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Published: November 10th 2017
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Geo: 60.6333, 8.16667
This morning I was up early to catch the 8.05 to Hovet to meet my cousins dad. On the train I had my eyes glued to the window almost the entire way. It is really pretty here. Huge mountains covered in forest, except for where the rocky cliffs jut out. Every so often we would come across a small patch of land which had been cleared for agriculture. No more than about 60 acres. Almost every barn I saw was red with a white trim. I think that maybe that's the building code here. Oh so you want to put up a building for animals? that'll red and white only
The are few areas of land which are cleared for other reasons. I saw a patch of land cleared underneath some powerlines coming down the hill (smart) and another kind of curvy path which I think may be a ski run in the winter. Just outside of Honefoss, we came across a lake. It was surrounded by forest and the water was dark. (the day was overcast) Honestly it looked like something from the stories of King Arthur and Camelot. I would not have been surprised to see the
lady of the lake rising up out of the water with Excalibur in her hand.
I made it to Al, barely. I thought they announced the next station was Al (pronounced Orl) gathered my bags and jumped off the train. I looked around and saw the station was Gol. I thought maybe they were the same place, just my bad interpretation of the local language, but I checked with some folk standing on the platform and they confirmed that no, this is not Al. I jumped back on the train and thanked the gods that they wait a good five minutes at each station. The next station was Al and Harald was there waiting for me. Phew!
Harald took me the back way to Horvet. We drove up this mountain road (which was a toll road, way out here in the bush) through the mountains around his home town. We drove up through a forest where many of the trees have started to change colour, it was all yellow and green. In a few weeks they'll be red and yellow and eventually the trees will go bare when the snows come. The highest mountain here is 1900m above sea level.
We couldn't see it because the clouds were to low. Eventually the forest stopped as we were up to high for the trees to grow. The rocky ground was covered red shrubs, really big red shrubs. I get the feeling this land could be very unforgiving to the unprepared hiker or camper. On the upside, apparently the wolves and bears don't bother human beings to much. They are more scared of us, handy to know.
Back at Haralds he cooked a delicious deer stew. It was an absolute feast. He also introduced me to Aquavit, a sweet Norwegian spirit. He recommended we drink it with beer. He thought it was quite odd to find an Aussie who doesn't drink beer! I decided as I was trying new things I should have a beer with this spirit because it does have a kick to it. The beer actually went down quite nicely. Maybe because it was a pilsner (which I haven't had before) or maybe it was the aquavit, but it worked either way. We flipped on the TV and Harald, very politely, was looking for and english program. Wouldn't you know it, Vikings was on (one of my favourite shows)
So we watched Vikings, Harald seemed to like it. I got a few interesting tidbits on the vikings. They were more liberal with women's rights than most western societies. Women were allowed to divorce their husbands, and they had a right to own property, they had more of a say in public life. St Olav who is credited with converting Norway to Christianity was a particularly brutal bastard. And Odin, the vikings chief god, may have been an actual person from the south.
I commented on the filming of the series, I wonder were it was made. Harald thought it looked like Scotland, until there was a shot of particularly beautiful landscape....that was Norway. :-)
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