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Published: August 12th 2015
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Beautiful nature
When you travel through Telemark District the dramatic landscape and the beautiful nature is what you will remember it for afterwards. The Norwegian nature and various cultural and industrial heritage sites
In the previous blog entry I wrote about the production of heavy water in Norway during the second world war and the events around that. When I visited Lake Tinnsjo, Rjukan Railway and Vemork Power Station, some of the key places in Nazi-Germany's quest for heavy water, I also went to some places unrelated to World War II. In this blog entry I will write about that. OK, I will also write about Vemork Power Station but only for its significance as an industrial heritage site.
When you travel through Telemark District the dramatic landscape and the beautiful nature is what you will remember it for afterwards.
There are waterfalls everywhere and they come in every size. There are big thundering ones cascading down, there are more elegant ones running in steady streams and there are small little trickles of water flowing in a laid back kind of way. They all have their own beauty. Piece of advice if you go there. Don't take a shower in them because the water has likely melted from a glacier further up and is therefore
Dramatic landscape
When the mountains are lit up by the sun and they reflect in the water it is magical. cold as ice. I learned that the hard way a few years ago…
There are also lakes among the mountains and fjords making deep cuts into the Norwegian coast. When the mountains are lit up by the sun and they reflect in the water it is magical. Look at the photos and you will get an idea of what I mean. I promise you that the colours in the pictures are all real, no photoshopping anywhere.
Higher up in the mountains there is less vegetation and the terrain is more barren and rugged. It is not any less beautiful though. We just have to go there sometime and hike. There are hundreds of miles of hiking trails and we'd love to try some of them out.
One of the hiking trails I learned of follows an old route used for crossing the mountains. For a long time it was only passable on foot or on horse. Possibly a horse drawn wagon could pass on the first version of the road but probably not. The route was abandoned when it was replaced by a paved road. However, in recent years they have
Waterfall
There are waterfalls everywhere and they come in every size. There are more elegant ones running in steady streams again marked the old route and made it into a hiking trail. It would be interesting to try that.
They abandoned the first route across the mountains when it was replaced with a paved road. This road was partly single lane and it was only drivable in summer. Nowadays large sections of that first paved road has also been replaced so now they can keep the road open all year around. To make the road passable in winter they had to replace the most difficult passages with tunnels. Some of those tunnels are impressive to say the least.
In summer it is possible to drive on the sections of the road that were replaced by tunnels. They kept and maintain those roads both for sightseeing purposes and to have a second route in case they have to shut down the tunnel for some reason. When I drove there they were doing maintenance work in one tunnel so I had to cross the mountain on the sightseeing road.
Some of the oldest preserved churches in Norway are called stave churches. I visited two such churches, one in
Roldal and one in
Heddal.
Waterfall and reflection
When the mountains and the waterfall are lit up by the sun and they reflect in the water it is magical. I promise you that the colours in the picture are all real, no photoshopping anywhere The first one I entered and walked around in where as the latter one I only stopped by and looked at from the outside. Roldal stave church is beautifully painted on the inside. Heddal stave church is supposedly the largest stave church in Norway.
Only a few days after I visited Norway UNESCO decided to add Vemork Power Plant, Tyssedal Power Plant and two more sites to the world heritage list with the comment that they are "an exceptional combination of industrial assets and themes associated to the natural landscape".
Both these sites are well preserved hydroelectric power stations built in the early 20th century. Today they are no longer in use, they have been replaced by more modern power stations, but are kept as museum. I found them well worth visiting both for their historical significance and for their esthetic value. When they built industries a hundred years ago they made them both useful and beautiful.
When we are writing blogs we sometimes try to throw in something funny at the end. Either some joke in the text or a funny photo. That's like a little gift from
Waterfall
There are waterfalls everywhere and they come in every size. There are big thundering ones cascading down us to the people who actually bother to read the entire blog and/or look through all the photos. This time alas there no joke coming. Instead we saved some depressing stuff to the end. But hey, sad things are also part of life. Right?
In 2011 Norway was the target of a terrorist attack in which 77 people were killed. The attack began with a car bomb in central Oslo and continued with a spree killing on Utoya Island. I see no point in writing more details about this other than telling you that the perpetrator was captured alive, he is a Norwegian fascist and is at the time of writing serving a prison sentence.
When I came back to Oslo, after my trip in the highlands, I had a few hours to kill. I then went to the place where the car bomb was set off. In a way it is a bit ironic that the car bomb was made from ANFO, which stands for Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil, because ammonium nitrate was the main product produced in the fertilizer factory in Vemork.
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Dancing Dave
David Hooper
Location, location, location
What a glorious spot. Yet I presume the elements would mean highs and lows would be off the scale. But paradise must also have the lows or it has no balance. That's my perspective of paradise for what it's worth.