Norway in a nutshell

The famous "Norway in a Nutshell" tour is everything it claims to be,
except that it isn't done in a nutshell, but in a bus, train and a boat.
But the views are indeed absolutely spectacular at the every segment of
the trip. We were also exceptionally lucky because contrary to the
weather forecast and statistical averages, on the day we picked for the
trip the rain has stopped and the skies finally cleared. As you can
imagine sunny weather has greatly improved the scenery.
My only complaint, albeit a very tiny one was that the automatic
commentary on the tourist boat was done in up to 9-11 different
languages, one after another. Sometimes it felt like the loudspeaker
would never shut up. Fortunately they didn't use all the languages for
every announcement, but would instead pick 3-7 at random, that's why I
am not certain about the total number of languages used. At first I
tried to figure the system, why a particular announcement is chosen to
be
translated i.e. into Spanish, Polish and Japanese and another into
French, Portuguese, Italian and German. But I couldn't solve the
problem and tried to concentrate on the nature instead. But then I got
interested in the announcements once more when I caught that the text
conveyed in different translations is not exactly the same. I.e the
stone church, that according to the English version was built in XIII
century, the French translation placed in the VIII century, but the
following message in Portuguese somewhat restored it to XIIth. It
didn't make any sense and once again I tried to ignore the text and just
enjoy the views.

Finally, upon landing in a small port of Flom we switched to a special
tourist train that travels for 20 miles through the impossibly beautiful
terrain. Unfortunately this terrain is also impossible for overland
travel and the whole 1/3 of the way the train spends in tunnels, where
opportunities for sightseeing are very limited. And for the rest of the
trip, most people get only a one-sided picture, that is either
left-sided or right-sided one. Because the train frequently dives in
into the mountains and emerges on the other side, neither side of the
train could be preferred to another. Therefore I couldn't decide where
to sit and spend most of the trip in "tambur", running from one window
to another.

Once we arrived to the final stop, the mountain station of Myrdal (only
about 1300m, but close to the snow line!), we thought that we gotta see
the same road again, but this time with a full 360 view. So from Myrdal
we hiked all the way back to Flom, an easy 20km descent to the sea
level. At first I was taking pictures of every waterfall on the way,
than of every second, then of every tenth higher than 50 meters... then
I just put the camera away - there are too many of them, my trigger
finger got sore.

Once we finally passed all the 1001 waterfall and descended back to Flom
we had an option of renting a kayak, and backtracking the route of the
tourist boat as well. It would be only two days of paddling (certainly
days filled with fun!) The company www.fjordpaddlingnorway.com provides
all the equipment, but it requires 3 weeks advance reservation. Hmm...
I wish I knew it beforehand, but Zara for some reason is glad that I
didn't. Why is that?