Country: Norway
Distance travelled:
Weather: Sunny

It was closer to midday when we finally woke today. I find a 3am bedtime and a cold morning are always a good reason to stay in bed a little longer. By the time we were heading back through the entry gate it was closer to 2pm. Having watched the combi-sized van ahead of us execute a quick u-turn and head back in, we paused briefly to pick their camera up from the middle of the road in front of us and return it to them then made good our escape.

The drive back to the turnoff at Olderfjord was highlighted by the high speed tour buses and madmen on bicycles that had been missing on our late evening approach two days earlier. We puzzled briefly over the herd of reindeer sitting smack in the middle of a patch of snow then turned our attention back to the road.

We turned east again, heading for Kirkenes and the Russian border. Passing Lakselv, a small town taking full advantage of its location by charging well above the typical price for fuel and expecting 40kr (about $8 AUD) for a token for the motorhome service point. We were not impressed when we realised this gave three minutes access to either the water tap or the cassette emptying equipment. We’re not that fast although with the incredible water pressure in Norway, I suppose the fresh water tank would have been filled. We didn’t bother, confident that there would be a better option further down the road. From Lakselv we decided to take a secondary road rather than the main highway since they both ended in the same location.

Now the mountains seemed more worn down that any others we had seen in Norway. There was more scree and at the waterline, pebbled beach rather than sand. The pine had mostly dropped away and now the trees were mostly birch (I think). Only an occasional building punctuated the hillsides, I think we saw more caravans and motorhomes parked in the multitudes of suitable places than permanent structures.

On the edge of one of the infrequent settlements as Mark accelerated up a hill a movement in the trees caught my eye. A moose bolted back into the trees, startled by the noise of the van. Further on, a splendid stretch of road ended suddenly with what can only be described as adventure roadworks. Not a soul in sight (it was late Sunday night) and with no directing arrows we found ourselves on a dirt track one car wide with wheel ruts so deep the undercarriage scraped repeatedly. The road improved for a few minutes and then we were back on dirt again, a hill climb this time with filthy chunks of snow bizarrely painted with fluorescent paint. A fox was spotted heading over the hill we were on and we pondered what he ate in this landscape barren to our eyes.

Stopping for dinner beside an unknown fjord, I had another attempt at fettuccine carbonara with more of the hoarded chicken from our freezer. All was going well until I dropped an egg! And not on the floor of the main habitation section, I dropped it right beside the passenger seat. Great, if I haven’t cleaned that up properly, we’ll be smelling egg for the next month or more. I continued with dinner and the results were quite satisfactory. Only the view let us down, since the low sun reflected off the fjord, glaring into the window so that we had to shut the blind.

Eventually we reached Kirkenes, another town with that slightly untidy look of a place used to being under snow for nine or ten months of every year. Signs warned of military zones, cameras watching, acceptable behavior near the border. Pausing on the outskirts of town, I dropped off the two travel bugs in a geocache I had selected while at Nordkapp and then we headed in. A distance sign pointing to Murmansk with text in Norwegian and Russian was the first of many cyrillic signs seen. We get the feeling there is quite a lot of cross-border interaction here. Finally we pulled up in a carpark overlooking the harbour with two other motorhomes and feel into bed after a long day of driving.

Kirkenes