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The Bergen Line at First Light
At 6:40 the train leaves Myrdal for the coast, and the Hardangervidda does its slow, snowy theatre.
By Maren Holt
Issue 07
9 min
Photography by the author
The platform at Myrdal is empty except for a man in a bright orange vest who waves the train away with the unhurried courtesy of a man who has done it ten thousand times. We climb past the frozen waterfalls and into the white, where the Hardangervidda opens like a held breath.
By the time we reach the fjord, the sun has found the water. Passengers who slept through the plateau wake up slowly, the way you wake from a good dream, and press their foreheads to the glass. Nobody takes a photograph. It would be like photographing the inside of your own chest.
This is the argument the Bergen Line makes: that the best journeys are the ones where nothing is required of you except to look.