T here is something about wild swimming, about cutting your hands through the water of rivers, lakes, seas, that a dip in even the sleekest of infinity pools can’t match. It’s the freedom, the swirling of currents on your skin. But most of all, it’s the total immersion in a natural landscape, the feeling of being a continuous part of the elements — water, earth and sky.
Norway’s landscapes must be some of the most aesthetically daring arrangements of water, rock and sky anywhere in the world. Swimming in its steep fjords and sweeping valley lakes is an experience that’s practically operatic. In summer, not only are the water temperatures bearable, but the sun shines on late into the night and, in some places, never sets.
Bergen in July had taken on a strangely Mediterranean climate. My friend Christina and I were starting our trip with a few days there, staying in a boutique hotel called the Hanseatic, carved from a medieval warehouse on the Bryggen. This is the city’s historical wharf, a warren of old storehouses, merchants’ offices and fishermen’s quarters. Baking heat rose from the cobbled streets that wound their way around the harbor just outside our windows. We wandered down there, past the market with its fish vendors speaking 16 languages fluently as they flicked knives through great swaths of marinated salmon, making up sandwiches in the shade of plastic awnings.
Traders were selling reindeer skins from the north. We carried on along the Nordnes promontory, between rows of sunlit clapboard houses. Good swimming spots include Helleneset and Gamle Bergen, but even in the city center the waters are crystal clear. On Nordnes, you can swim from the rocks behind the United Sardine Factory, now an arts center, or, for a few kroner, dive from the boards high above the water on the western point. At a latitude several degrees north of chilly Aberdeen, on the east coast of Scotland, the granite was scented with suntan oil, laced with stretched-out nut-brown limbs: already the local Bergeners had taken up their favorite sunbathing spots. Blond kids ran and flipped, turning somersaults into the fjord.
From the end of the diving board, the view was entirely surreal. Ahead and to the west, the outlying islands shone like promised lands in the perfect afternoon, on a blue-bronze sea. Round to the east loomed a vast container ship in the fjord, so apart from everything else that it looked like a paperweight pinning down the separate poster of the landscape. I jumped. The deep cool waters sloughed off the day’s heat in one clean sweep. We swam along the base of the cliffs, ducking under ropes and resting against floats. Young men were diving off rooftops into the water.
Soaking in the confines of my clawfoot bathtub that evening, underneath a huge old winching wheel, my skin was already a riot of sun-pricked freckles. Heading along the Bryggen, there are countless tables for drinking in the sun, and there is also the Enhjorningen, or Unicorn, one of the city’s best restaurants. We ate angle fish and sweetly marinated blackberries in its wooden upstairs rooms, and then we made our way towards the funicular railway station in growing dusk. From the high plateau of Mount Floyen where the funicular ends, the night stretched slowly over the city lights below. We came back up here the next day to go fell-walking through the pine forests, then headed on, to the wilder waters of the north.
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