Eidfjord RIB tour: the inner end, under the plateau

A hundred and eighty kilometres from the sea, the fjord has run out of width. The arms here — Simadalen, Osa, the water below Eidfjord itself — are steep-sided and shadowed, and the mountains behind them run straight up onto the plateau.

That plateau is the reason for the waterfalls. Hardangervidda is the largest mountain plateau in Europe, and everything that melts or falls on it has to come down somewhere. Vøringsfossen, twenty minutes up the road, drops about 182 metres into a gorge and is one of the most visited natural sights in Norway. What the boat gets you instead is the unnamed ones: falls with no road, no car park and no viewing platform, which the skipper takes the bow underneath.

There is also farmland here that is hard to explain until you see it: small farms on ledges a hundred metres above the water, reached historically by ladder, worked because there was nowhere else. The skippers point them out and the stories are worth listening to.

One practical note: Eidfjord is a cruise-ship port. When a ship is in, the village and Vøringsfossen are busy. The RIB trips are small and unaffected, but the road and the café queue are not.

Above Eidfjord the land stops being a fjord side and becomes Hardangervidda: the largest mountain plateau in Europe, roughly the size of a small country, treeless, and home to the largest wild reindeer herd on the continent.

It is what makes the inner fjord what it is. Water that falls or melts up there has to leave, and it leaves over the edge — Vøringsfossen being the most famous of many. The road from Eidfjord up Måbødalen climbs onto it in a series of switchbacks and hairpins, and the change from fjord to plateau takes about half an hour.

The nature centre in Eidfjord explains it properly, including the reindeer, the archaeology and the hydro power that also comes off this plateau. If it is raining, that is where to go.