What the Naeroyfjord is
It is a side arm of the Sognefjord, which is the longest and deepest fjord in Norway, and it is the narrowest and steepest arm of the lot.
At its tightest the water between the walls is a few hundred metres across, with rock going up well over a kilometre on both sides. That ratio is the whole thing: a channel narrow enough that the sky is a strip and the light changes with every bend.
It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2005 along with the Geirangerfjord, and the citation is about exactly this. Not the prettiness, but the scale and clarity of the landform: a textbook example of what ice does to rock, preserved without a road, a dam or a town in the middle of it.
It is also short, which surprises people. Seventeen kilometres is nothing next to the two hundred of the Sognefjord it branches from. The whole of the protected stretch fits comfortably inside a two-hour round trip, which is why this tour exists in the shape it does.
Why a small boat is a different trip
A large vessel is comfortable, sheltered and slow, and it stays in open water because it has to. It draws several metres, it takes time to turn, and it cannot approach a rock wall.
A rigid inflatable draws almost nothing, turns on the spot and is small enough to be nosed in close to the shore. That means the guide can take you under a waterfall, along a rock face and into corners a scheduled boat has no business entering.
It also means you are outside for two hours with nothing between you and the fjord, which is why there is a thermal suit rather than a lounge. Speed on cold water in an open boat is cold, and being dressed for it is the difference between an experience and an endurance test.
The waterfalls
Glaciers cut the main valley far deeper than the side valleys feeding into it, so the tributaries were left hanging high up the walls. Their water has nowhere to go but over the edge.
The result is a fjord with waterfalls down both sides, dozens of them, most unnamed. After heavy rain or during the spring melt they multiply into something closer to a curtain than a set of falls.
This is where the boat earns its keep. The guide can take the RIB right up to the base of one, close enough that the noise takes over and the spray reaches you, and that is not an experience available from any other vessel on this water.
How many there are depends entirely on the week. A dry spell in late summer leaves the permanent ones; two days of rain puts three or four times as many down the same walls, most of them gone again within days.
The farms nobody can explain from a distance
Look up as you go and you will see green shelves partway up the walls, and on some of them buildings.
People farmed those ledges for centuries. There was no road to any of them; everything and everybody arrived by boat and then went up. Children were rowed to school. Hay was carried down. Livestock were moved on paths that a modern visitor would not attempt.
Almost all of them are empty now, abandoned across the twentieth century as the arithmetic stopped working. From a large vessel they are a detail on the hillside. From a small boat close in, with somebody explaining them, they are the most memorable thing in the fjord.
What else is out there
Goats, first, because they surprise everyone. There are goats on the rock faces above the waterline, standing on ledges that look like they should not hold anything, and they are entirely unbothered.
Harbour porpoises come into the fjord, and seals use it. White-tailed eagles nest on these walls, and a bird with a two-metre wingspan crossing above an open boat is a different proposition from the same bird seen through a window.
None of it is promised. It is a wild fjord rather than a wildlife tour, and the honest position is that most trips see something and no trip is guaranteed anything.
Who this is not for
The operator is direct and so should we be. Nobody under fourteen and nobody under a hundred and forty centimetres can go, and that is a fixed rule rather than a guideline.
It is also unsuitable for pregnant passengers and for anyone with mobility impairments. A RIB involves stepping down into a boat that is moving, sitting astride a padded bench and absorbing impacts through your back for two hours.
If any of that sounds wrong, the scheduled cruise on the same fjord is a genuinely good alternative rather than a consolation prize, and there is a page here comparing them honestly.
None of that is the operator being cautious for the sake of it. A rigid inflatable takes impacts through the hull and passes them to whoever is sitting on it, and two hours of that is a genuine physical experience rather than a boat ride.
