Category — Norway

I woke up early and let Martina sleep (she was a little hung over ). I packed my bag and got ready to leave.  I woke Martina up (her alarm was ringing 5 minutes ago anyway) and said goodbye to her.

I get out into the street, a little nervous since my last hitchhiking adventure (not counting Svolvaer – Kabelvag) didn’t work out so well. I was reassured soon as I was picked up after 5 minutes. The car took me into Svolvaer, where I walked a little and tried again.

It took about half an hour before a van stopped with a bunch of teachers in it (“we are going to learn _something_ about a computer” ). They took me quite a bit upto Stramsund. There was a ferry in between, so I paid for myself and stayed with them.

After Ttramsund, I walked over the bridge across the fjord and after half an hour I was picked up by a fuel truck (never thought these kind of cars pick up hitchhikers!) .  It took me to the next bridge (80km I guess) and I repeated my last tactic: I walked across the bridge and then found a spot.

I was picked up by a woman that drove me to Bjerkvik, which was the point where I had to turn north in the direction of Tromsø.  First, I went to the supermarket to get some dinner. Then I went to look for an internet café to see if I had a couch in Tromsø or not. There was no internet café (very small town) so I was pointed to the local hotel. The internet  computer was not working, so the guy working there let me behind the counter to quickly check my email and couchsurfing messages. I found a message from Eric saying that I was welcome to his house. I sent him a message on his mobile telling him where I was and when I suspected to be there. After that, I quickly thanked the hotel worker and went back on my way.

I was picked up by a guy in a big-ass SUV. The guy was a civilian working for the army and he dropped me off in a little town that was next to a military base, so the whole town was swarming with soldiers. I started walking in the direction of Tromsø, just to get a little out of the town (tried tactic, you miss all the traffic that stays in the town and won’t pick you up anyway)

Next, I was picked up by an elderly guy who turned out to be a missionary on his way to Tromsø. He offered me a ride all the way but told me that he had to stop for an hour in between to meet some people. I looked at my watch and decided that this guy was my best bet to be sure to reach Tromsø, so I said yes and waited when he was meeting. I blogged a bit, slept a bit and waited a bit. Then we continued our way to Tromsø. I was actually going to make the whole way in one day (over 450 km!). Northern Norway is so much better for hitchhiking than south Norway!

As if I wasn’t happy enough, I got an extra unexpected surprise: I saw the Northern light! We stopped for a bit to watch it. My driver had seen it a million times but could see that I was impressed, so he stopped just for me. I watched the dancing light in the sky with awe! I have never seen something so amazing! Again (this seems to happen to me a lot the last couple of weeks) I was so happy I could scream!

We continued our way and made it to Tromsø even before 22:00. I called up my host Eric who was in the middle of a party. He found someone to pick me up and 10 minutes later a car pulled up with w guy holding a bottle of beer out of the window. This was a very nice way to meet my new host! I got into the car and found out the guy handing me the beer was my host Eric. The guy driving was completely sober, which is something very nice about the Norwegian culture: drunk driving is simply socially unacceptable (besides the fact that the maximum penalty is three weeks in jail, a fine of 1,5 months of gross income AND  (not or) losing your driver’s license for two years.

We arrived at the party (Eric has this beautiful house with an amazing view over the fjord) which was going at full force and I said hi to everybody. Wait a second… is that Jeff, the French guy I met in Oslo and later unexpectedly at Bente’s place? Couchsurfing is a small world, even in a big ass country like Norway :). We partied at Eric’s house for a bit and then made our way to the city center. Tromsø is the city with the most pubs per capita in Norway, so this was exciting. We arrived at a very nice pub, except for the fact that one of our guys got into a fight with some dude that was obviously looking for it. Our guy was evading it, but there was no stopping the other guy. It cooled down for a bit after security came to check it out, but five minutes later I see the same guy flying by jumping at our friend.  Then I got to see why you don’t start a fight in a Norwegian pub; the security guys came running at him, threw him to the ground and just sat on him pushing his face to the ground until the police arrived to take him in. I, shocked at the level of violence portrayed by the security guys, was told that this was the not-so-rough way to handle a thing like this and that the guy was lucky

We partied some more and went home when the pub was closing. I was reasonably drunk so I fell asleep right away (not in my own bed as turned out later, but that was corrected when the rightful owner wanted to go to bed

The next day my host and her roommate had to go to their school from 9.00 till 15.00, so I went out to explore the village. I went out onto the peer which had the most amazing view to the town (pictures in the gallery). After sitting there for a couple of hours I went back and sidetracked to a small track leading up to some rocks looking out over the fjords. I climbed them and sat there for another hour. This Lofoten area is overwhelmingly beautiful. Steep rock formations, combined with idyllic villages and beautiful fjords.

When I saw some rain coming my way from the fjord, I decided to go back to the little town and make some use of the free wifi access in the town’s café/coffeeshop. I sat there until it was 15.00 and I realized that I had forgotten my glasses and my phone in Martina’s room. Since I was supposed to call her when it was three, I had a problem. I tried calling her through skype, but she didn’t pick up. Oh, shit

I decided to walk over to her house as it was already close to 16.00 and figured she might be at home. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Since my phone was still in her room and my best chance of figuring out where she was, I figured I needed to walk back to the main square (I feel that it _is_ big enough to call it that ) and pick up some wifi access to try calling her through skype again. I did and she picked up this time. Turned out she was still in her school hanging out with her roommate. I went there too and we hung out for a bit.

Around 19.00 Martina and her roommate needed to attend a guest college by their teacher, so I went back to the café to use some more internet. After a bit, one of Martina’s friends from the night before showed up explaining that she had missed the class because she fell asleep on her couch. This would never happen to me I talked with her until the rest of the group showed up and we spent the night in the pub because it was “cheap” beer night (55 Krone for 0,6l beer (!)).

At some point I played some pool with Martina which ended up in three guys challenging me (looks like all that break-taking at CoolBlue finally payed off ). Since I like pool and it is fun to finally win at a game, I enjoyed it very much. We went home too late, and Martina considered herself too drunk (I only drank two beers in 6 hours). We went home, talked some more and went to sleep.

The next morning I got up (as usual I would almost say ) to see the sunrise. This time it was a little more beautiful, but not as spectacular as it could have been. I had my last breakfast on the boat, went to bed a little after that to sleep some more, and woke up when we were almost in Bodo. I wanted to find some internet access again to download some email and send Martina (my next host) a message about my arrival. Almost running through the drizzle, I found a very nice café with free internet access. It was lightning fast so I uploaded my pics from the previous days and some blog posts, as well as downloading all my mail and uploading part of my backups. Then I ran back to the boat.

Back on the panorama deck, I got talking to a couple from the US. We had a very nice talk and they invited me to their home in Olympia, Washington if I would ever come near there. The guy was head of tourism in the state capital, so he convinced me that Olympia really was a nice city. Looks like I might have to go there

After talking to them, I prepared my backpack to hitchhike and I prepared myself as well. T-shirt, blouse, fleece sweater and rain coat on top, underwear, hiking pants and rain pants on the bottom.

I got off the ship a little late, called Martina (my host) to let her know and went on my way to Kabelvaag. It was pitch dark and drizzling. I started walking towards the main road and lifted my thumb for every car I met along the way. The fifth car (hitchhiking in the north easier than in the south, anyone?) stopped and the girls inside turned out to be Belgian girls. They took me to Kabelvaag where it took me a considerable amount of time to find the main square. Asking a passer-by who insists that Kabelvaag doesn’t have a main square is not really reassuring at 22.00 in the night when it is raining :). In the end I found it and Martina told me to go to the pub to meet her there.

I waited in the pub for a couple of minutes and then Martina and two of her friends showed up. We had a beer (I took a cola to create some more trust ) and some of their friends showed up. They were talking in Norwegian virtually the whole time but I didn’t mind as that gave me the time to observe them all a little bit. Apparently there was an art- and filmschool in this little town  that they were all attending. After a while we returned to the house and after talking a bit we went to bed.

The next day I got up early again to find the same deal: lots of grey, not very spectacular. This time it didn’t get much better (or was I spoiled yesterday?). When I woke up, we were docked in Trondheim. I didn’t really have a reason to go out, so I decided to stay in. I had breakfast, hung around the ship all day and did some computer stuff. Interesting was that all of a sudden puke bags had started appearing everywhere o n the ship. I found out why soon enough (although the bags seemed overkill ;)): the waves got a lot rougher today. We had waves splashing as high as deck 7 (one deck above the bridge). In the evening, I had dinner with some bread rolls and some sardines I had left in my cabin. I watched another spectacular sundown. I decided that I was gonna stay on the ship a bit longer. I originally was supposed to get off at Bodo, but since my next host was going to be on the Lofoten islands (Kabelvåg, to be exact), I decided that I needed to make the ferry trip anyway. I paid  a little bit of extra money and then went off to bed early again.

The trip today was very nice, but nothing near as spectacular as the one  yesterday. I enjoyed myself very much nonetheless

The next morning I woke up early hoping to see a beautiful sunrise. Instead, it was raining and grey. Nevertheless, it was very beautiful to see everything gain some color slowly while more and more daylight emerged. At 7.30 I had breakfast. Since I had paid so much for the trip on the ferry, I din’t have money for dinner. Instead I decided to eat as much as I could at breakfast and then have some bread rolls that I had in my cabin for dinner. I am glad I decided this, because this breakfast buffet was the biggest I have ever seen!

After eating as much as I could I spent some time walking around the ship and enjoying the marvelous views (they are truly amazing and I’m not even going to try to describe them here, check the gallery for examples) until we got to a place called Alesund. Since we had three hours in this town and it looked beautiful from the ship, I decided to get off. I had two goals: one was checking my email and sending a message to Joanna to explain what happened. The other was to climb up the hill next to Alesund and enjoy the view from 130m up high. Climbing up and enjoying the view was easy (climbing down was less pleasant for my knees ). My other goal proved to be more challenging. I am quite sure that Alesund is a secret marine intelligence base: I found about 50 wireless networks, not one of them being unprotected (unless it was commercial). I have never seen this in my life, especially not in a town that is so much in the middle of nowhere!

In the end I used one of the commercial ones since after two hours of searching I still had zilch I paid with my credit card as that seemed the easiest, but due to a fuckup in their system I ended up paying twice (great, one more thing I have to take care of, getting my money back). Anyway, I connected, pulled in over 300 new emails and posted a blog post that I had waiting. I saw and email from Joanna flash by that her hike had taken longer than expected and she hadn’t returned until 19:45. Glad I didn’t wait for her! I sent her an email back explaining what I did.

I got back on the boat, we left Alesund and carried on this amazing trip. I spent my time watching the truly amazing sundown from outside on the front of the ship (I’m the king of the world, anyone? ). There was heavy wind (I’d estimate at least force 8 or 9) which rocked the ship pretty hard, but I was having the time of my life (check me laughing in the pictures ). Another man came out, but he went back in, since he was almost blown off the ship. Guess there is an advantage to being a big guy after all :). Just as the sun was setting, the sister ship of our ship was passing by and they greeted each other with some loud horn blowing like two birds cheerfully singing in the sunset.

After sundown (frozen and beat up, but as happy as a man can get), I returned to my hut to edit some video (everyone waiting for the various videos: see, I’m working on it, just give me some time ) and go to bed later. What a beautiful, breathtaking, amazing day! This Hurtigruten is already definitely worth my money and supposedly it is only getting better and better as we go more north!

The next morning I went to the booking office to book my ticket first (I needed to be sure that I could actually be on the boat before packing up ). That was no problem, and as it was so much cheaper than I expected, I booked a ticket not only to Trondheim, but all the way up to Bodo (just above the arctic circle) as the lady said that the nature up there is really nice and it was still cheaper than what I had expected to pay for only going to Trondheim. With a ticket for three nights on the ship and three Breakfasts costing me 1901 NOK in my pocket, I left the booking office. I was so happy this had worked out, I was almost singing and dancing in the street (the fact that I can’t dance and am a horrible singer obviously keeping me from actually doing that )

I looked at my watch and saw that it was only 11.00, so I decided to climb up one of the hills surrounding Bergen (320m climb from sea level) and have a look at the view from up there. It was amazing! (pictures in the gallery soon) I decided to take the shuttle back down as the joints in my knee are not really happy carrying all that weight downhill (uphill went surprisingly well!).

After that I went home, bought some stuff to replace what I had used from Basil’s supplies, packed my stuff and cleaned up a bit for Basil. Before I left, I called Joanna to let her known I was coming as per her instructions. No response. Weird, but hey she could be in the toilet, shower or kitchen or something. I headed over to the other building. No Joanna. FUCK!! I waited and waited until it was 17:45 (boarding for the ship started at 18.00 and it would cost me about 45 minutes to get from where I was to the ship). Then I decided to slide the key under her door after making _really_ sure that it was actually her room.

I made my way to the boat, arriving in time to actually board, phew! I found my cabin and unpacked some of my stuff. Then I wandered around the ship waiting until we would leave (22.30, unfortunately in the dark). I was right in my suspicions: I single-handedly pulled down the average age by about 20 years in every room I entered Of course I fell asleep in the comfy chairs in the panorama lounge and woke up when we were well underway. Nevermind, no one was waving me off like you are supposed to on a cruise anyway

I went to bed early to have a good night’s sleep. Rocky, since the weather wasn’t very easy, but hey, it’s not like I can sleep anywhere