It was not only that going to see them was so high on my lifelong bucket list but also that the two ancient (more than 1100 years old) longboats are in the flesh (in the oak, really) more wonderfully slender and lovely than all the photographs in all the books had promised.

You may not touch the Viking ships but at the Vigeland Sculpture Park everyone mingles with and can't leap their hands off the extended family of smooth and burly giant folk that Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943) made from flesh-coloured granite. Naked men and women and children, of all ages and physiques are arranged in poses displaying everything from joy to despair.

I saw two awestruck Japanese matrons fondling a giant man's giant genitals. Too shy myself to caress any genitals, bottoms or breasts (on the day I was more of a calves, thighs and biceps man) I did understand the matrons' impulses.

Travel expands the education. We arrived in Norway gormlessly ignorant of the great Vigeland, and just as ignorant of Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914) Norway's beloved artist of his nation's troll-rich folklore. Both geniuses works wherever we saw them (Kittelsen's adorn museums in Oslo and in Bergen) bound us in spells.

But everyone with a smattering of reading knows of some of the towering folk and treasures of Norwegian arts and life. And so we were on a typical mission to catch up with painter Edvard Munch (to be in the alarming presence of his The Scream at Oslo's National Gallery was another bucket list moment), playwright Henrik Ibsen, tuneful national composer Edvard Grieg and polar explorers and national heroes Nansen and Amundsen.

Oslo is, truly, a city of statues, so many of them elegant, witty and wonderful. And most visitors' experience of the city begins just outside the railway station (to which one is whisked by rail from Oslo's airport) with Elena Engelsen's fabulous 4.5 metre long bronze tiger. Little children, frightened but thrilled, sit on this man-eater's back to be photographed.

Oslo's ostentatious new Opera and Ballet theatre, behind-the-scenes (we took the tour) bristling with state-of-the-art theatrical technologies galore, is clad in white granite and looks like a testament to Norwegian prosperity. It cascades down into the harbour's edge like a glacier carving out a fiord. To be up on its white granite roof is like being on the battlements of a pretentious castle carved from melting-proof ice.

Almost as vertebrae-tingling as the Viking ships is Oslo's legendary Polar ship Fram. It may be Norway's manmade national treasure (do we have one of those, if so is it the stuffed Phar Lap?). It is ensconced in its own harbourside museum. Unorthodox of shape (imagine a ship the shape of half of an egg sliced lengthwise), it is the bemuscled wooden ship so essential to Arctic and Antarctic triumphs of Nansen and Amundsen. Nansen, who commissioned it, called it a seagoing "fortress" of oak that polar ice would never crush. If it seems to creak with special pleasure to greet an Australian visitor it is of course because, though retired now, it has fond memories of being in Hobart during Amundsen's Antarctic triumph.

Almost all visitors to Norway sally along to a fiord. Our way of doing this was to traverse some of the Sognefjord by ferry as part of the world-famous mountain-crossing journey, mostly by rail, from Oslo to Bergen. There had been heavy rain which meant that on a morning on the fiord of deeply authentic Nordic weather (mists and low cloud) every one of the umpteen slender waterfalls zooming down the vertical cliffs was at its torrential best.

Tourists like to gasp at the scenic splendour of the fiords but I found the immense landscape intimidating. One felt as insignificant, in this landscape, as an ephemeral pimple on a minor troll's bum. Serious scholarly students of the Norwegians say the national personality is shaped by this, by the less than six million Norwegians living, pluckily, in little seaside, fiordside pockets of an otherwise uninhabitable land where nature (manifested in rockiness, dark forests and trolls) is the rather menacing master.

Frightened (and a bit bored too, for after you've seen your first 1000 waterfalls you've seen enough) I gave up looking out at the frightening fiord and immersed myself in a biography of Nansen.

And so on to absurdly scenic Bergen. You will remember that the OECD has calculated that Canberra's ACT and Western Norway (where Bergen is spectacularly arranged among snow-upholstered heights and around a very Nordic harbour) are the two most idyllic, prosperous places on earth to live in.

Bergen's most famous son is Norway's national composer, the elfin Edvard Grieg (1843-1907). He and his similarly elfin wife Nina Grieg lived in a sweet, ornate, very wooden little waterside cottage on a waterside headland at Troldhaugen (educated readers will be able to hum Grieg's foot-tappingly infectious melody Wedding Day at Troldhaugen) now preserved as part of a Grieg museum.

The Troldhaugen cottage is an unsatisfying spot. Ainola, the Sibelius home near Helsinki of the Finnish national composer looks and feels as if the great Finn is still living in it. One half expects to bump into him there. But the Grieg home (a less substantial home for a far less substantial composer, for Grieg seems never to have written anything soul-shaking and hair-raising) feels like a dolled up dolls' house and crafty tourist magnet. You never feel the Griegs are at home. And it teemed with irritating tourists, as thick as the lice in a troll's pubic hair, on the day we were there.

But for a bit of poignant peace and quiet at otherwise teeming Troldhaugen take the steep and poorly-signposted path down to the water's edge (few grey, hip-replaced tourists tackle this path) to Edvard and Nina's joint, hard-to-find grave. It is stylishly hewn out, quite high up, in the face of a rocky cliff.

Bergen's better charms include a funicular rail climb to a vantage spot from where you can go "Golly!" at this Canberra of the North in its wonderful setting, and a harbourside fish market where they sell things, harvested from the nearby bleak but bountiful seas, not dreamt of by Australian fishmongers.

"What's that?" I asked a fishmongertrix looking, like every second woman one encounters in Norway, the reigning Miss Norway. The Miss Norway who took me on my tour of Ibsen's apartment in Oslo was so blondely beautiful I feared I would let Australia down by swooning.

"It's whale," the Bergen goddess tantalised, hewing me a little reddish-black flake of it (it was cooked already) to taste.

My wife Sandra threatened never to kiss me again if I ate any whale. But, as part of my immersion in things traditionally Norwegian and in the same spirit one tackles reindeer meatballs in Helsinki and casseroled bullfrog in Shanghai, I took that risk. I had a whaleburger. It was yummy and expensive (for Norway is wallet-slimmingly pricey) beyond belief.

If Norway seems off the beaten track remember that it is only 100 minutes from Heathrow. Culturally and scenically it is a strange, exciting, mind-tingling destination. The enviable Norwegians are a small, good-looking, multi-lingual, socially progressive family, blessed with heroes (especially of the arts and polar exploration) galore. A fortnight in their fascinating, troll-infested land felt like just an unsatisfactory skim across the national surface.

It was with a leaden heart, my application for political asylum politely turned down, that I flew away, on the plane sitting next to a wife still refusing to kiss my whale-flavoured lips.

Getting there
Oslo's Gardermoen Airport is well served, by several airlines, from London's Heathrow. We flew from Heathrow to Oslo with British Airways, settled in to our seats to cabin muzak by Norway's national composer Grieg.

Staying there
We stayed at Oslo's Grand Hotel, on Karl Johans gate (Oslo's Champs-Elysees). It is history-rich (it was a favourite haunt of the great Ibsen), and neighbours include Norway's royal family, 500 metres away at the Royal Palace. In Bergen we stayed at the quayside at the ancient, heritage-listed and very wooden Hanseatic Hotel.

More information
Norway In A Nutshell packages (ask you travel agent) give you a night in a fiordside hotel, a ferry trip along a fiord, and hair-raisingly steep and zig-zagging bus and railway experiences. NordicVisitor.com is a useful website for travellers. Lonely Planet's Norway has sensible advice about affordable eating out in this expensive kingdom.