Norway 2024

The route

Travel essentials

Two full weeks in August, with two friends and a camping car. We drove up through Denmark and Sweden, did the Norwegian mountains and fjords, and came back down the south coast. The most important thing to say first: you have to like camping life. Two weeks in a camper with two other people is great if that’s your thing and fairly miserable if it isn’t.

Entry and money. No visa, and no real paperwork at all. Norway isn’t in the EU, but it is in the EEA and in Schengen, so as an Austrian you just drive in. What does change is the money, because all three countries have their own currency: Danish, Swedish and Norwegian kroner, none of them the euro. That sounds annoying and it wasn’t. My debit card worked everywhere without a single problem and I barely touched cash for two weeks.

Accommodation and where you can actually sleep. We used park4night to find spots and stayed flexible, which worked really well and is the way I’d do it again. But be careful with the thing everybody repeats about Scandinavia, that you can camp anywhere. It’s not that simple, and it’s wrong in two different ways.

Denmark has no right to roam at all, unlike its neighbours. Wild camping there is prohibited in public places, including beaches, forests, roadsides and car parks, and there are fines for it. What Denmark offers instead is a few hundred designated “free tenting” forests and nature campsites, and motor vehicles are explicitly not allowed at those. So with a camper Denmark was the strictest country of the three by a wide margin.

Norway and Sweden do have the real thing, the allemannsretten or allemansrätten, and it’s genuinely generous. But it was written for people on foot: it covers tents on uncultivated land, not motorhomes. A camper falls under parking and motor traffic law instead. In practice that means you park in lay-bys and on public roads where nothing is signposted, at least 150 m from the nearest house, and you move on after a night. It’s tolerated rather than a right, and in the busier spots it’s getting less tolerated than it used to be. None of this was a problem for us, but “sleep where you like” isn’t accurate and it’s worth knowing before you plan around it.

Prices. The whole of Scandinavia is expensive and Norway is the worst of it. That part is no surprise for a country this rich. Alcohol is a category of its own, because on top of the general price level there’s a heavy alcohol tax: in Norway roughly half of what you pay for a bottle is excise duty, and spirits and wine are only sold through the state monopoly, Vinmonopolet, which closes earlier than normal shops. The consequence is that going out simply isn’t the same thing it is in Austria. It’s expensive and it’s much less widespread, and you notice that in the evenings.

Weather and daylight. August in Norway means very long days. This far north it doesn’t really get fully dark at night, which takes some getting used to and is wonderful when you’re driving late or finishing a hike in the evening. The other side of it is easy to imagine: I wouldn’t want to be there in winter with almost no sunlight at all.

We were also remarkably lucky. We had 20 to 30 degrees and almost constant sunshine for two weeks, which is not what you should plan for. The normal pattern is that the weather changes a lot and changes fast, a mix of sun, cloud and rain within the same few hours. Pack as if you’re going to get wet, because usually you will.

Personal thoughts, experiences and research

Hiking here is different from Austria

The trails are not as well built as Austrian ones. Less pavement, fewer steps cut into things, less infrastructure generally, and I liked that a lot, because what you get instead is more nature. The people on the trails are also noticeably sportier than at home. Norway is a very sporting nation and you can feel it, not only in how many great athletes they produce in athletics and in the winter sports, but in who you meet on an ordinary mountain on an ordinary day.

I want to be honest about one thing though, because it would be easy to oversell. The famous hikes are not quiet. Besseggen, which we did in perfect weather, takes something like 50,000 to 60,000 people a year and has its own patrol to help hikers who get into trouble. Trolltunga was the one that really bothered me: it’s a 28 km day for a photo you then queue for. Preikestolen actually gets the most visitors of the three, around 300,000 a year, but it’s a short hike onto a big open plateau, so the crowd spreads out and it doesn’t feel the same way. So the contrast with Austria is real, but it’s about how the trails are built and who walks them, not about having the mountains to yourself.

How did they get so rich?

This was the question I kept coming back to, and Stavanger is where you get the answer, because the oil museum lays the whole thing out. Why is this country so rich, so clean, so far ahead on things like electric cars?

Part of the answer is pure luck. Norway has a lot of land, a lot of minerals, a lot of hydropower, very few people to divide it between, and then oil on top of that. Five and a half million people sitting on that much resource is a starting position almost nobody else has.

But the interesting part is what they did with it, because having oil is common and staying rich from it is not. Norway kept the state in the middle of it: direct state participation through its own oil company, a hard tax regime, and from 1990 a fund that the petroleum revenue goes into rather than into the yearly budget. The government is only allowed to spend the expected real return, currently around three percent, so the capital itself keeps working for the next generation. That fund is now the largest in the world at roughly $2.3 trillion, about $390,000 per Norwegian, and it already finances more than one krone in four of the state budget.

The comparison I found most instructive is Britain. The usual version is that the UK sold its North Sea oil to companies and Norway didn’t, but that isn’t really the difference, because both licensed their fields to private companies. The difference is how much they took and what they did with it. Over the decades the Norwegian state captured something like $30 a barrel against the UK’s $11, and Britain spent its share on current expenditure, tax cuts and the costs of deindustrialisation, and never built a fund at all. Roughly £400 billion in today’s money went through and nothing was saved.

In fairness to Britain, the counter-arguments are decent: the UK had fourteen times the population, so any fund would have been far smaller per head, it ran deficits in almost every year of that period so it would have been saving with borrowed money, and its fields were smaller and depleted faster. Which supports the first point rather than undermining it. A lot of Norway’s position is luck, and it’s worth saying that plainly instead of treating the country as a policy miracle that everyone could copy.

And they are now clever again on top of the luck, investing the oil money into renewables and into an electric car fleet that has gone further than anywhere else: 96 percent of all new cars sold in Norway in 2025 were fully electric, and electric cars have overtaken diesel in the total fleet. There is an irony in financing that with petroleum revenue, and they are entirely comfortable with it.

Which brings me to the part I can’t fully resolve. Norway behaves as a pretty self-interested state. It sits outside the EU but inside the single market through the EEA and inside Schengen, so it gets most of the benefits while keeping control over its oil, its fisheries and its own rules. I keep wondering why the EU accepts that arrangement as easily as it does, and why there’s so little pressure on a country that is this rich largely because it had the good fortune to be sitting on top of something. I don’t have a satisfying answer to that one.

Fjords and tunnels

The last thing I didn’t expect to find interesting. Norway is cut apart by fjords, and the way they’ve dealt with that is to drill through everything: more than 900 road tunnels, over 750 km of tunnel in total, and more than thirty of them running under the sea. The one that starts at Stavanger, the Ryfylke tunnel, is 14.4 km long and goes 292 m below sea level, which makes it the deepest subsea road tunnel in the world. It replaced a 45 minute ferry with a 15 minute drive. Elsewhere the Lærdal tunnel is 24.5 km, the longest road tunnel anywhere, and they put gentle curves and lit caverns into it so drivers don’t fall asleep.

What’s nice as an Austrian is that they build them differently from us. Austria gave the world the New Austrian Tunnelling Method, which is a double-shell approach: you support the rock, monitor how it moves, and then put in a second permanent concrete lining. The Norwegian method is single-shell. They drill and blast through hard, jointed rock, classify the rock quality as they advance, and the support they install as they go, rock bolts and fibre-reinforced shotcrete, simply stays as the permanent support. No second lining. It uses dramatically less concrete, far fewer people and less time, and it works because their rock is good enough to carry itself.

Neither method is better in the abstract. NATM suits softer, weaker ground and the Norwegian method suits hard rock that tends to break along joints, so each country ended up with the approach its own geology asked for. That’s a small thing to notice on a holiday, but it stayed with me: two countries with about equally deep tunnelling traditions, arriving at genuinely different engineering philosophies because the ground underneath them is different.