yourself, but it was all worth it. If you’re fit and you like hikes and you don’t have any impediments then you’ll love the views, and if you’ve never stood behind a waterfall before then it’s a fabulous place to do it. It helps to have nice weather, naturally, and we’d have appreciated it a smidge more if it had been a few degrees cooler but that’s such a small thing to mention.
We hopped back on the tender boat – an inside trip back to Crown Princess this time – and after freshening up (and we really needed freshening up) we enjoyed the early evening sailaway from Geiranger from our balcony. Yes, we’d seen most of these views on the cruise through the fjord earlier in the day but they’re not views you could ever get tired of seeing. We had another chance to see the Seven Sisters Waterfall and the perfect amount of calm beauty to observe to totally smooth out any stress aches and pains from the day’s hike.
The evening on Crown Princess was one that followed the same sort of pattern we enjoy on most cruise ships: food, drink, quizzes, and dancing (or people-watching) in the disco until the early hours. The next day of this Norwegian fjords cruise would see us dock at Olden where we were looking forward to a boat ride on a lake and a visit to see a glacier for the first time.
