Ferries from Håheller hurtigbåtkai

Håheller is a quay in the Lysefjord with no road to it, serving other places with no road to them. The best known is Flørli, where 4,444 wooden steps climb the mountain beside an old penstock — the longest wooden stairway in the world, built so workers could maintain the pipe.

Where the boats go

• Flørli (car ferry call) — about 15 minutes, 6 sailings.
• Lysebotn (car ferry call) — about 15 minutes, 5 sailings.
• Flørli (express boat) — about 20 minutes, 3 sailings.
• Lysebotn (express boat) — about 10 minutes, 3 sailings.

34 active sailings, operated by Kolumbus.

⚠ Two vessel types to the same two places

Flørli and Lysebotn are each served by both a car ferry call and an express boat, on separate timetables with different crossing times. Nine sailings reach Flørli in total, but only three of them are the faster boat.

Work out which one your return depends on. On a roadless fjord the difference between a 15-minute and a 20-minute crossing matters far less than which timetable you are reading.

The stairs

The 4,444 steps take most people between two and three hours to climb, and the descent by the Rallarstien path is longer. Flørli is reachable only by boat or on foot.

The hydroelectric plant ran from 1918 and the pipeline came straight down the mountainside; somebody had to walk up to keep it working, so they built a staircase beside it. The plant closed; the staircase stayed.

The Lysefjord

Forty kilometres of vertical granite, with Preikestolen at the seaward end and Kjerag near Lysebotn at the head. Lysebotn is where the road down from Sirdal arrives in twenty-seven hairpins — closed by snow for much of the year.

Season

The boats run year round on a reduced winter pattern, but the stairs are a summer proposition — ice on wooden steps above a fjord is not something to attempt casually.