First night of camping ended up at 2AM and us running back to the car due to being too optimistic about Norway’s weather in autumn.

However, it was nice just to sit down in the middle of nowhere with a view to a waterfall and to cook some food, and talk shit about city life.

Gudvangen

It turns out that in Norway it was raining all August and the rain did not stop in September. At this point I started to think if I did a major mistake yoloing the weather research. Most of the nights we didn’t even bother with the tent and just slept in the car. It seemed like a drier and warmer way to sleep with very little sacrifice of comfort.

There was one nice day when the clouds cleared and we managed to squeeze in a hike:

Whilst on our way back from our hike in Bakka, we saw a French guy just backpacking through the rain. He was hitchhiking and traveling by bus through Norway. He ended up in our camp. I watched him put a tent through a heavy rain. Fuck, he had worst than us. We talked for a bit. Apparently he was traveling around Norway until December. It was his dream.

It is interesting how you feel shitty realizing that you might have timed the season bad, it is pissing down with rain, you are moody, your girlfriend is even moodier, yet you see that you are not alone with your shitty holiday decisions and everyone is just moving forward. So you too start moving forward.

Before you get used to them, mountain have this devouring effect. You can stand at the most random spot and simply watch.

Stana Gard

Eventually the rain started to get the best of two of us. The initial idea was to camp all the way, but the batteries seem to start running low. A little bit of luck and we found a small house to rent on a shore of a fjord just two hours away from Gudvangen. The house was built in 1930s and it made you want to start your poetry career as soon as you open the door.

The Bulgarian

Meanwhile the weather forecast started to get better. Initially seeing all this rain I have buried the original plan to hike for four days to Trolltunga from Kinsarvik. However, now it seemed like we are back in the game. The only problem was the final cloudy days that we need to kill. And here we were back to that parking lot life.

The parking spot was in a really nice, 24 hours, with a toilet. The only problem was that on the first day some guy with French plates pulled over and took a massive shit that killed the toilet for everyone and just bounced. I was still taking a nap when I saw him come out. After seeing the smirk on his face, I new right there that we might have a problem.

Soon after a new character entered the movie, the Bulgarian. A retired miner who worked in Australia and was apparently traveling with a camper, just fishing around the world. He was proper pissed off that the toilet was clogged and quickly started the investigation: “was it that car?”, “shit, it was probably that fatty”, “fucking hell, what were the numbers of the car?”. I am pretty sure I was his primary suspect, since when he came back from fishing it was just me and the crime scene at that point.

Kinsarvik – Stavali

Once the weather cleared, we stayed one night at a hostel to prepare for the four day hike. The next day we left my car near some grocery store and took a bus to Kinsarvik — our starting point. The hike itself was beautiful. I lost the water bottle almost at the start, but in Norway it is a useless thing to carry anyways. At some point we lost the markings of the trail too, so had to improvise.

Luckily we made it to Stavali. There was a point when it got dark, no cabin insight, rain had made the rocks wet and slippery, and at the most crucial moment my Garmin Instinct was just as lost as we were. It is interesting how in these kind of situations your mind becomes 100% focused on the survival, switching-off the pain, making you run over the slippery rocks in almost complete darkness, yet you make no mistakes. Nothing but a blind optimism that drives somebody in the moments like these.

It was great to finally reach the cabins and be greeted by a fiery full moon rising from the peaks of the mountains.

Stavali – Torehytten

The next day I had this pulsating headache that got worse when I moved. The good news was that there was another 20km hike ahead of us. Eventually, I just managed to walk it off, and that was an extra layer of beauty!

Mountain lakes, few random lemmings, and just quiet. For 20km.

I wish I had taken more photos of the Hårteigen mountain. It was definitely a highlight of the hike to see a mountain on top of the mountains. The good news was that Hårteigen turned out to be our new view from the porch.

Torehytten – Tyssevassbu

The next morning we were greeted by a helicopter. It landed next to our cabin and dropped off the cleaning guy with his dog. We packed our stuff and left for Tyssevassbu. This third stretch of 20km was by far the easiest. Whilst it was third day of the same difficulty trail, the body and mind seems completely used to it. There is no more pain. The kilometers just keep clocking. Rocks of different type become your new social media feed, only it makes you feel peaceful and fulfilled.

On this stretch you get to see large patches of hardened layers of snow. The ponds that form from it melting are actually refreshing to swim.

We have also encountered some eagles. First, just one of them started to circle us, then two others joined. Between us and them, not sure who was more entertained.

Tyssevassbu – Trolltunga – Tyssedal

On our final day of the hike we decided to wake up early and beat the crowds at Trolltunga. As the dawn was just breaking we were already walking. The trail itself was more of the same: lots of Norwegian sudoku.

Even though we had to backtrack multiple times and therefore took longer than expected, we managed to be amongst very few already at Trolltunga. We actually had the whole thing for ourselves. Initially I thought that maybe it was an overkill to get there so early before everyone else arrived only to realize 30 minutes later that, nope, I was right. People fucking kill shit.

It is a strange feeling to see crowds again after you have spent three days in the middle of nowhere with little to no contact with other humans. And then you see this stream…

According to my watch, we clocked about 76km in total. This picture encapsulates my mood at the end best:

The end

We thought about going to the Lysefjord next. However, in those four days it felt like we downloaded a torrent worth terabytes of data, most of which we didn’t even have time to process even partially. Going somewhere else felt like pouring water into a glass which was already beyond full. So we just bought the ferry ticket from Sweden to Poland and left for Sweden.