Fram Here to the Poles (5/8/25)

For our indoor activity, Bob and I walked about 45 minutes from Vigeland Park down to the harbor to catch a ferry to the highly recommended Fram Museum, a museum dedicated to Norway’s impressive history in polar exploration. The ferry would take us to the Bygdoy Peninsula, where there are a number of museums.

The ferry left from the harbor near City Hall for a 10 minute crossing to the peninsula, where it makes two stops. The first stop is for the Norse Folk Museum and then onto a second stop for 3 museums and a Holocaust Center. We got off at the 2nd stop for the Fram Museum. We paid approximately 11 US dollars per person for the round-trip ride, which leaves every 20 minutes.

Travel writer Rick Steve’s really recommended the Fram Museum and polar exploration is something that we have found interesting in other museums, most recently the Scott Polar Research Institute Polar Museum in Cambridge and a few years ago in Hobart, Tasmania. We had been looking forward to the introductory film, but sadly that wasn’t available today. However, it still did a great job of explaining Norway’s impressive role in polar exploration and demonstrating the resilience in the individuals involved.

There are a number of Norwegians that played vital roles in the exploration of both the north and south poles. Two of the most important were Fridtjof Nansen, who proved the theory of the east-west current in the Arctic and helped fill in the gaps of understanding of the land areas in the Arctic, and Roald Amundsen, who was the first to navigate the Northwest Passage, the first to reach the South Pole (nosing out the doomed Brit Robert Scott, and the first to fly over the Northwest Passage Pole and across the Arctic Ocean.

The museum provided an interesting timeline to compare Amundsen’s trip to the South Pole versus Scott’s, but the highlight of the museum was the ability to see and explore two well-preserved ships important to polar exploration— the Gjoa and the Fram.

After the museum, we walked through the small nearby park before catching the ferry back to the inner harbor.