The Plan
Yesterday night we went to bed not too late, because we knew we had a big day today. I didn’t sleep all too well, the matrass is a bit lumpy and I was on the top bed of the bunk. I tossed and turned a bit before falling asleep, and I woke up with a little bit of a lower back ache. I’m getting old! Although I put the alarm at 08:00, I was up before that, but it was way too late apparently, because all of our housemates had already left for the day.
We came to the Lofoten for one thing – hiking. There’s a few really nice trails in Norway, and one of them is yet to come (Besseggen in the Jotunheimen, Alex will know who lives there!), but today we have another one that’s on my list. Being in (almost) the most Western point of the Lofoten, there’s only one town further down the road, and we’re going to climb the mountain between Moskenes where our AirBnB is, and that town of Å i Lofoten. It’s called Tindstinden, and overlooks a few beautiful lakes, towns along the shoreline, and the Atlantic. You can see mainland Norway in the background, and if you’d look the other way, you’d see nothing for about 5'700 kilometers.
Breakfast
But first, breakfast. I was in charge of bacon-frying, and Paul was in charge of eggs-making. This is a very intricate procedure, because you never know how long to boil an egg before it gets too hard, or if it’s not long enough, snotty. And I have a very low tolerance for incorrectly boiled eggs. “Het is een natuurproduct!” is what my Dad says - and he’s right except products of nature can also be royally fucked up. But, Paul persevered and made us some totally delicious eggs. Today’s eggs have been boiled for 5 minutes give or take. Marina commented that they’re a bit too goopy, and we agree, so tomorrow he shall boil the egg for 30 seconds longer.
We had some nice salmon, salami, Sommarsalat, the eggs and toast. I made some Nescafe coffee, but it just isn’t as good for me as the Nespresso is. That’s OK, I’ll just make two cups to compensate! We pack our backpacks, and I find that for the last few hundred kilometers (and 19km of hiking), I’ve been toting around the coins that Marina had given me: Swedish, Danish and Norwegian Crowns. I decide I have no use for them right now, so I toss them aside. We then put on our spiffy new hiking pants, and Paul puts on his blue hiking shoes, we jump in the car and make the 4km trip to the trailhead. Lots of people hike to Munkebu, but not us. We’re going up up up!
The Trail
We start off at the trailhead just a kilometer or so NorthEast of Tind. We park the car and draw a nasty conclusion: Maybe I did need those coins after all! The parking here is paid, and it’s one of those honor-systems, where you grab an envelope from a little kiosk, put in the required NOK 50 and put your name/address on the slip, taking the stub and putting it in your car. Drat! I just tossed the coins in the drawer at the AirBnB. Luckily, Paul has a EUR 10,- note, so we figure that will have to do. Paul gleefully writes my home address on the slip though, so that when I get the parking ticket, he can laugh at me a little bit. I acquiece.
We make our way up the trail, and the first few hundred meters it’s quaint. Then, the slope steepens and we’re pretty clear that we’re in for it. Although the hike is only ~3km to the peak of the mountain here (from sea level to 492m / 1'600ft), the slope is the thing that kills you. We’re attacking this mountain-let on all fours. The terrain is rough, there is hardly any marked path, the only reason we know we’re headed in the right direction is on account of the stomping-feet-hoofmarks of the humans before us. Every now and again we see a few folks, they are all going up-hill too.
I kind of get annoyed at my Apple watch - every few minutes it does the ’taptap' on my wrist to ask me if it should stop recording my workout, as it clearly thinks I am doing nothing. In fact, I am panting and my lungs are on the tip of my tongue, it’s just I’m not making much forward progress so the silly thing thinks I’m not hiking. Well, Apple, my heartrate of 170 disagrees!!
In the middle of the trail, in for me a somewhat random location, we find a mailbox. It is not locked, and in it is a logbook in which I happily write my geocaching signature “Pim from CH” with the date. There are no geocaches on this trail, and we’re about to enter a national park, so there will not be any on the summit either. This will be my ersatz-geocache :-)
The higher we get, the more stunning the views are. We really did choose a good day to go hiking here, the temps are high (15C / 60F) and perfect for hiking. There’s almost no wind, the sun is bright and you can see really far. Under us, the towns of Tind, Sørvågen, Moskenes and end of the road Å i Lofoten are all smiling up to us. Some really beautiful lakes are in view too - Stuvdalsvatnet and Sørvågvatnet from whence we came, and Tindsvatnet on the other side of the mountain. On the ridge up, you can see all these lakes and towns, and every now and again a ferry bobs up and down the ocean, mostly going from Moskenes to Bodø, as we’ll do tomorrow morning. But first, we have to hike back down.
We have a spot of lunch and I eat some Tikkels, and we bounce. The way down is not as much fun for me. I have a mild fear of heights, so this trail is really not for me. I don’t really have a problem going up, however I do have a bit more difficulty going downhill. At one point, I am afraid I have to report there are chains and ropes to help climb up/down, and I cannot put myself to doing it. I hemm and haw, and ultimately just YOLO it and, as if often the case, the step down is really only 40cm, and my fears here are irrational. After that little victory, the trip down gets easier. And all-in, we spend 2.25hrs going up this hill but only 1.25hrs going down it. We take a few … shortcuts, and end up taking a slightly different route down than up. We returned to the car at around 14:00.
When we were up there, we saw that the E10 ends in Å i Lofoten, and it makes a nice little loop there to turn around. We looked it up: The E10 goes from here all the way to Luleå in Sweden, an 847 kilometer highway. So we had to go check out that end-point, and we took a picture of Tessa there: end of the road for you!
What else ?
Well, yesterday Paul cooked a fantastic meal for us (Red Pasta), and we had also bought what I call my dejetlag steak, which is broccoli, potatoes, sauteed onions and mushrooms, and a big steak. Big is not done in Norway (the meat here is pretty pricy), so we did Big-ish. We decided to move the blog from blogger to a self-hosted solutiion (based on Hugo), out of principle:
- I wanted to have a photo roll at the bottom of each post (as you see down below).
- And, if you click on a thumbnail, I want it to show you the full resolution picture with a little caption.
- To do this, I don’t want to end up editing javascript and HTML as would be the case for Blogger.
- Ideally, I would just add a link to a Google Photos gallery, but this is not available at all.
So out of pure rage and on silly principle, I decided to quit Blogger and move to a Hugo hosted site on Paul’s server. That decision was quickly made, and it took us the rest of the evening (from 15:00 - now: 23:20), to convert verything and build the server + SSL certs + photos and such. But: we have what we want and the next time we do a roadtrip, this will be trivial :-) I will also convert our 2013 roadrip to the UK + IE, and 2010 roadtrip from New York to Los Angeles, into the same formatting. It’s slick!
Tomorrow morning at 11:00 we drive down the street and into the harbor of Moskenes, to take the ferry to Bodø, the one which we’ve seen come and go a few times already. Tomorrow we’ll be on it, for four hours. The car has 240km of autonomy, and we’ll need 120km to get to our first Supercharger in Storjord. I guess you could say we really did plan these few days well!!
Pictures of the Day
