Oslo and Andalsnes

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While waiting for our bus tour to start we hit the museums. The last remaining Viking museum lay ahead - the Viking Ship Museum. Did I mention this last time? It houses three exceptionally well preserved Viking ships and the artifacts found with them. Awesome! We also visited the Folk Museum, which is an open-air museum (they seem to grow on trees here), but was quite interesting for it's collection of 16th and 17th century log buildings.

That evening we hooked up with our Top Deck bus tour. As it turns out the group consists of about 30 Aussies two kiwis and a canadian. So no worries about weird Swedish or French people on the tour. Yay! We are developing some prejudices against certain nationalities based on repeated exposure to bus loads of them in the museums... the difference between different nationalities is huge.

We stayed in Oslo again that night before hitting town the following day again with the group and seeing the Con-Tiki museum, the Fram polar exploration museum and the Resistance Museum. The group is a lot of fun and from the gossip we seem to have scored Top-Decks best tour guide, cook and bus driver combination, which is making the trip so much more fun.

Yesterday we journeyed from Oslo to Andalsnes via Lillihammer. In Lillihammer we got to ride the Olympic Bobsled run with experienced drivers. They strap five of you into a little metal cage and then push you down the track. Which is fine until you pick up sleed and get to the first corner. It's like riding a roller coaster only faster I think - we hit 100kph and were pulling 3G's of force, but what a rush!

Our camp at Andalsnes is up in the mountains and stunningly beautiful. The further north we get the more spectacular the scenery gets.

Today we drove over Trolls Pass, which is thought by some to be the most amasing piece of road in Europe. The track has been there for almost 300 years but has only recently been upgraded to a point where a bus could get over it. There are eleven 180 degree switchbacks winding up the face of an rock cliff that probably rises 500 meters straight up our of the valley. It's also a bit like Iceland in that there are waterfalls everywhere. This was followed by several ferry rides through fjords and back to Andalsnes.

I do have the ability to upload photos here, but this is more technicality than possibility due to the elderly nature it. If you get some count yourself lucky. I'll try after writing this.

Nigel

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