Original subtitles

The home of the Vikings was a wild land.

And.

It still is.

Here Nordic warriors fought.

Died.

And explored.

Their legacy inspires today’s adventurers.

Now, a walk on the wild side.

A spectacular seaside journey, from the bustling south.

Through the fjords.

And up to the Arctic north.

This is the coast of the Vikings, as seen:

By their gods.

Yeehoo!

The higher you go, the colder it gets.

That makes the frozen mountaintops of Norway a tough place

to eke out a living.

Few creatures even try.

But one prefers life with a chill in the air.

Musk oxen climb high.

They’re more closely related to mountain goats than cows.

And up here the wind whips the snow away

from the grass and lichen below.

It may look like slim pickings for an animal

that can weigh three hundred and sixty kilos,

but this is how they’ve survived for more than ten thousand years.

Hanging in the higher climes

can be a good way to avoid predators.

At least until the big thaw that comes with summer.

Now the mountain trails open up,

including one of the most famous in the world.

This path seems barely worn,

but every year some three hundred thousand hikers make this pilgrimage.

Two and a half hours of breathtaking views.

But it’s the destination that makes this trek so special.

Buck up and face the giddy heights.

Walk along the edge of sanity.

And you are rewarded with a religious experience,

at least in name.

This is Pulpit Rock,

one of the most famous escarpments on the planet.

Pulpit Rock sticks out thirty meters from the side of the fjord

and it’s so named because it looks like a church lectern.

The first tourists came here in 1900.

And they’ve been coming ever since.

It’s been called the best viewing platform in the world.

And it was seen by millions in the climactic scene

of the 2018 Mission: Impossible movie.

Now it’s more popular than ever.

Visitors cram onto a natural platform

less than half the size of a football field.

The drop down? A dizzying six hundred and four meters.

Two hundred and thirty meters higher than the Empire State Building.

This is just one special feature in a coastline

that commands respect and inspires adventure.

From the capital of Oslo in the south,

Norway’s coastline heads southwest and then swings north.

Past pulpit Rock.

And one thousand six hundred fifty miles to Lofoten in the Arctic Circle.

This was the farthest outpost for the Vikings who once ruled this land.

Much of this Viking coastline it dwarfed by steep cliffs.

One creature is at home both above and below these lofty heights.

The white-tailed eagle is one of the largest birds of prey on earth.

Its specialty: fishing.

Norway has the highest density of white-tailed eagles in the world.

They need as much as six hundred grams of food a day each.

It gets competitive.

The younger birds don’t have their white tails yet,

but they still jump in on the action.

It’s a good grab. But waiting in the wings, a challenger.

The catch goes down,

and the challenger sees it first.

Now, rather than risk a counter attack,

he takes it to go.

Eagles on the Viking coast inspire some dare devils.

The humans just need to start a little higher.

A group of hikers climbs to the top of the Kjerag Cliffs.

And they have no intention of climbing down.

They’re on a mission to BASE jump.

There are seventy or so such athletes in Norway,

including world champions.

For them Kjerag is a Mecca.

It towers above the surrounding peaks,

more than one thousand meters high.

For thrill seekers like Carlos Montanero Mora,

BASE jumping is the ultimate expression of the Viking spirit.

The soul of BASE jumping is freedom and nature.

Being able to take control of your own life,

make your own decisions and try new stuff.

I couldn't imagine myself here 11 years ago,

before I started skydiving.

You assess all the time,

"Am I ready for this? Have I done enough research?

Is this within my skill level?”

And if all those answers are yes,

we start walking, try to keep a level head,

think about, "This could go wrong. What do I do then?

Have I done everything I can to make this a safe jump.”

And if that checklist says yes,

then the only step is to jump.

The danger and the risk is always there,

no matter what you do, how safe you do it.

The risk is always there.

So when I get to the edge,

I assess the winds.

I assess who I’m with. My own inner feeling.

Just, do I feel comfortable doing this today?

Right before the exit you’re at your most concentrated and scared,

a good balance of both.

I do a count.

It kina sets my mind in what I’m about to do.

Once I count down, it's set in stone.

Then it's full focus on what's coming ahead.

You're taking a big risk but you have done your homework

so in theory it should work [laughs].

You ready?

3, 2, 1.

See ya.

There's a complete feeling of freedom

because you're not attached to anything, literally.

You're falling. You're weightless,

you're unable to focus on anything else than the present moment.

And that's where the freedom lies.

Woohoohoohoo. Yeah buddy. Woo ha ha. Yeah buddy.

These adventurers are not alone.

Records kept since 1994 log more than fifty thousand jumps

along the Viking coast.

You can plan everything out.

You can do everything right.

And still, something can go wrong.

No one can guarantee you that this jump will be safe. Ever.

Even the best have died doing what they know.

And we have all lost friends.

That's the randomness and freedom of it that you cannot control it.

No matter who you are or what you do.

But you have a little moment of, "Ok, I've pulled.”

Ah! There it is!

Thank God. Thank God.

It's a huge relief, joy and a new focus.

Now I have to land.

Depending on the suit,

it’s around thirty seconds of flight time

before these BASE jumpers pull their chutes.

They get to punch through the clouds like a bird,

all going well, that is.

For those who live in Norway,

such encounters with nature are never far away.

Travel one hundred kilometers up the Oslo Fjord,

past forty or so islands,

and you reach one of the most remarkable capital cities in the world.

Oslo is often labeled

one of the most expensive places to live on the planet.

But it’s also been ranked number one for its quality of life.

Fewer than seven hundred thousand people live here.

Yet it’s a world center.

And the home of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s a bustling city.

But more than two thirds of its space

is dedicated to waterways and forests.

It is therefore a capital and a springboard into nature.

From here you can jump into the wide open wilderness of the north,

or the wide open waters of the coast,

and get a taste of the adventurous Viking spirit.

Not far out of Oslo, signs of Norway’s rich past.

On the banks, mounds of dirt hide incredible treasures.

This is the Borre Mound Cemetery,

and these piles cover the most extensive collection

of kings’ graves in Scandinavia.

Others nearby watch over the crops.

Buried with the royal remains,

archaeologists have found ornaments, some buildings

and even the first ever excavated timbers of an ancient Viking ship.

All of this to accompany Nordic nobles

on a sunset journey into Odin’s Valhalla.

Death for the average Viking came after just thirty or forty winters.

Head out of the Oslo Fjord and follow the coast southwest

and around for five hundred and twenty five kilometers.

And you find a unique symbol of the Viking past

and its incredible violence.

Near Norway’s southwesterly most point, this:

Three bronze swords stand ten meters tall,

planted into solid granite.

They commemorate a historic and bloody naval battle.

In the ninth century several kings faced off against each other

in the Battle of Hafrsfjord.

And one of them emerged to rule all of Norway,

King Harald Fairhair.

Harald’s rise marked the beginning of Norway as a single kingdom.

And few rulers were as notorious as

the king’s son and successor, Erik the First Bloodaxe.

The Bloodaxe part of his name?

He earned that by murdering five of his brothers.

Now one kingdom, the country needed a name.

And they found it in an inland sea

just a little farther north up Karmsundet Strait.

Most countries are named after their ethnic group or land areas,

but Norway is named after this shipping lane,

a natural protected passage that leads north.

It is the “north way” or Norway.

On its islands kings drowned those accused of witchcraft and wizardry.

And in Avaldsnes, King Harald made his royal home.

Today it’s mostly farmland, and ruins.

But reconstructions of a longhouse, a roundhouse

and a boathouse for Viking warships are still here.

These Norwegians are part of an archaeological study

trying to uncover the ways Vikings used weapon and tools,

as well as how they prepared timber

and made buildings and ships \

and honed their battle skills.

All Viking men learned to fight.

And many of the women.

Viking power came from these battle skills

and the ability to build boats and navigate.

And of those, navigation may have been the greatest challenge.

Draw a straight line along Norway’s sea border

and it’ll measure two thousand six hundred and fifty kilometers.

But when you add in every island, bay and fjord,

the actual coastline is nearly ten times that distance.

In this land of natural straits and channels,

boats are connectors.

Through the fjords, vessels are dwarfed by cascading waterfalls,

and impassable cliffs.

That’s why the waterways have been used like highways for hundreds of years.

Towns like Lysebotn are quaint harbors.

And they have long been gateways to an often frozen interior.

Norway’s southernmost glaciers

lie in Folgefonn National Park

and in places the ice is four hundred meters thick.

Around fourteen feet of snow falls up here every year.

But on a good day this area is an adventurer’s playground.

We have the sun out right now, beautiful day,

next week we can have a rampant blizzard up here,

and uh, it’s almost like it’s changing mood.

Snorre Gimse Storro is a glacier guide.

For him, the chilled heights and perilous cracks are part of the thrill.

It’s all about knowing what it going on.

You just have to be patient with it,

you have to work with it,

you have to try and be nice with it, respect it.

The glacier can be a treacherous place.

When you have the snow laying on top all of those,

all of those things are hidden.

So you end up really walking over snow bridges

which might be very, very thin.

You, you don’t know.

You have to read the glacier,

you have to know what to look for,

you have to know what you are looking at in the landscape.

The reward is the glacier itself.

It has a mystique to it.

It’s nature that is constantly changing

and every single time you are up here

there will be some slight changes.

So it is that excitement of seeing new stuff all the time

and seeing new things pop out, hearing the sounds.

And if the sounds atop the glacier fail to impress,

wait till you hear what’s going on below!

On the surface of Norway’s glaciers the sound fluctuates

between eerie silence and icy winds.

But down below glacier guide Snorre Gimse Storro hears something different.

Melting ice streams through the cracks.

You can’t see it, but you can hear it

changing the glacier from the inside out.

The ice is of course thousands of years old but,

but that crevasse you are in wasn’t similar last year,

it wasn’t similar last week! You are always seeing something new.

While Snorre climbs up and out,

the water from melting ice streams in and down.

It finally finds fresh air as it leaves the glacier

and feeds the valleys and villages below.

The towering fjords in between present their own climbing challenge.

But no need for crampons here.

The Flam Railway cuts through this landscape

and climbs eight hundred and sixty seven meters in only twenty kilometers.

That makes it one of the steepest railway climbs on the planet.

And it’s been ranked the number one railway experience in the world.

Since 1940 the train from Flam has taken passengers past free flowing rivers,

up mountains and by bursting cascades.

It’s perfect habitat for one of Norway’s more elusive inhabitants.

The Eurasian otter is built for the Viking coast.

Its double-layered coat has a coarse outer fur.

It’s waterproof to protect it from the cold.

And it’s just as content by salt water as it is by fresh.

As long as it can still find a stream now

and then to down a drink and wash.

Its dense bones to help it sink into the streams,

where it can hold its breath for up to four minutes,

enough time to snag some lunch.

And when otters are not hunting, it’s play time.

Illegal trapping and killing,

along with pollution and net entanglements

have put otters on the “near-threatened” list.

But they can still be seen by those

who take to the water quietly.

This fjord in central Norway dwarfs kayakers.

They call this a paddler’s paradise.

Ervin Mejia liked it so much during his vacation in 2005,

that he stayed on and now guides others.

I came. I fell in love with the place and I decided to stay.

It was just too much to absorb all at once.

Extreme landscape, very nice people,

just a beautiful place.

Some of the views that we get to see around here are not only dramatic,

but sometimes going into another world.

Coming into the fjords, you are stepping back in time,

and as you're coming in it

just ah narrows down a little bit

and then you actually realize how small you really are

because the sheer walls around you,

it seems like they're closing in on you.

By definition, a fjord is a long deep inlet surrounded by cliffs.

This one is seventeen kilometers long.

At its narrowest it’s only a few hundred meters across.

the walls of this fjord plunge another five hundred meters beneath the sea.

And rise up fourteen hundred meters.

But trek up above and you soon find farmland.

The majority of Vikings were farmers.

They made the most of the land around them.

You're starting off a hike and uh,

where it starts off somewhat steep, not so steep,

and then it starts to turn into sheer steepness.

Um, still hikeable, without having to climb.

And then all of a sudden you just are rewarded

with this just wonderful view.

It's almost like a dream.

This dream can also be a nightmare for travelers in a hurry.

Road builders must get creative to overcome fjords, peaks,

islands and a maze of waterways.

So just a little farther north they built a modern marvel

that’s been called Norway’s greatest construction of the 20th century.

This is Norway’s world famous Atlantic Ocean road.

It’s only eight kilometers long, but it took six years to build.

It winds and arches like a great serpent across twelve bridges

and juts out over the ocean.

So close that on a windy day cars get hit by sea spray.

That’s not a problem for another bridge about five hundred and eighty kilometers

farther up the coast.

This one sits forty-one meters above the sea.

It’s famous for what dances beneath.

The swirling twirling pirouettes below

are from one of the world’s strongest currents.

It rips through this straight in Saltstraumen

forming mighty whirlpools ten meters across.

It’s been clocked at a speed of thirty-seven kilometers an hour,

nearly as fast as a galloping horse.

But for the most spectacular water flows in Norway,

you don’t look down, you look up.

Water courses through the veins of the Viking coast.

It shapes the land in spectacular ways.

These glaciers began their carving out of Norway’s fjords

and deep valleys about twenty thousand years ago.

Now rain, ice and snow-melt are finishing the job.

Some waterfalls plummet more than seven hundred and fifty meters.

Ten of the world’s tallest thirty waterfalls are in Norway.

Some may look like a trickle

compared to the towering cliffs around them,

but others fan out, as legend says, like cascading locks of hair.

All this flowing water carves the landscape, until.

Every winter, when nature turns off the tap.

And everything grinds to a halt.

Vikings quickly learned how hard the winters here can be.

But there’s one place where the water never freezes.

When the snow meets the sea in far north Lofoten,

it’s time to go fishing.

Winter brings a great migration of cod to Norway

and anglers head out in traditional fishing boats called a “sjark”.

Cod are bottom dwellers,

and here they hang out on the continental shelf.

Right now they’ve just spawned with the females

laying between twenty and thirty million eggs each.

The time is right for sports fishermen to strike.

It’s hard cold work done with rod and reel.

But the rewards are usually worth the effort.

In this case, a cod weighing nearly fourteen kilos.

Commercial boats are here too,

using longlines that stretch out for kilometers.

Big cod eat one thing: other fish.

So these commercial lines are baited with mackerel,

herring and squid.

Dragged through a crowd of cod, the bait is irresistible.

Cod from Lofoten has its own name,

referred to the world over as skrei.

And they catch nearly half a million tons of skrei every year.

Back on shore, the fresh meat is sent to markets

in the United States and Europe.

But the real genius is what they do with the heads and tails.

Fishermen in Norway’s far north use their Arctic climate

as a free form of freeze drying.

Giant drying racks for fish have been used since the Viking days.

They hang the fish up for three or four months

and the cold dry air does the rest.

The result is “stockfish” that will last without further refrigeration.

For nearly a thousand years stockfish has been a major Norwegian export.

It helped build the nation.

It’s cod that allowed the Vikings to settle and stay in Lofoten.

It was their northernmost outpost.

The stunning cliffs and seaside fishing villages,

all caked in snow,

mask one of Lofoten’s best kept secrets,

the water is relatively warm.

Despite these islands being in the Arctic circle,

the gulf stream keeps the ocean here well above freezing.

The towns of the Lofoten Islands support around twenty four thousand people.

They must still deal with winter on the roads.

And they do it with modern machinery.

It can be hazardous work during midwinter

when Lofoten has a full month of night.

But their work in this part of the Viking coast

may still be illuminated.

By spectacular displays of the northern lights.

Aurora borealis.

The dazzling green shimmer of the northern lights

is created by charged particles from the sun.

They are drawn to the poles by the earth’s magnetic field.

And now they collide with gas particles in our upper atmosphere.

It’s all happening one hundred kilometers up,

making a great spectacle for those on earth, and in space.

Some say the Vikings believed

the lights were the armor of the Valkyrie virgin warriors

who escorted the dead from the battlefield to the heavens.

Beneath these northern lights

is where the Vikings of Lofoten built

some of their most impressive dwellings, giant long houses.

This life-sized replica of a long house in Borg

is nearly eighty-five meters long.

Norway’s most formidable chieftain lived here.

The area’s natural resources made him a powerful leader.

And there was no one to the north to compete.

No Vikings settled further into the Arctic than this.

It was the end of the road.

And eventually the Viking way of life itself ended.

Christianity replaced the war-loving gods of Norway.

And slowly the Vikings moved from raiding and fighting,

to farming and fishing.

The last of the Viking monarchs was killed in a raid

in England in the year one thousand sixty six.

What remains now are symbols of the Viking past.

A rugged coastline.

Wild inhabitants.

And an irrepressible spirit of adventure.

Yahoo!

The Vikings may be gone,

but the incredible Viking coast will honor them.

Forever.