Oslo; Monday, 27 May, 2024

I woke up just as the ship was approaching the start of the Oslofjorden so I was able to watch us slowly glide into fjord and start our, near 4 hour, approach to the Norwegian City with a cup of coffee up on deck before heading down for a proper breakfast in the buffet.

After breakfast we headed back up on deck to watch the slow progress of the ship up the fjord as we sailed past initially sparsely populated small islands and then increasingly large communities, with passenger and car ferries shuttling commuters across the waters. About 40 minutes before our scheduled arrival time the centre of Oslo became visible at the head of the fjord as was the DFDS ferry from Copenhagen that we had been chasing for much of the night across the sea and up the fjord.

Just before 10 the boat started a slow turn as it manoeuvred into it’s berth at the Color Line Terminal, at which point we headed down from the deck back to the cabins to pack up and prepare to disembark – a process that took nearly 30 minutes to get off the ship and then down the ramps and link bridges out to the front of the terminal and, after finding out the next bus into town wasn’t for over 20 minutes, into a taxi over to the hotel for the night.

Despite it only being 11am the hotel had rooms ready for us and very kindly let us checkin and drop off our luggage before we headed back out. We caught the tram from outside the hotel a couple of stops before changing onto the bus out to the Bygdøy peninsular and the numerous museums located on it.

Our main stop was to visit the Fram Museum and have a look around their collection, which we spent some time doing, before heading over to the neighbouring Norwegian Maritime Museum for a late lunch, which turned into quite a long lunch as a spectacularly heavy and prolonged shower passed overhead.

Eventually, after about an hour of sheltering in the café of the museum we headed out into the sunshine to catch the bus back into the centre of town with the aim of changing back onto the tram to the hotel. Whilst the bus element worked perfectly it turned out that the rain shower had been so heavy it had flooded a number of roads, and caused quite a few trams to short-out, so there was general chaos and in the end we waited for nearly 30 minutes for the tram back to the hotel. Thankfully, we made it back to the hotel in time for afternoon Fika – cake and coffee offered by the hotel to all guests.

With the weather forecast not looking good for the rest of the day we decided just to hop on the Metro for the scenic ride up into the hills above the city at Frognerseteren, able to take in the stunning views both of the scenery and another catastrophically wet downpour on the way up, where thankfully a 20 minute gap in the showers accompanied our arrival and wait at Frognerseteren for the next train back down into Oslo.

Back down in town we had to shelter in the metro station for about 15 minutes before the rain finally calmed down to a light drizzle before we were able to head back to the hotel for dinner.

After dinner we headed back out and down to Aker Brygge to grab a late evening drink on the waters edge looking across at the castle and harbour before heading back to the hotel to turn in.