Dom, the jolly Viking conquers Norway

Sheer beauty: Towering rocks flank the fjords on the scenic Norway In A Nutshell tour that Dom took from Oslo to Bergen

My previous Scandinavian experiences haven't been all that successful.

In Helsinki, for a TV show, I was suspended above the main square on a crane dressed as a sailor.

A hundred thousand Helsinkers, all packed into the city centre, laughed and taunted me – they just wouldn't fin(n)ish (sorry) – it still gives me nightmares.

Then there was the time I visited the Ice Hotel in northern Sweden. It was closed and there were only three hours of daylight per day.

I got very depressed and nearly became a suicide statistic in the Arctic Circle.

Yet despite all this, I've always had a soft spot for Scandinavia. So, finding myself with a couple of spare days, I decided to make a whistle-stop tour of Norway – as you do.

I started in the capital, Oslo. It's a gorgeous little port city with a population of only half a million nestled under hills and forests.

When I told anyone I was going to Oslo, they all went: 'Ooh, take your savings, it's £8 a pint over there.'

Everyone was very consistent – it was never seven or nine pounds but eight, on the button.

Actually, Norway is very expensive, especially booze, but it's more like £5 a pint, if you're interested. It's a hangover from the country's Lutheran past – there was complete prohibition during the First World War.

Then, after 1920, the state took control of the alcohol business and ran an expensive monopoly.

Things did loosen up in the Eighties but the prices didn't drop, and the oil-rich Norwegians didn't grumble.

Nor, however, did they ever learn to buy a round –most have a 'vorspiel' (before drinks) at somebody's house before hitting the town.

Sadly, I didn't have this advantage. My first drink was a beer in the glamorous setting of the Grand Cafe on the city's main drag.

Cheers: Dom raises a glass of (expensive) beer to the camera

It's one of Oslo's oldest hang-outs and reminded me of some of the wonderful old cafes I used to frequent when I lived in Prague in the early Nineties.

The playwright Ibsen used to drink in the Grand Cafe along with 'many other famous Norwegians', according to my guidebook.

That got me thinking – could I name five famous Norwegians? Trude, the blonde vet, Amundsen, Ibsen, Thor? Was he Norwegian? I think the band A-Ha were from here.

Hang on, got it – the Heroes of Telemark, there were loads of them, well done me.

Through the huge picture windows I started to spot an inordinate number of beggars.

This wasn't something I'd equated with rich, clean Norway.

It was cold and rainy outside so I opted not to join the multitude of panhandlers but rather to stay hunkered down in the Grand Cafe and have a meal there.

I was rather nervous of Norwegian cuisine – a friend of mine had a Norwegian girlfriend and went to stay with her family.

In honour of his visit, they dug up a putrefied shark they'd buried in the snow – he said it was rather like eating a corpse (they broke up soon after).

I also have a pathological hatred of rollmop herrings – a staple of any Scandinavian meal.

I steeled myself and went for the touristic 'Taste of Norway' menu. I was very pleasantly surprised – I had some superb scallops followed by a perfectly cooked rack of lamb and not a herring in sight, rolled or mopped.

House that: Old colourful houses add a splash of colour

Next morning, I woke up to a brief period of sun and blue skies.

This was my day to 'do' the Oslo tourist thing.

But first I wandered off in search of some breakfast. Oslo, as far as I could make out, has no Starbucks, which is refreshing, and there were plenty of individual little shops selling hot, strong coffee and loads of lovely sticky things to eat.

My tummy sated, I set off on my touristing.

I had loads to do so I chose to use taxis to ferry me about – this was a big mistake as they have a minimum charge of ten quid and the meter flies round faster than a fast, round thing.

First stop was the Viking Ships Museum. It was truly fabulous – three intact longboats, more than 1,000 years old and quite, quite beautiful in their design.

It really appealed to the little boy in me who had read so much about Vikings and their adventures as a kid – it's a must-see.

Next up was the Nobel Centre. It's a must-not-see – it's mindnumbingly dull. I nearly fell asleep inside.

To wake up, I decided to walk to my next destination. I wandered past Aker Brygge, a huge seafront shopping centre/bar zone and the main social centre for the city.

I stopped for a coffee and watched hundreds of mirror-shaded Nords sunning themselves.

The glare from their rows of white teeth was blinding.

Norwegian women, as in Iceland, are stunning – sadly, unlike in Iceland, so are the men.

I sat in silence as gorgeous Viking couples flirted and bantered around me before no doubt setting off for a hard day's rape and pillage.

Water sight: Boats go about their business in Bergen harbour

Pretty soon the rain returned and the Viking hordes retreated indoors, but it gave me a tantalising glimpse of how amazing this city must be in the summer.

I have a joke about visiting cities – climb the very tall thing, see the very old thing and then have a drink in the big open thing.

To my delight I stumbled across the Storting, which literally means 'big thing'.

It turned out to be the parliament building but it made me smile. Norwegians seem to have a very developed sense of humour.

Trigger Happy TV did very well here – they've clearly got good taste.

My final destination was Holmenkollen – the oldest ski jump in the world.

It sits overlooking Oslo, high on a hill in the Marka, the seemingly endless area of forests and lakes that surround the capital.

When I got to the site, I was terribly disappointed.

Having been there since 1892, it had been demolished just three days before my arrival as they are building two new jumps for the 2011 FSI Nordic World Ski Championships.

Northern belles: Girls in traditional dress. Norwegian women are stunning, says Dom, but sadly so are the men

They could have hung on until I'd seen it – very selfish of them, I thought.

In truth, October is not the best time to visit Norway – it's not quite winter so winter pastimes haven't kicked in, but summer is well and truly over so quite a few things are closed.

The following day, I left Oslo on a trip seemingly designed to suit my impatient travelling style.

It was called Norway In A Nutshell although, strictly speaking, it should have been called Norway In A Train, Then Another Train, Then A Boat, Then A Bus And Then A Train Again, but it probably wouldn't be as catchy.

After three-and-a-half hours gazing at the passing scenery on the Oslo-Bergen train, I started to see snow on the ground.

Pretty soon it was a white-out. As we reached the highest point (Finse, at 4,000ft), I got a text from my mum.

In an extraordinary coincidence, her text told me that my grandfather used to come to a place called Finse to ski before the First World War and she wanted me to keep an eye out for the place. How weird.

It's weird that she texted me just as I arrived in the very place she mentioned, weird that I had any connection to this godforsaken mountain outpost, and weird that my mum knew how to text – she's a bit of a Luddite.

Oarsome: A centuries-old longboat in Oslo's Viking Ships Museum

I wanted to stop and explore but I couldn't – my nutshell rolled on.

We carried on to Myrdal, where I left the Oslo-Bergen line and took the train down to Flam – the 'gateway' to one of Norway's most impressive fjords, Aurlandsfjord.

When I say that we took the train 'down', I really mean down – it was a gradient of one in 18 – the steepest railway in Northern Europe.

Not for nothing does the train have five separate sets of brakes.

The brakes held and I made it to Flam. I got off the train and on to a boat that chugged out into the fjord.

The scenery was quite extraordinary – huge looming towers of rock dwarfed us on each side.

I felt tiny and insignificant. There was no doubt that I was singularly more impressed than the bored Norwegian school party who ignored these majestic views to practise graffiti tags on their A4 pads in the boat's cafeteria.

Nothing ever impresses school parties – they are a total waste of time, and all they ever want to do is smoke, drink and try to snog the attractive girl with slightly less acne than anyone else.

They could have a school trip to Mars and they would all mope about under hoodies, tugging on their greasy hair and lighting cigarette butts out of ashtrays.

On deck, a Japanese tour group made sure that not a single inch of either the boat or the fjord remained undocumented by their clicking cameras.

Thank the Lord for the invention of digital, otherwise that mysterious lab in Switzerland to which we used to send our holiday snaps would have been kept busy for a year just developing this one batch.

We got off the boat at Gudvangen and hopped on a bus that took us the long and windy way back to join the main line at Voss.

After a couple of £5 beers at the station bar, it was back on the train to Bergen – it was tiring, this nutshell lark.

In Bergen, I checked in to my hotel and slept the sleep of Viking kings. The following morning, I woke up to a torrential downpour – this former capital is famous for rain.

I asked the receptionist for an umbrella. She pointed to a barrel containing a bunch of them for sale.

I didn't want to buy one – I was here for only five hours and liked to travel light.

Didn't the hotel have one I could borrow? 'No,' said the grumpy receptionist, looking totally uninterested.

As I ventured out into the deluge, I noticed the words 'We Care' stamped boldly on the umbrella barrel.

'Not that much, you don't,' I muttered to myself, but my words were whipped away in the wind – probably carried off to some distant oil rig to entertain some bemused oil worker.

I did my best to do the tourist things but the lure of warm eateries and drinking establishments was strong.

I eventually took refuge in a dark and cosy fish restaurant that served wonderful, fresh seafood and £4 beers.

On the walls hung gorgeously enticing pictures of dreamy, soft evening light hitting rows and rows of blonde, tanned white-toothed young people sitting at packed dockside cafes.

I loved Norway. It's a great country – but I think that next time, I'll come in the summer...

Travel Facts

Sunvil Discovery (020 8758 4747, www.sunvil.co.uk) offers a five-night break to Norway from £1,198.

This includes return flights, transfers, three nights' B&B in Oslo, two in Bergen, a Norway In A Nutshell excursion from Oslo to Bergen, entry to 33 tourist attractions and use of public transport in Oslo and free or discounted entry to tourist attractions, plus bus travel in Bergen.