We Took a Magical Family Trip to Norway During the Winter—Here’s How to Visit

I am a child of the tropics. I grew up in coastal South India, just above the equator, amid lush rice fields and a brilliant burning sun. I wore T-shirts, shorts, and sandals throughout the year; closed shoes were a clammy imposition. So what was I doing on a stormy, freezing hill in December, knee-deep in snow, bundled in four layers of protective clothing and thick boots? How did I end up in Norway for Christmas, snowshoe hiking at 2,600 feet, overlooking a frigid fjord sculpted by ancient glaciers?

The path that led me and my family to that snowy hill is somewhat improbable: it began with an online game called GeoGuessr. The game flashes scenes from Google Street View across a screen, and players must identify the locations. My son, aged 15, has spent too many hours playing it. As a result, he has developed an acute, somewhat bizarre, knowledge of obscure geographies. One of his specialties is Scandinavia. Late one night, he insisted we book our tickets for the coming December. “Norway in winter is my life’s dream,” he said, plaintively. What self-respecting parent could deny their child such a deeply held wish?

And so we found ourselves in Oslo two days before Christmas, the city abandoned for the holidays, most shops and restaurants shuttered. We wandered its broad avenues, which were lined with mounds of packed snow, and its elegant parks, clad in sheets of ice. Near the center of town, in the old harbor area, a deserted promenade ran between frosty vistas and imposing museums and cultural buildings. The iconic sloped roof terrace of the Oslo Opera House, which swarms with tourists in warmer months, was now closed to visitors. Cruise ships sat, as if abandoned, in the harbor, no passengers or crew in sight.

There was one corner of the bay that did, however, seem busy. At the edge of a dock, next to a sleek wood-and-glass structure that looked like a floating bunker, a group of men and women stood shirtless in the cold. They approached the water and, to my astonishment, plunged in. The building was a floating sauna; everyone I spoke with swore by the physical and psychological benefits of the rapid transition from heat to cold offered by these dives. My initial sighting of this practice set my heart racing. It seemed like a ritual reserved for locals—definitely not something a visitor from the tropics would ever attempt. 

After three days in Oslo, we headed to the village of Flåm, some 200 miles to the northwest in a mountainous region known for its UNESCO-listed fjords. Before arriving in Norway, my son had told me about the train ride from Flåm to Myrdal, which was reputed to be one of the most scenic in the world, and he showed me lists that described the journey as “breathtaking,” “spectacular,” and “epic.” I soon found out that none of this was exaggeration.

We started early in the morning, riding through white landscapes that stretched to an orange horizon where the sun perched gently, like a ball of butter. There was a soothing predictability to it all, the monotony of snow-covered fields and thinned-out birches and spruces passing over us like a balm, interrupted every so often by an isolated hamlet or home seemingly trapped in the ice. I wondered how their inhabitants got in and out; perhaps, I thought, they hibernated in the winter. 

At Myrdal Station, which was crowded with Norwegians dressed in colorful ski outfits, we changed to a smaller train. It was slower, filled mostly with tourists, and the surroundings were very different. We made our way on a narrow track in a craggy landscape of gray rock and icicles, with the occasional stream flowing—seemingly impossibly—through frozen ice. The train descended into a valley, on what I later learned was one of the world’s steepest standard-gauge railway lines. 

Around six hours after leaving Oslo, we arrived in Flåm, where we walked to a low-slung shed by the Aurlandsfjord. There we met Julie Aksnes Williams, a student in the nearby city of Bergen and a part-time guide for Fjordsafari. She greeted us with a distinctly American twang. Although she had grown up around Flåm, her father was from Barbados. It seemed fitting that I’d been matched with a guide who was familiar with both the snow and the tropics. 

“Any of you ever gone snowshoe hiking before?” she asked, smiling. We stared back blankly. So she piled us into her car and drove up a winding mountain track until we reached what seemed like the end of the road. She unloaded five sets of snowshoes, helped us strap in, then led us into the white hills, under frozen trees that stood like sentinels.

The snow was four or five feet deep, powdery and light, and our snowshoes barely kept us from sinking. We made our way up a steep incline, huffing and puffing—I learned that snowshoe hiking is considerably more exhausting than the traditional version—and then, after about half an hour, we found ourselves above the clouds, in a clearing. Below us, like a sudden revelation, opened a panorama of hazy, stormy mountains and dark fjords.

Williams unpacked a thermos and served us a hot—and very sweet—drink made from black-currant syrup. The world felt far away and, save for a few twinkling lights, empty; it seemed we had the fjords to ourselves.

I was disabused of this notion the next day, however, when we met Williams again, this time for a ride along the fjords in a rigid inflatable boat, or RIB. We came bundled in our warmest winter gear, but the staff at Fjordsafari told us that we would need something heavier for the temperatures out on the water—which, they warned, could be 15 degrees colder. So we were draped in thick layers of thermal wear, covered with neon-colored flotation suits, and adorned with tinted goggles and sturdy rubber boots. We looked like astronauts. 

The setting was, indeed, moonlike—a landscape of rocky hills dotted with frozen waterfalls and patches of white. But as we went farther out onto the water, the wind blowing brutally onto our cheeks, I started seeing signs of human habitation amid the otherworldly scenery: red barns, wooden docks, even a hotel set on top of a mountain (which, Williams informed us, could only be reached by a 45-minute hike).

Gradually, as we went deeper into the fjords, villages revealed themselves. They were inhabited by a handful of people and a few goats; one village had a single resident. The existence of pastoral life on these hills was perhaps the most surprising aspect of our fjord excursion. I had come to Norway expecting a 21st-century European country with spectacular nature, and I wasn’t disappointed. But I didn’t anticipate centuries-old life clinging tenaciously to the hillsides.

We stopped at Undredal, a picturesque hamlet famous for a goat population that outnumbers humans by a ratio of 5 to 1. The village is also known for its brown goat “cheese”—a sweet Norwegian confection made from whey that more closely resembles fudge than cheese—and we sampled some, along with locally produced sausages, in a restaurant by the water. We took a few moments to wander the town’s icy paths and walked past its 12th-century stave church, which is reportedly the smallest still in use in Scandinavia. Then we clambered back into our motorboats and returned to Flåm.

Williams and I made a plan to meet later that afternoon; I told her I wanted to better understand how the town and its surroundings had changed over the years. First, though, my family and I had an appointment that had been nagging at me all morning: a reservation at one of those floating saunas.

We built up our courage with a lunch of burgers and pizza at the Flåm Marina, a cozy place with generous views of the fjord. I confess to experiencing a low level of anxiety throughout the meal, a trepidatious inner monologue about whether I would actually take the plunge. The water, we had been told, hovered near freezing, on the low side even for the season. Perhaps, I rationalized, I could skip it, on a day that even locals might consider cold. 

But then lunch was over and my family, seemingly less hesitant than I was, ambled over to the sauna, and I really had no choice but to follow. Before I knew it we were stripped down to our swimming gear and ensconced in the woody warmth of a room overlooking the fjord. This, of course, was the easy part. We reclined on the wooden benches and gazed out at the shimmering water, which was backed by shadowy peaks. I could have stayed in there all afternoon.

Count on teenage boys to disrupt their parents’ comfort zones. About 15 minutes in, my sons opened the door to the sauna and walked onto the deck outside. I decided it was irresponsible—not to mention damaging to my reputation—to let them take this plunge alone. And so I stepped out, pushed them gently aside, took a deep breath, lowered myself down a ladder, then treaded somewhat frantically in the frigid cold until I’d counted to 12 (I was determined to go over 10). Then I pulled myself up the ladder, to general acclaim from the family.

For us fathers, respect is hard-won—and often short-lived. To our right, on an adjacent floating sauna, a group of Norwegians laughed loudly in their swimsuits, cannonballing and frolicking in the fjord for extended periods, as if on spring break in some kind of tropical paradise. 

Later, in the dark blue light of afternoon, Williams and I walked along the city’s docks: past a couple of ferries, anchored overnight, and a row of colorfully painted wooden buildings. The structures were immaculately preserved, and the streets that ran alongside them were almost empty. The whole scene was positively pastoral, almost too quaint to be true. I told Williams how surprised I was by the apparent continuity of life in the area. “This town looks unchanged,” I said. “Are these buildings real, or were they built for a movie set?”

She laughed, and confirmed that these were indeed originals. But she added that things weren’t quite as static as they might appear. She said I was lucky to be visiting in winter, when the town wasn’t as crowded and retained something of its original feel. In summers, she went on, Flåm’s narrow dockside could be overwhelmed with tourists disembarking from cruise ships, which bring noise and pollution. Some farmers had recently protested; they painted no cruise ships on bales of hay. As always, she said, tourism was a double-edged sword: even as the crush of outsiders disrupted life, it also provided the income—and incentive—for Flåm to protect its past. “People work really hard to take care of this place and preserve its original feeling,” Williams told me. 

We were standing in front of a train station when Williams told me all of this, facing a carriage that would have been crowded with tourists just a few hours earlier, before public transportation into Flåm shut down for the day. Williams told me she used to take this train home from school when she as a child. She sat with the conductors and they helped with her homework. Now the new conductors don’t recognize her; they yell at her for not loading her winter equipment correctly.

“That’s just the way it is,” Williams said, somewhat ruefully. “Some things change, and some things stay the same. It’s just a fact of life.”

Children of the tropics belong on beaches; we long for crystal-clear water, white sands. For our last stop in Norway, we flew to Tromsø, 217 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Beaches were the last thing on my mind when we landed. Temperatures hovered below freezing; the town was bathed in a perpetual winter darkness. Yet late one night, we found ourselves standing on a beach. 

Sommarøy is a town about 22 miles outside Tromsø, and we had traveled there with a group in hopes of seeing the northern lights. The beach was unlike any other I’d visited. Sheets of undulating snow led into gently lapping Arctic waves. There were no sand dunes, only hills of silvery ice that shone like miniature Alpine peaks under an almost-full moon.

The northern lights were on our bucket list. We were determined to round off our trip with a sighting, but the evening began inauspiciously. Sarah Caufield, our Canadian guide, told us that the viewing had been poor in recent weeks. The lights were capricious, she said, and no one really understood when or how they would appear. All we could do was hope. 

We stood for more than an hour on the freezing beach, gravitating toward a campfire maintained by another group. We scoured the sky, admiring the brilliant stars, sometimes wishfully seeing signs of the lights in wisps of clouds. Caufield monitored an app on her phone, trying to gauge our chances. Some people gave up and returned to sit inside their parked vehicles.

Then, suddenly, we saw a faint green trace, followed by a more pronounced line, which soon became an undeniable arc ripping across the sky. People came running back from the parking lot. The beach was filled with admiring “oohs” and “aahs.” The lights ebbed and flowed; they’d quiet down for a while, and then explode again, sometimes in bright lines and sometimes in dramatic neon swirls. It was like being at a Fourth of July show, except during winter. 

We watched in awe, taking in the mystery of the Arctic night. After a while, I asked my son if he was cold and suggested we head back to the warmth of our vehicle. “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is my dream come true.” 

Oslo

Sommerro

A glamorous property housed in a 1930s building, just around the corner from the Royal Palace. The cavernous coffee shop is great for people-watching. Don’t miss the heated outdoor pool on the top floor.

Fukuya

A cozy neighborhood Asian restaurant right off Frogner Park, perfect for sushi or a Thai curry on a cold day.

Frogner Park

Expansive lawns, covered with impressive sculpture, stretch seemingly into the horizon. On weekends, the park teems with families with young kids. 

Flåm

Fretheim Hotel

A mix of old and new architecture, this hotel has impressive views of the surrounding hills and fjords. The dinner buffet is a satisfying option after a day of hiking.

Ægir Brewpub

A pub and restaurant in a wooden building. Its Viking-themed menu offers a smorgasbord of traditional dishes.

Flåm Marina Café

A family-run establishment attached to a small apartment hotel, this place has an enviable location overlooking the fjord and serves pizzas and burgers.

Fjordsafari

The friendly, professional guides at this company can take you on snowshoe hikes or boat rides along the fjords. Safety is taken seriously, as is protection from the cold.

Fjorena

Test your courage as you move between the warm sauna interior and the freezing fjord outside. The sauna offers amazing views. 

Flåm Railway

This small train leads down one of the steepest railway lines in the world, and cuts through stunning, craggy scenery. Try to get a seat in one of the front carriages for the best view.

Bergen

Bergen Børs Hotel

Norway’s second-largest city is the gateway to the fjords. This beautiful hotel, which once housed the stock exchange, faces a square lined with heritage buildings, just a few blocks from the water. Its restaurant is decorated with stunning frescoes.

Allmuen 

In a city known for its food scene, Allmuen stands out for the freshness and inventiveness of its cuisine. It uses local produce for Mediterranean-inspired menus that change daily.

Tromsø

Vervet Apartment Hotel

Modern apartments in an up-and-coming neighborhood just outside the city center, with a collection of restaurants and coffee shops in the vicinity.

Bardus

This upscale restaurant in the heart of town has an attached bar that’s more relaxed and less crowded.

Bengts Bistro

A no-frills place with an authentic vibe. The menu highlights pizza and grilled kebabs.

Tromsø Mikrobryggeri & Balthazar Vinbar

A microbrewery and wine bar set in a cozy 19th-century building on one of the main streets.  

Polar Museum

This small, unassuming museum provides a great introduction to life near the Arctic Circle. It includes a history of seal hunting, artifacts from the dramatic races to the North Pole, and photographic and narrative evidence of the hardships generations have endured in the bitter cold. 

Arctic Guide Services

This company, one of many providing tours and excursions, is reliable and staffed with knowledgeable guides. It offers northern lights and “midnight sun” experiences, as well as hiking in the surrounding hills.

A version of this story first appeared in the December 2024 / January 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Fjord Focus.”