Norway in ten photographs

Norway was eight days, one road and five friends, which turns out to be the right number for a car and a hiking trail.

Oslo first. The opera house has a roof you are invited to walk up, in ordinary shoes, and people do. The Munch museum has The Scream, smaller than you expect and quieter than you expect. We queued for it. Then we found ice cream, which is the other thing Oslo does well and nobody writes about.

South to Preikestolen, and we climbed it in cloud. I had been warned about that and would choose it again: the drop only appears when the mist moves, and then it is six hundred meters straight down to the water. The specks at the edge in that photograph are people who got there first.

The middle of the trip is fjords, and no photograph of a fjord does it justice — they are too big and too quiet to fit in a frame. The one that comes closest is a small island near Strand with a single red house on it, because the house tells you how big everything else is.

Låtefossen arrives without warning: two waterfalls converging beside the road, close enough to wet the windshield. There is a stone bridge you can stand on, and everyone does.

Trolltunga was the day that mattered. Ten hours of walking, most of it up, for a slab of rock sticking out over a lake seven hundred meters below. There is a queue at the end. Nobody minds the queue.

Bergen closed it out, in an ice bar, in July, wearing the coats they lend you at the door. Completely a tourist trap, and the best evening of the week.

Three years on I can name every one of these places from the photograph alone. That is the whole reason for putting a code on a badge: the pictures already exist, and the sticker is the thing that makes anyone open them.