The Update #19 - All or Nothing

I had initially given this story the title: Taking it slow. Because I honestly felt like we hadn’t done much this week. Especially not a lot of hiking. Jap always writes a short summary of the day every day and I try to make a story of it at the end of the week. I started typing and said that this week we didn’t do 4 hikes in a week and that we had taken it very easy. However, then I got to the first day and one of the first words I read there was: hiking… Then I scrolled through to see how many hikes we actually had done this week. It turned out not to be 4, but still 3… Hahaha. That’s what Norway does to you… if you only did a big hike 3 days out of 7, then you haven’t really done anything. hahaha. Now that I scroll through the summaries, I realize that we actually did quite a lot again this week. Just read:

Sunday: Despite the fact that we had done a long hiking yesterday (I said it, right away, already that word, hike, haha) with a lot of altitude meters, we thought that we could still handle a hike. For this we first had to drive a bit and so we started our day early. The walk would go to a viewpoint over islets of the Lofoten. Once we got to the start of the walk it turned out that we had to pay 13 euros to park. We starting huff and puff and where thinking up all sorts of excuses. We found it hard to admit to each other that we really didn’t feel like going for another walk. Hahaha, we already had such beautiful views and the legs felt a bit tired. But luckily we cought ourselves in time and so we drove on to Svolvær, which must be a somewhat larger town. When we arrived here it turned out that we had forgotten that it was Sunday and that a lot of things are closed here in Norway on Sundays. The town was therefore somewhat deserted and the shops were all closed, except for a Thai takeaway. So we ordered pad Thai for lunch here, delicious! After that we spend a long time in….. how could it be otherwise… a baker working on the new update. We also wrote to a next workaway address because we had not yet received a response from the first workaway. Very soon after sending our message we got very nice and positive response. So we have found our address in Tenerife! In the meantime it was already the end of the afternoon and we wanted to drive towards the Ferry to the Vesteralen. Only then I thought that was still a cool rock here that you could go to of which we had already seen many photos. Curious as we are, we couldn’t help but quickly put the location in the navigation and drove there. From below it looked really nice already, but for the real view we had to climb up stairs again. It was only one km to get a good view of the rock. So after a moment’s hesitation, because we didn’t really feel like walking again, we started again on the stairs that we got to know so well the day before. Fortunately it wasn’t as far as yesterday and we were already ‘quickly’ (in an hour) at the viewpoint. The last part was quite a bit of scrambling, but we are used to that by now. A lot of people were rock climbing on the rock and it looked really impressive. You could climb all the way to the top, we will pass on that. We just sat and watched these people for a while and Jap was able to take beautiful images with the drone. Then it was back to the car. In the parking lot we ran into Joep, Jaimy and Phillis again. We chatted with them for a while after which we drove to a place to take a shower that Joep had recommended to us. And what a shower it was.. We had to pay 5 euros and then we could take an unlimited shower, the water was really warm and the jet was very strong. As you can tell we were very happy with this shower and as we do, the grade of the shower is….drum roll please…..a 9.5 (-0.5 point because it wasn’t free). We had something to eat here and then drove to the Ferry that we will take to the Vesteralen tomorrow.

Today we had a really quiet day. We started the day by finishing our piece for vanlifemagazine, vanergize. In this we give creative sports exercises that you can do inside the bus. nice huh? We had already taken some pictures for this yesterday, but some text had to be added. Then we went to the Vesteralen. For this we had to take the boat again and we went to the supermarket. On the way, as a real wildlife spotter, I spotted 2 more moose. This time both with antlers! The counter is at 9! At our new camper place we finished the new update and putt on the website. I made a delicious lasagna and the rest of the evening we watched movies and gave our legs some rest, as tomorrow there is another long hike on the program. Jap also almost demolished our back door in the evening, it could no longer close. Fortunately, he also solved it himself, otherwise that would have been a problem because it is quite cold and with an open door it is difficult to drive. After some cursing and finally some quiet thinking, he managed to bend it back and everything could close normally again.

The next day there was a big hike on the program, 13 km with a lot of altitude meters. At first we were both unsure whether we felt like another hike, but around 11 o’clock we set off anyway. The hike started with a steep climb but soon we were at the top and walked over a ridge for the rest of the time. We had nice views of lakes and the sea. Along the way we stopped regularly to eat something or take some pictures and videos. It was quite cold but really perfect walking weather. After 8 km we finished the hardest part and we walked back via/along the beach for the rest of the walk. Despite the fact that we have hiked a lot in recent weeks, we could really enjoy the walk. It was really different from all the other walks we’ve done in Norway so far. It was also a lot less strenuous and it was nice to take a walk around instead of an in and out walk. Because it was not such a difficult walk, we had a lovely chat along the way and enjoyed the views. That is sometimes quite difficult if you are plodding up a mountain or have to climb a million steps, hahaha. After 5 hours of walking we were back at Bob, tired but satisfied. It wasn’t a spectacular walk, maybe we’re just starting to get spoiled with all the beauty here in Norway, but a nice one. Then we drove, with a pitstop at the supermarket, to the next camper spot. Here we had pancakes for diner and read a book for the rest of the evening with our feet up high.

It was a different day than usual, we didn’t hike but did something else super fun. But for that we first had to drive a bit, to Bleik, a small town on the coast. Because here is the largest puffin / puffin colony in Norway, a bird that we really associate with “the artics”. So we really needed to see them! Once in Bleik, we started looking for a company that could help us with this. This turned out to be a bit more difficult than we initially thought. But eventually we were able to get a spot on a boat later that afternoon. We were actually right on time or almost too late because the puffins are already on their way to the open sea, towards Greenland. The breeding season is over and last year they had last set out for the puffins on this very day. Because we are a bit late in the season, there are only a few hundred puffins instead of thousands. The boat we went on was a real old fishing boat and it was sailed by two old fishermen. One gentleman was the guide and he told the best stories. For example, if the parents of a puffin chick think the chick is old enough to take care of itself, they leave overnight and never come back. When the puffin young becomes hungry after a few days, it will start looking for food on its own, even though it cannot fly. He said (with a wink of course) that human parents could learn something from this. If you want your adolescent children to leave the house, you just have to stop feeding them and they will automatically look for their food elsewhere, hahah. And like this he had many more stories. His stories distracted us during the trip to the rock. The sea was quite rough and the boat went up and down a lot. Soon we came to the rock where the puffins nest and saw puffins swimming on the waves. They were really much smaller than we expected but super cute. Jap has shot more than 400 photos! Hahah, but because we moved so much it was very difficult to take good sharp pictures with a zoom lens. Luckily we saw a lot of puffins and many of them often had a whole lot of fish in their mouths. Besides seeing the puffins, there were also really huge white-tailed eagles flying around the rock, around 10. Unfortunately they were here for a reason, as the skipper called it, for a 3 star dinner, the puffins. The eagles eat two in a day ?. At one point the skipper threw two more fish into the water to lure the eagles, which allowed us to see them from a lot closer. And as he put it himself, to save two more puffins. But we could indeed see them from up close and wauw those animals are big, really huge! We floated around the rock for quite some time and watched the puffins and eagles. The wind was still blowing strongly and on the way back the waves had grown a bit bigger. We occasionally went over a wave so that I had to try to swallow a scream (of fun). Back at Bob’s in the evening we were still completely full of adrenaline, it was a really great experience!

The next day it was predicted that the weather would be much better, meaning in Norway, it would be sunny but still quite cool (4 degrees). We wanted to do a walk not far from here and since the weather forecast would be really better at the end of the day, we chose to take it easy in the morning. We read, had a nice lunch with risotto andused this time to book the boat to the Canary Islands. On October 1 we get on the boat and then get off again on October 3 in Tenerife. But more on that another time ?. Anyway, after that we went for the hike. The weather looked great and the sun was shining, so we were really looking forward to it. We had to climb a lot in the beginning, but then we walked a part again over a ridge from which we would continue to the top. But unfortunately when we arrived at the ridge the clouds were flying at us. It was already very windy but now we also could not see a whole lot. Every now and then we could get a glimpse of how beautiful the view could be. Once at the top we really didn’t see anything of the view. Which really sucks. We had walked for 1.30 hours to get to the top without being rewarded. We took shelter from the wind behind a piece of rock, but unfortunately this didn’t make it better. We soon got very cold and had to go back, without a view. On the way back we both felt our legs and we took it easy. We have fantasized a lot along the way about what our life will be like in Tenerife and that we are also really looking forward to our road trip to get there. After almost four months in Scandinavia, we really look forward to another environment. The wind kept blowing very hard even when we got back to the camper, at times we were almost afraid that we would blow away with the bus.

I can be brief about the next two days. We haven’t done that much. Saturday we could possibly go on a whale watching tour, for which we lingered in the area and used the time to really get going with the movie of Sweden. Of course we did this at a bakery. It was very cozy in the bakery, but it felt more like we were in the restaurant of the local retirement home than at the bakery. Unfortunately, the boat trip was canceled because there was too much wind and therefore the waves were too high, just like it had already been canceled the 4 days before. There was a chance that we could join on Sunday, but we will need to wait and see. We had approached the company to ask if we could come along for free in exchange for photos and mentions on our instagram page and in our blog. It may sound crazy, but apparently a lot of people do this. And the price of the whale safari was too high for our budget so we thought let’s just try it. And it actually worked. But because we were allowed to join for free, this was of course only possible if there were spots left. We did get a free tour of their whale museum which was also very interesting. The guide knew a lot about whales and talked about them with a lot of passion. We’ll have to wait and see if we can join on Sunday and you will read about that in next week’s story.