nawl

It was a trip involving many different forms of transportation.

We took the bus to Halhjem, then the ferry from Halhjem to Våge, then bicycled across the island to the cabin.

At this point, things are much the same as the trip to the cabin in January. Just subtract out the frost, add in some flowers, and you've got it.

The scenery is, of course, stupendous.

The next morning we packed up Jan's little sailboat and set off with vague plans to, like, camp out on some islands and stuff.

The weather was fabulous. It could have rained, or the wind could have disappeared for days, or blown too hard to sail. But it did none of those things, and our vague plans turned into an itinerary of epic proportions, at least when you scale for a four-day trip in a sailboat whose max speed is something like 12 km/hr.

I made a little map of our route. (I looked around for nice interfaces to input a custom path to Google maps and this is the best I found. But I can't extract the URL to take away the annoying rest of the site.)

We were sailing for ten, eleven hours a day. You'd think being in a slow-moving boat for that long would get boring, but somehow it didn't. The sky, the water, the rocky cliffs and trees along the coast are ever-changing.

The sea in these fjords is sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, sometimes black, sometimes sparkly, sometimes glassy smooth, sometimes rippled, sometimes choppy, sometimes full of meter-high swells.

I watched for jellyfish. Clear ones with four pinkish round pads that don't sting humans. In shallower areas there would be thousands upon thousands of them spread evenly through the water, disappearing as pale ellipses into the depths. Red ones with tentacles that do sting. I only saw two blue ones.

I got bitten by: midges, mosquitos, klegg ("horseflies", but they're evil and look like skinny bees), ticks, stinging ants. I learned to like the adventure of leaning myself out over the edge of the boat to pee. (I haven't quite mastered the art of peeing while standing up, and when you gotta go you gotta go, especially when you've been staying properly hydrated and you're six hours from the next stop and completely surrounded by water.)

The first night we camped on the most adorable little island, the boat tied up in a shallow green inlet, the tent set up in a perfect little grassy area underneath the trees. Someone had put in a lot of effort to make a nice little dock area that was now clearly abandoned, and at the highest point of the hill we found a modern house foundation, complete with beautiful fireplace, and the wreckage of the rest of the house strewn about.

I'm told that Norway, (much like California) now has laws against building within 50m of the coast, except for structures like docks and boathouses that obviously need to be on water, in order to preserve the coast for the use of everybody (like us). This has resulted in the phenomenon of luxurious three-story "boathouses" with big windows and balconies placed improbably far from the water, and most likely in the apparently reluctant destruction of the house on the island, which was small enough that no structure was more than 50m from water.

The other half of the island appeared to be used by a farmer to keep his goats. I guess goats can't swim, so an island is kind of like a pasture with built-in fences.

Night was never really dark, just sort of an extended sunsetdawn.

The second night we camped in the ruins of a thousand-year old monastery. It's a national monument (open only in the summer, tours available to groups of eight or more), but I was assured that nobody would care. Nobody did.

On the island at night, there were the cries of birds, the quiet murmur of someone's dinner party on a balcony watching the dusk of midnight, the occasional baa of a discontented sheep, the occasional moo of a cow, and the rising-falling engines of the rånerer, the kids who get drunk on a Friday night and drive their souped-up scooters back and forth across the island. And that was all.

The island shares a single police car among several islands, so when the ferry came in, the scooters roared over to the dock to see if the police car was on it.

In the morning we sailed out very slowly, gliding silently past the tiny farm where the sheep were kept and a woman was fluffing hay in a field with a rake. Absolutely surreal.

The third night, we rowed into a shallow inlet when the wind died in the fjord, where Jan managed to spear a flounder with a hunting weapon fashioned out of a paring knife, the rudder handle, a chocolate wrapper, and a small piece of rope.

I suppose being a carnivore is slightly more understandable if you're capable of killing the creature yourself, as he did when he cut its head off with the knife when it failed to actually be dead after an hour of sitting in a plastic bag.

Anyways, it was a charming little camping spot.

The beach was covered in perfect shells, two halves still attached.

And then we sailed back to Tysnes.