Kayaking, day three: Ria's 11th birthday

It was not quite the Harry Potter birthday Ria was hoping for, but waking up in a pretty yellow tent nestled in a knee-deep field of soft green grasses and white and pink flowers along a deep and magnificent fjord in western Norway was a pretty close second for Ria.

 

Ria and I were back in the tandem together, and led the group across the main fjord and into a smaller fingerling fjord, an absolutely magical experience. We had a beautiful day, spending lunch perched on a steep hillside. Liselotte brought out cake and sang the Norwegian birthday song, complete with a little dance, for Ria. It was delightful, and I think that Matt was at least as pleased as Thom and I were, although this may have had to do with seeing Liselotte doing the little dance than with anything else. Or maybe it was because he likes cake.

 

I gave Ria her gifts at dinner: a frisbee, which turned out to be quite popular with Matt and Jason, and a tiny stuffed hedgehog wearing a party hat. Ria named it Mat, after Matt, but to spare his fragile ego she assured him that the pudgy little hedgehog's name is short for Mathilda. Matt saw right through that. And Liselotte made cheesecake for us, over a whisperlite stove, on the side of a fjord. Amazing.

 

Our camp site was again on a hillside, and near our tent was a large rock on which a local bird had made a scrape nest and payed two pretty brown eggs. We never did identify the parents of the eggs, but think they are probably gulls or possibly oyster catchers.

 

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Kayaking, day two

Liselotte warned us that today would be the longest day, and that we might face headwinds. This makes it sound a lot easier than it actually was, so it was a good thing it was Thom's turn to tandem with Ria and I shared a kayak with John.

 

Almost immediately after launching we faced straight into what felt like a hurricane, or at least way more wind than the photos of happy kayakers on glassy water featured on the website. The first day we covered 8km; today it was closer to 24, and it was hard going. Jason and Matt did incredibly well, and Kieran and Ron improved significantly. John and I had a wonderful time paddling together - we have similar stroke speeds and both like to hug the shore where the water is infintesimally calmer.

 

Much of the day was spent in the main channel of Sognefjord, which is wide and stunningly beautiful, deep and dark, and, at least on this day, a cauldron of waves. We regularly got nailed with heavy waves, and were absolutely drenched much of the day. Towards the end of the day, Liselotte hitched Thom and Ria's kayaks to hers with a tow rope and gave them a much-deserved hand through the headwind and the steep waves. Thom paddled hard all day. It is more than twice as hard to paddle a tandem without a true partner than with, given the poor angle the person in the rear has with the boat, the inability to take any breaks, and the difficulty of overcoming inertia alone.

 

That night we camped on a narrow peninsula, in a field I called Entre les Deux Mers, that was romantically beautiful in a breath-taking way.

 

The social dynamics of the group have evolved significantly. Jason, who greeted us so cheerfully, turns out to be quite quiet and observant but not very chatty. Matt, wearer of the oddly provocative t-shirt, spends most of his time harassing Ria, which is a poorly disguised attempt to hide the fact that he actually kind of likes her. John is the narrator of the group, which is great because he has great powers of observation and spots things that are interesting, beautiful, or unusual. Ron and Kieran have a beautiful grandfather-grandson relationship that the rest of us wish we could have had with our grandfathers. And Liselotte is professional, calm, and an absolute font of information about this region of Norway. We all truly appreciate her guiding, and are in awe that she can paddle hard all day, then make an amazing dinner for all of us, wake before the rest of us and make a hot breakfast, and remain cheerful and look freshly showered each day. It is a mystery, since the rest of us are decaying noticeably.

 

Night Entre les Deux Mers started early as we were all knackered after this long, hard day. I think we were all asleep by eight. Our tents were near each other, and some time in the middle of the night I awoke and could hear snoring from all the tents, and found the sound to be oddly soothing and comforting.

 

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Kayaking, day one

Breakfast at the hotel: a madhouse of elderly Canadian tourists. One lady asked Ria to explain the two kinds of milk to her. Ria said that lett means light, or skim, milk, and hell means whole milk. A Canadian man, forgetting that Norwegian is not a Romance language, interrupted to say that lett means milk, that it's like lait. Ria said politely, "I think that melk means milk, actually."

 

We walked to the beach where the kayak tour began, and were cheerfully greeted by Jason, another client, a man in his mid-30s from South Africa now living in London, and less cheerfully by his friend Matt, also from South Africa via London, who was well inked and wearing a t-shirt that said Kitten Tits and had a pair of kitten heads in profile right where you'd expect them to be given the message conveyed. Matt took one look at the child (Ria) and his expression conveyed a distinct desire to escape. Not a kid lover, apparently. I told Ria that he rubbed me the wrong way, but that I could be swayed. At the moment, however, he had not made a good first impression. Coming late to the party were Kieran (18, English) and his granddad Ron.

 

Once we were all in place, we met our guide Liselotte (23, Norwegian) and the kayak tour started with several hours of preparation: getting gear together, going through safety instructions, more gear fussing, distributing food among the eight of us, loading gear on a trailer, driving through several unbelievably long tunnels, getting gear off the trailer, and then fussing with the gear again.

 

We finally shoved off the beach after five; we had started the process at 9:30 a.m. Ria and I shared a tandem kayak, and Thom shared one with our last companion: a stereotypical Aussie named John. John is 64, with a large bushy white beard, a belly like a barrel, and the skin of someone who has spent many years in the outback, which he has. He has many years of kayaking experience, and was a great kayaking companion.

 

We immediately crossed the fjord in a brisk pace, and it quickly became clear who the strong kayakers are. John and Thom paddled well together and set a strong pace. Matt and Jason had never been kayaking, or so they said, but they might have been ringers given their excellent strokes, easy synchronicity, and strong paddling. Ria and I were the slowest, as Ria could not paddle the whole time and was too short to be able to make an efficient stroke. And in the only yellow kayak in the otherwise all-red fleet came Kieran and Ron in what Thom called the Rule Eight Boat, named after rule eight of the rules governing right of way among boats: regardless of who has the right of way, each craft is responsible for avoiding a collision. They had some challenges with steering, and as a result ended up paddling roughly twice the distance as the rest of us, giving Kieran a handful of blisters. Good thing chicks dig scars.

 

We camped that evening on a bare hillside with a few flat spots, after hauling our kayaks up into a derelict boathouse across old, whitened logs. Liselotte made us a fabulous dinner and we slept happily under the warm glow of the nearly midnight sun.

 

 

 

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Going kayaking

Today we leave for a five-day kayaking trip in the fjords, so we won't be posting anything for a while. Don't panic, Mom, it doesn't mean we've drowned. Just that we've paddled out of wifi range.

 

 

 

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Traveling to Flåm

Our morning train left Bergen's pretty railway station and headed into the fjord-raked countryside. We passed through several tunnels and stopped ever-so-briefly at several tiny, picturesque villages, ending up in Myrdal.

 

We crossed to the tracks on the opposite side and boarded a historic train, the interior lined with wood, which headed down a steep grade (1:18) through many tunnels, past waterfalls and magnificent canyons, and along precipitous ledges.

 

At Flåm we and all the other tourists disembarked, at just a few feet above sea level, and joined the throngs of tourists from a cruise ship docked in front of our hotel.

 

We had a picnic lunch on our balcony with a view of a mountain meadow, and dinner at a restaurant with a Viking menu. The food was surprisingly delicious and artfully arranged. It was a magnificent meal.

 

 

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Bergen 2

Bergen has around a quarter million people in a pretty valley fairly far among the fjords. The center of town is an active port, with a fish market, a historic district, and many pricy shops and restaurants. Yes, a soft serve ice cream is $11.

 

Thom spent much of the day sleeping off a cold he caught from Ria, exacerbated by jet lag. Ria and I went to the Hanseatic Museum and walked through the historic port district. The museum showed the interior of the pretty port buildings as they appeared around 800 years ago, which was fascinating in its smallness and darkness.

 

In the evening the three of us took the funicular to the peak of one of the seven mountains and had a fantastic dinner at the top.

 

 

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Bergen, Norway

We had an uneventful flight - the best kind - and on arrival in Bergen our airbnb host's handsome young son, Lars Henrik, picked us up in his black Audi Q5 and gave us a driving tour of Bergen. It is a beautifully romantic port town, the hillsides dotted with white houses sporting colorful tile roofs. The town's nickname is the city among the seven mountains, and the view from the top of the one we drove up was breathtaking. Lars's family, too, are sailors and they keep a 44-foot boat in the harbor here.

Our flat's wall of windows faces the harbor and the historic fishing village, and is sunny and light with a nice kitchen and two bedrooms. We napped, made a simple dinner, and in the evening walked around the harbor to the active historic district where we admired the many boats, cafés, and shops, and wandered through the fish market as it was closing and folding up.

 

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Overview

Thom, Ria and I will be spending a month in Scandinavia, and this chronicle is for our friends and family. At Ria's Waldorf school, she has been studying the Norse myths this year, fourth grade, and this trip celebrates and reinforces the geographical and cultural connections with those stories.

The first week we spend in western Norway, kayaking in the fjords. The second week we'll be in Stockholm, and for the third week we're chartering a sailboat from Stockholm to the Åland Islands in western Finland. The fourth week is split: first a few days in Finland, then the rest of the week in Iceland.