Day 9 - to Andalsenes

Finding a working internet connection in this part of the world is becoming a bit of a problem, hence no updates for the past few days. I decided to shell out for a campsite last night rather than do my original plan (camp wild) as this one said it had Wi-Fi. It did, but alas, the router was not Mac compatible. I arrived at the campsite last night at 9:55 pm and pitched the tent in a hurry as the rain was just coming. Made dinner and hit the sack listening to the din of the rain and the incredibly loud german snoring in the next tent.

I think it rained all night and was still going strong in the morning but began to ease off by 10am. I started packing and noticed my Helmet was missing....oops...trip stopped without one of those. I found it a bit later by the bike and it was well and truly sodden. More like a bucket than a lid. One wet, soggy ride in store. One good thing about lots of rain is that it charges up all the waterfalls. I saw hundreds of them today, the water was thundering off the mountains. Where yesterday, there would have been a modest little trickle, today was a raging white torrent.

Todays route covers some of Norway's best driving roads and it is a bit of a shame that the cloud was so low. All that low cloud meant that every-time I crossed a mountain top, I got cold and wet. But it was still worth it. Now I have an excuse to come back and try again.

At the end of that day, I decided to give the 'Trolls Ladder' road a go despite the bad weather. It was the shortest way to some accommodation.  It is an amazing road engineering achievement. It drops 600m between two waterfalls at an average 10% gradient. This is my view at the top. I was 'flying on instruments' as the say in aviation circles. Then all the water in the air buggered up the GPS signal so I had to rely on the 5m in front of me that I could see.

Nearer the bottom, I dropped through the cloud and only had the rain and the waterfall spray to deal with. Tonight, I deserve a little luxury so it is to be a real bed in a Youth Hostel.

Route 274 miles/10:53 hrs


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