Tue, 22 Jul 2003

author Tim	location Måbødalen Camping og Hyttesenter, Hordaland, Norge
posted 08:46 CEST 23/07/03	section Europe2002/Europe/Norge ( all photos )

Forest, Frost and Fjords ( 32 photos )
A very diverse day yesterday, as we drove East towards the coast along the RV7 road, which interestingly is the same road my parents drove along the otherway back in 1976. We were in forest to start with, as we wound our way along through Gol and stopped at Ål to watch the Bergen-Oslo train go through and have some lunch.
Not much futher along, we were winding up through the mountains to the closed-for-seven-months-of-the-year Hardangervidda Pass. About here we started to wonder what those little specs of white were far away on the hill tops.
Our suspicions were confirmed when we stopped to go and play with the stuff. Snow. In Summer. Getting out to walk over to it for the obligatory snowball fight and photos, we were immediately hit with a cold wind, the reason the snow still exists from the winter falls. But we were swimming only a couple of days ago!
Back in the van to warm up, we kept east until the road started to fall back to sea-level in the most fascinating way. It was as if someone had taken a giant cork-screw and attacked the mountain with it, the resulting tunnels were then turned into roads where you drove in the top and out the bottom.
Upon reaching the bottom of a series of four or five such tunnels, about four kilometres in total, we stopped at a little "museum" in the middle of nowhere (well, actually right next to some very high steep fjord cliffs) to work out what these things were and where we were (none of this was on our maps).
It turns out we had missed the one thing in the area which we have circled and under-lined on our maps as Do Not Miss, and to get back to it we had to go back up the cork-screw thingamies again! This we did, and eventually noted the poorly-signposted turn-off to Vøringfossen just at the top of the corkscrews.
Perhaps the tourist buses, cars and campervans should have given it away, but we were too busy admiring the scenery the first time. This is a huge noisy waterfall with a hundered and fifty metre or so vertical drop, the highest in Norway. We wandered off through the forest in the direction of the noise, taking care to stay away from the cliffs (no child and adult proof fences in this country - they expect people to look after themselves, which I think is good since you see everything in its natural state).
It was quite a spectacular sight, as we trudged through a bit more forest then back to the start for a drop into our first Norge tourist shop, cloaked in the local fashion with grass and plants on the roof, presumably for insulation. Strange that we have seen so few such touristy shops, but I guess that's because we have stopped in so few big touristy places. I purchased the obligatory Moose soft-toy, which is now named Chocolate and sits to guard the van when we leave it for a while.
We then walked the other way to the "official" viewing platform where you got a good big-picture view of the falls, but not as close.
From there, we needed to attack the cork-screw one final time to head onwards, and we found a caravan park not far from the bottom. Both tired, we stopped in and got a site here in the quiet only interrupted by the noise of the river. From our van door, we can see the clouds around the high cliff-faces all around us - a nice area to spend a while.
I cooked dinner last night, but it had to be done again properly by Liz after I managed to drop the first load of pasta onto the ground as I was draining it. So it was more of a combined effort :)
We did some planning last night and will spend a day or two driving south from here along some highly-recommended scenic roads, maybe take in a bit of the coast, before heading back north through Bergen and continuing our journey mostly that way.

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