June 2 & 3: Stave churches & hiking on the largest glacier in mainlandEurope
On Tuesday morning we woke up with the sun
– not that it ever fully went down – and headed down our little mountain to the
town of Sogndal. Sogndal isn’t a
particularly big town, but it’s a lot larger than the other scattered
settlements we had seen along the fjords.
Halfway down the hill we stumbled upon a red stave church, which really
set the tone for the day, which was to be filled with visits to the beautiful,
fairytale-style buildings.
After picking up groceries and repacking
the bags, we head to the tourist information center – a counter at the end of a
takeaway and ice-cream shop, where nobody spoke great English – and got on a
bus that would take us to our hire car.
Despite wanting to, a) rough it a little bit and, b) see Norway on the
cheap, we needed to hire a car for a couple of days for an activity we had
planned for Wednesday.
We hopped in the car – Nicholas repeating
to himself over and over that he needed to drive on the right-hand side of the
road – and set out to find another Stave church. One wrong turn and several tunnels later, we
were in a graveyard that surrounded another of the strange structures. The tombstones in the graveyard dated back a
few hundred years, but there were many recent ones too. While we stood around taking pictures, one
young boy came over and polished a fresh headstone. This made us feel a little bit like bad
tourists, so we left.
Snaking our way along the tourist road next
to the fjord, through tunnel after tunnel, we managed to cover a lot more
ground than we were able to with packs.
This car had heated seats – the holy grail of car features – and we put
them on despite not being particularly cold.
After driving along too many narrow, windy
roads (on the wrong side of the road, with not enough passing places if we
happened to see another traveller) we made our way to a Stave church listed on
the tourist brochure. The Urnes Stave
Church is a UNESCO listed site (I feel like Norway is basically comprised of
UNESCO listed sites?) because of three reasons:
1.
It’s the oldest Stave church
still standing in Norway
2.
It’s the oldest wooden building
still standing in Norway
3.
It’s the oldest wooden building
still standing in the world
We rocked up at the Stave church later than
anticipated, but didn’t really have any intention to go in anyway, so weren’t
looking at the time. When we pulled up
the car and went to the little house where the tickets were being sold, but a
man closed the door on us. Nicholas
knocked on the door.
The Urnes Stave Church
“Is the Stave church still open?” he asked.
“No, it’s just closed,” he replied.
A pretty middle-aged woman with a long
blonde plait interjected, saying that she could take us into the church,
despite the fact that she’d just locked it up.
“They can have ten minutes,” the man told
her.
“They can have as long as I give
them.” She turned to Nicholas. “You have to be sure that you want to go in,”
she said.
Nicholas looked at me and I nodded, so we
paid our fare and wandered up to the (very) old, wooden church. While other visitors were given a pair of
brochures and left to peruse at their leisure, the lady followed us up and
started giving us a thorough guided tour.
She walked us around and explained the carvings, the building techniques
and how the church was arranged. The
reason the wood was lasting so long, she explained was because the people who
erected the church had produced the wood to be self-preserving. 15-20 years before they felled the tree,
they cut off its limbs and left the tree to produce sap that would course
through the tree and add an internal layer of resin to the wood.
My favourite carving at the Urnes Stave Church - a horse/dog capturing a wingless dragon
Very little had been done in modernia to
maintain the site, because it was so well preserved, but a few years ago they
found one side of the building was sinking. They came in, fixed the sinking
part and thought their job was done.
However, because the belltower was added to the church around 600 years
after its initial build, the belltower was now off-center and they had to fix
that too.
We thanked her profusely and then head back
onto the road to see Feigumfossen – a 218m waterfall, considered one of Norway’s
most beautiful. Despite the rain,
slippery mud and wet mossy rocks (all a recipe for disaster) we climbed up and
up to see the waterfall up close. The
forest we walked through felt more like a subtropical rainforest than anything
you’d expect to find in Norway.
I’ve seen a few of the waterfalls we have
in Australia, and we’ve seen a few on our travels, but none so high so
close. The water appeared to fall in
slow motion, falling over itself and into the pool at its base. The violently flowing river at its base
seemed to flow at a completely different speed.
It looked frantic compared to the meditative flow from the mouth of the
waterfall.
Nicholas, being the clever little
rockhopper that he is, clamoured up the rocks to the base of the waterfall, becoming
so small and so dwarfed that he disappeared completely, blending into rocks
twice his height. It’s not such a
stretch that people believe giant humanoid trolls live in these places.
We found this wedged between some branches on our way back
We bought some blueberry jam from this tiny self-serve kiosk on our way back.
Perhaps because it was raining heavily, or
perhaps it was because we wanted to relive our time in Scotland (or, more
likely, perhaps we were feeling lazy) we slept in the car nearby, shielding our
faces from the midnight halflight.
The following morning was a morning I’d
been waiting for since we planned our Norway trip in Oslo – we were heading out
to kayak through a glacial lake and hike on the largest glacier in mainland
Europe!
The idea came about after a conversation we
had with our hosts in Moss, who pointed us in the direction of a glacier near
Bødo. There was a lot of glacial hiking
there, but none that fit in our price range.
Then we found Ice Troll, who offered the kind of trip we were after.
Our guide, Sam, was a Kiwi who got his
experience climbing glaciers in New Zealand.
Most of the glaciers there had melted to the point of becoming
inaccessible, so he’d come over to Norway to guide here instead. He was pretty excellent. He piled us into the dodgy-looking Ice Troll
van and drove us down to the glacial lake that pools at the base of the glacier
so that we could kayak across it to the glacier itself.
We rock-hopped and climbed up, until we
reached a dirty, sandy patch of snow, where we could strap on our crampons and
grab some ice-axes to take with us. I
confessed to Sam that I wasn’t super confident on ice, and when he harnessed
our group together he let me go behind him.
The other 5 people in our group were
American and all had a lot more money than we did, but this meant we could bond
with Sam over our mutual wild camping experiences.
The glacier itself had many more crevasses
than I’d expected, which all looked to be lit by a bright blue light. Sam also pointed out a few wells he referred
to as Moulins, which we could climb and abseil in if we did an overnight
trip. Nicholas and I decided to pencil
one in for another year in September.
A little ice cave under the glacier
A moulin - did you know you can abseil in these things? Definitely keen to give that a go.
We followed Sam along in single file and
occasionally he had to carve out a few steps for us with his ice axe. I mostly used mine to balance myself, by
sticking it into the ice walls. A
couple of times I used it to pull myself out of little ice bridges I slipped
into, created when soft snow falls over the mouth of a crevasse. I wasn’t the only one to fall into these
repeatedly, and I was glad we were all connected by rope, so nobody could fall
too far.
I came to prefer walking on the ice to
walking on soft snow – and perhaps even on grassy mountains – because there was
so little to get in the way, and it was so easy to carve your own path. Crampons are pretty nifty inventions, and I
decided I could definitely get into more ice-based activities (even if they
were a little bit terrifying sometimes).
For probably three hours we were led around
on the ice, with Sam producing a thermos of hot chocolate at one point, and all
of us sitting down on the cold snow to have lunch at another. Sam talked about the black sediment that
collected in the snow and mentioned how good it was for the skin, too. Naturally I was curious, and smeared it all
over my nose and cheeks on the way back down the glacier.
The rain held off for most of the day
hiking and luckily there was almost no wind – all in all, a perfect day for
being outdoors. We were, however,
grateful to be retiring to the car that night, because our shoes and socks were
soaked through.
So much snow!
About the Author
0 comments