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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