Fjord living

“Hei fara! Falturil-tural-tura!”

In a showroom for local goat cheese, Leif Inge Underdal boldly breaks into a verse of Kråkevisa – 'The Crow Song' – stomping to the beat with his foot. “I get people to sing along on that last lyric. Everyone can follow it, whether they come from Korea or anywhere else,” he says.

We are in Undredal, which literally means “wonder valley”, a tiny village nestled beside a fairytale-like Norwegian fjord landscape near the mouth of the Nærøyfjord. At the quayside café, Underdal gives travellers a taste of the local culture. And yes: he does share a surname with the name of his village.

“Hei fara! Falturil-tural-tura!”
Kråkevisa – The Crow Song

Living off the land

The sing-along is an effective icebreaker. Underdal likes to sing Kråkevisa since the moral of the traditional folk tune is that one should utilise everything and not throw anything away – a lesson that has been important here in this isolated valley throughout its history. “I try to show how it's possible to live off the land along the fjord. Every resource has to be leveraged to sustain the farm,” explains Underdal, who also runs the village’s local grocery shop.

“But those who come and listen shouldn’t just learn something, they should have a good time and enjoy themselves as well,” he says, enthusiastically. “So I’ll always offer a bit of entertainment.”

Unique Norwegian cheese

A couple of minutes up the road from Undredal lies a cluster of small farms that produce goat cheese and meat. At midday, one of them has a post-it note nailed to the front door: “The milkmaid is on a break till 2 PM”.

Rubbing sleep out of her eyes, Erna Underdal Skarsbø (there is the name again!) offers coffee and cakes with freshly made goat cheese. That’s what you do in these parts when a stranger comes knocking. The cheese isn’t usually made in the next room, though. “It was made this morning,” says Erna, who gets up at every day at four to milk the animals.

She sells her cheese at Leif Inge’s store in Undredal. But now that there’s a road, she’s had visitors coming by car from the Netherlands, Germany, Eastern Europe, and beyond who have spotted her “Goat cheese for sale” sign from the road. “We communicate using sign language and a little broken English,” says Erna, whose farm has been in the family for four generations.

One of Norway’s most characteristic products is its sweet brown cheese made from goat’s milk. “The whey is boiled for 7–8 hours until the milk’s natural sugars become caramelised,” explains Underdal at the café, while showcasing four different kinds of cheese from the valley’s small factory.

The cheese is served with flatbread, sour cream, local goat sausage, and three kinds of jam made from local berries – blueberry, raspberry, and of course the local favourite, cloudberry. Blackcurrant squash and freshly made apple juice belong at the traditional table as well.

Everything is locally produced and everything is full of flavour: “The goats are free to climb up the mountainside to find the very best grazing spots. And when they eat the best, you will also get the best milk possible,” says Undredal.

Serenity and solitude

It is from the fjord that you get the best views of the traditional mountainside farms that cling precariously to the steep slopes. The famous Stigen – 'the Ladder' – is a good example: a solitary farm several hundred metres up from the turquoise fjord water below. “When the tax collector came to collect back in the old days, they’d pull up the ladder so he couldn’t get there. Or so the legend goes,” says Per A. Hove, captain of MF Fanaraaken running the route between Flåm and Gudvangen.

On the shore, you can also see Undredal stave church, built in 1147 and the smallest in Scandinavia that remains in regular use. The church is open daily during the summer season and is well worth a visit.

Along the Nærøyfjord, you can catch a glimpse of three old hamlets squeezed in between the fjords and the mountains, where people have resided and made a living since time immemorial. The largest of them had perhaps 40 residents just a few generations ago, but there are hardly any people left at all today. “There is just a single guy who lives in that hamlet over the winter,” says Hove, pointing at one charming, tiny settlement as the ferry glides silently past.

Hove first sailed this route in 1962. Half a century later, he’s still not bored with it. “Some say it's in the blood. I think there’s something to that,” he says of working at sea. “There are always new challenges. No two days are alike. And of course, this fjord is just so special, especially on sunny days. On the last stretch towards Gudvangen, the scenery still mesmerises me.”

Likewise, there is much that will never change for Erna. “What has changed over the last 30 years is that we’ve gotten roads, I have a car, and there are more visitors. Otherwise, it's the same. We’re keeping track of the outside world in our way, but it's so quiet, so good to be here. Everything just falls into place,” she says. “This is my paradise.”