The Quiet Month, Explained (It Was Norway)

An apology first, since that is the correct order of operations. If you have been checking this blog for the past month and finding nothing new, I am sorry, and also I have an excuse of genuinely unusual quality: Christina and I have been in Norway, and Norway does not encourage you to sit indoors typing. Norway encourages you to stand very still on the edge of something enormous and reconsider your sense of scale. This takes time. It cannot be rushed, and it certainly cannot be done while also maintaining a blogging schedule.

We flew into Oslo on the 3rd of July and flew out again on the 20th, seventeen nights, and a hire car booking that had quietly become a Suzuki S-Cross Hybrid by the time we arrived at the desk rather than the Toyota Yaris Cross we'd actually reserved. It turned out to be a perfectly good car, with the single exception of a satnav system possessing roughly twice the neediness of any GPS unit I have encountered before or since, forever recalculating with the wounded urgency of a system convinced you were about to drive into a fjord on purpose. Our route took us down the south coast to Kristiansand, along to Stavanger, up through Bergen and the Sognefjord, out to the west coast towns of Ålesund and Kristiansund, over the Trollstigen pass, and back through the Jotunheimen mountains to Lillehammer before returning the car in Oslo with, I am pleased to report, all four wheels and no new dents. 3,265 kilometres of driving, most of it with a fjord on one side and a cliff on the other, and I would recommend the whole thing to absolutely anyone. We also had, almost unreasonably, perfect sunny weather for the entire trip, including two days in Bergen, the rainiest city in Europe, which felt faintly like cheating. The one exception was Trollstigen itself, where low cloud dropped visibility to just beyond arm's length and we crept the entire hairpin descent at not much more than walking pace, trusting the crash barriers rather than our eyes.

 

In fairness to Slartibartfast

As I am sure you are aware, the Earth's coastlines were designed by a Magrathean craftsman named Slartibartfast, who took particular and slightly obsessive pride in the fiddly bits, and who won an award for his work on the fjords of Norway. Having now driven the length of several of them, I would like to go on record: the award was deserved, and if there is a ceremony I have missed, someone should be organising a retrospective.

The Sognefjord alone runs 205 kilometres inland and drops over 1,300 metres to the seabed at its deepest point, which is a genuinely difficult thing to process while sitting in a small hire car with a can of Monster. Geirangerfjord, narrower and steeper, looks less like something carved by a glacier and more like something carved by someone who had a point to prove. The fiddly bits, in short, are the entire point. Nobody designs a coastline this deliberately unless they actually care whether people gasp when they see it, and we gasped, repeatedly, on a schedule that would have been embarrassing if anyone Norwegian had been watching closely enough to notice, which, this being Norway, they were too polite to do.

 

The people

Norwegians have a reputation, largely self-inflicted and largely inaccurate, for reserve. What we found instead, from Oslo to a campsite car park near Geiranger with no phone signal and a broken tap, was quiet, competent helpfulness delivered without fuss and without any expectation of thanks. Directions given precisely and without impatience. A ferry worker who noticed we'd queued in the wrong lane and simply waved us into the right one before we'd finished apologising. A hotel receptionist in Ålesund who, on hearing we planned to walk up to the Aksla viewpoint, quietly mentioned the shortcut that avoided the steepest steps, entirely unprompted. None of this was performed. It was just how things were done, which is, I have come to think, the only version of hospitality worth having.

 

Infrastructure as a point of national pride

I have spent thirty years in technology leadership, which means I notice infrastructure the way other people notice weather, and Norway's infrastructure is, without exaggeration, the most impressive civil engineering I have driven through. This is a country of five million people who have collectively decided that a fjord, a mountain, or an open strait is not a reason to go around, it is a reason to go under, over, or straight through.

The Lærdal Tunnel, which we drove on Day 8, is 24.5 kilometres long, the longest road tunnel on earth, lit in shifting blue and amber to stop drivers hallucinating from tunnel fatigue on the way through. It is free to use. It exists purely because somebody decided that the mountain between Aurland and Lærdal was an inconvenience worth solving properly rather than an excuse to leave things as they were. Elsewhere on the route there are subsea tunnels dropping the road below the seabed to link islands that have no business being linked, bridges strung across fjords that would, in most countries, simply be labelled "the edge of the map," and the Atlantic Road, which threads eight bridges across open ocean between skerries in a way that looks, from a distance, like the road forgot it was supposed to be on land at all. None of it felt like showing off. It felt like a country that had simply decided its geography was not going to be allowed to inconvenience anyone, and then quietly got on with fixing it.

 

The technology, and the complete absence of coins

This is the part I most wanted to write about, because it is the part most directly in my professional lane. Norway runs on AutoPASS, an ANPR-based electronic tolling system that reads your number plate as you pass under a gantry, on bridges, through tunnels, into cities, with no barrier, no stopping, and no ticket machine anywhere in sight. The hire car comes pre-registered, the tolls accrue automatically, and the bill turns up on your card at the end. You simply drive. It is the kind of frictionless, invisible infrastructure that most countries promise and few actually deliver, and having it work correctly, silently, for seventeen days straight was quietly one of the most satisfying pieces of applied technology I have used all year.

Parking works the same way. Rather than a machine, a ticket, and a dashboard display, most Norwegian towns use GPS-and-plate-linked parking apps: open the app, confirm the zone you're standing in, and the system handles the rest, again reading your plate rather than trusting a paper ticket to survive on a dashboard in direct sunlight. And across the entire seventeen nights, in cities, small towns, ferry queues, and one extremely rural campsite reception, we did not use cash once. Not a single krone touched our hands. Card, phone, or plate, every time, everywhere, without friction and without anyone treating it as remarkable. It was only remarkable to us, because we come from places where "cashless" is still occasionally aspirational rather than simply how Tuesday works.

 

 

Back to it

So: apologies for the quiet, and thank you for your patience. Normal service resumes now, hopefully with slightly better perspective on what "well-designed infrastructure" actually looks like when a country commits to it properly, fiddly bits and all.

All Posts