Scandinavia Trip: Up the Spiral, across the fells of Telemark, and to the fjords

[cjsmith]

*** Tue Sept 24:

The hotel provided a nice big breakfast in the morning. I had tea, orange juice, cereal, bread and butter, and I tried some hard cracker bread because Arne had said it was typically Swedish and I wanted to try local stuff. It was good with butter on it. I don't know if that's how it is normally eaten.

We watched guests stack their dishes neatly in the to-wash cart, and I thought to myself, no wonder people get annoyed at Americans; most of us would never be neat and helpful like this, especially not back home.

It was twenty of ten when we were ready to go, and we decided to give up on the bookshop. We didn't know where we could park near it and it wouldn't be open for another twenty minutes. We caught E18 out of Oslo, westbound.

Norway is particularly known for road tunnels, and we saw our first one in the town of Drammen: "Spiralen", or The Spiral, winds six full turns around as it corkscrews upward through a mountain, to emerge at the top with a lovely view of the city and its river. Even knowing it was there, and knowing where it was ("behind the hospital, along a well-marked road") we spent a half hour looking for it. The problem, of course, was that we had no idea where the hospital was. One of our early attempts was to pass up the sign for "Sentrum" (downtown) and continue on E18. That took us into a tunnel that emerged only once we had passed outside the city limits. Oops. :-) When we eventually did find the place, there was a coin-operated ticket machine and we had no idea how much to pay. 15kr appeared to be associated with the Spiral, but so did two hundred or so. And us without a dictionary. We asked an old man sitting in his car. He claimed to know little English, but assured us that the 15kr price was correct. I told him "Takk for hjelpen" and he instantly said something surprised-sounding in Norwegian. I said no, that's the only thing I know how to say. He said I said it well. I was all happy.

Back in town we passed, among other things, a store that appeared to sell school books. I pleaded, and we stopped long enough for me to run in. We weren't at all sure we were in a legal place to park. Quickly I returned in triumph with my prizes: a tiny Norwegian/English dictionary, and a volume of Calvin and Hobbes to translate later.

The Spiral was just the first amazing tunnel we would see. Others along our route had turns also, although no others were spirals; they also included climbs and descents, and some had exits. Longer tunnels (especially near cities) tend to be wired for radio, program "P1" or "P4" on various frequencies depending on locale. Must ask: are these state-run radio stations, or what?

Continued westward through the Vestfold region and on to Telemark, "cradle of skiing". In a small town with some kind of museum, we parked in an area we hoped was legal: a parking lot with a lectern set up and quite a few people gathered. We asked two policemen in a nearby car what the occasion was. They said it was the opening of a new bus terminal. That explained the speeches and the girls' band. I felt sorry for the band; they got to play for thirty seconds, and had to stand around in uniform listening to lengthy speeches. The museum, of course, was closed. This became a theme for the trip.

Travelling ever farther westbound, we discovered that when there is one lane per direction and a shoulder not quite wide enough for a car, it is customary for slower traffic to pull onto the shoulder to allow faster traffic to pass. Later we lost the shoulder, and later still we learned that any road with one lane per direction is a pretty good road. Anything wide enough for one lane per direction has a painted center line and solid white edge lines. If a road narrows further, it gets dashed white edge lines and no center line. Sometimes such a road allows two cars to pass side-by-side. Other times, as we would soon see, it barely allows one car to proceed.

In the high country of Telemark, the "fells of Telemark", we felt like we were on another planet. We were way above the tree line, which in this part of the world is 2500 feet. Mostly, there was rock, lichen, a stiff cold wind, and lakes. We found a tunnel through a solid rock hill, with an alternate route alongside it. We wondered at that; are tunnels so fun to build that they are put in even where another road exists? Later we learned that the tunnel can be used year-round, and the other road cannot. In winter the snow is too hard-packed to plow, and the high winds can blow a car right off into the water.

We did see a few houses in this remote, stark land. We have no idea what these people do for a living or where they get their food.

Night falls slowly here. I guess that's to be expected: the path of the sun is more slanted, the farther north you go. This is the land of eternal twilight. In this slowly deepening night we came to Odda, at the very southernmost end of a branch of a fjord. This was my first ever view of a fjord. We found the major hotel, the Hardanger, facing the water. We got the second-to-last room. She told us it was "old", and not renovated yet. We wouldn't have known until we spent some time in it. It had a beautiful view of the fjord. It also had our towels folded into clever decorative patterns on top of the tidy down comforters. The two main beds had a pattern reminiscent of origami salt-cellars, and the daybed had a swan!

We parked in back of the hotel, up a hill, and dragged our stuff inside before walking down the street toward food. I ate at "Peppe's Pizza", a chain started (so the bilingual menu claimed) by an American woman and her Norwegian husband. The web address is www.peppes.no. Apparently .no is Norway. I decided I had to be weird. I got the six-topping pizza: pepperoni, extra cheese, garlic-flavored meatballs, satay-flavored chicken, peanuts, and sweet corn. It was delicious. I have been so hungry this trip. Meanwhile Rob polished off a banana split.

Odda is a major power-industry and chemical-industry town. From the balcony of our room we could see a chemical plant on an island in the fjord, and a power plant off to the right up the shore. Unfortunately, the balcony was almost warmer than the room itself. We asked the desk for help. The desk clerk offered to bring us an "oven" (electric space heater). She came up and fiddled with the radiator, but it was clearly not responding. I sat down and started to write this journal.

Not long afterward, the electricity went out. Oops! We called the desk again, as I dug out a Photon micro-light. They had been trying to fix the heat and had goofed. Soon we had both heat and light.

Neither of us took any drugs this evening, and I had a difficult time falling asleep. Am I becoming dependent on melatonin and Sominex?