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| Oslo
Tours - Excursions |
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Walking
Tours
The following organisations operate scheduled and bespoke guided
tour services for individuals and groups in and around Oslo:
Oslo City
Museum ‘Know the City’ tours (telephone number:
23 28 41 70, are available on fixed dates, starting from the museum
in Frogner Park.
Oslo City and Nature Walks (telephone number: 41
31 87 40) offers regular scheduled walking tours of the city and
the surrounding countryside.
Oslo
City Walks (telephone number: 22 28 94 59 or 22 14 49 74 runs
scheduled themed tours departing on weekday mornings from the main
tourist office
Guideservice
(telephone number: 22 42 70 20.
Oslo
Guide Bureau (telephone number: 22 42 28 18) are the central
bookings agencies for licensed guides, primarily servicing the groups
market.
Bus and boat tours
Båtservice
Sightseeing A/S (telephone number: 23 35 68 90) offers a comprehensive
choice of bus and boat tours. These range from a basic 50-minute
boat tour on the fjord, departing hourly, to the seven-and-a-half-hour
‘Grand Tour’ combined bus and boat
tour. The company also offers a 3-hour evening sailing ship cruise
during July and August, which includes a shrimp buffet. Departures
from Rådhusbrygge 3, in front of the City Hall.
City Sightseeing
(telephone number: 22 95 54 14) offers a range of themed coach tours
departing daily.
For a Half
Day
Vigelandsparken
(Vigeland Park):
Situated on the western outskirts of the city, Vigeland Park is
Norway’s most visited attraction and annually welcoming over
a million people. It can be reached on foot, from the city centre,
along Frognerveien, in under an hour and it is tempting also for
visitors to linger longer by the cafés and boutiques of the
attractive Frogner area. Buses 20, 45 and 81 and trams 12 or 15
can provide a faster link.
The park is a monument to the artist Gustav Vigeland
(1869-1943), who spent forty years creating the sculptures in granite,
cast iron and bronze, which now adorn it. From the entry through
the huge wrought iron gates, the first sculptures are the bronze
figures on either side of the Vigeland bridge.
There are 200 works in total – the most famous of which is
the Angry Boy, a chubby youngster stamping his
foot. Beyond the bridge, the Fountain is a large
saucer-shaped pool supported by 6 giants with water spilling down
around them. At the centre of the park, the Monolith
is a mass of human bodies, young and old, carved from a single column
of granite, 14m (46ft) high. There are many more sculptures to be
seen, both in the park and in the Vigeland
Museum (telephone number: 23 49 37 00), where Vigeland’s
sketches and plaster originals are displayed.
For
a Whole Day
'Norway in a Nutshell'
The ‘Norway in a Nutshell’ excursion by train, boat
and bus provides a spectacular glimpse of Norway’s scenery
in a day.
The train departs from Oslo S station at 0811 hrs,
reaching Myrdal station, at 866m (2,841ft), with
its snow-covered peaks, sheer rock faces and streams plunging down
the abyss. The idea of taking a train down through this terrain
is quite unimaginable, however, in a magnificent feat of engineering,
the Flåm Line descends to sea level along
around 24km (15 miles) of winding track, precipitous inclines and
deep tunnels. From picturesque Flåm, the
trip continues by boat to Gudvangen in the innermost
reaches of the Sognefjorden, through the narrow
passage of the Nærøyfjorden, the narrowest
fjord located in Europe. The bus to Voss then takes
the mountain road, with perilous hairpin bends, through more magnificent
mountain scenery, including dramatic waterfalls at Stalheimskleiven.
From Voss, the train returns to Oslo at 2213 hrs.
It would be impossible to get a more comprehensive overview of the
landscape in one day.
There is a second option which goes via Bergen,
involving the night train back to Oslo and arriving in the capital
early the following morning. The Tours are operated by Fjord
Tours A/S (telephone number: 81 56 82 22). NSB
(telephone number: 81 50 08 88) also provides further information
and tickets. |
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