Up to Norway for a friend’s visit in Bergen

Frau Weidig (70) brings us on the right track after being lost in Merseburg

We like calm mornings, so only at 5pm in the afternoon we start from Leipzig towards Norway. Instead of getting straight to the highway we miss the bus stop and end up in Merseburg town. With Frau Weidig (70) from Weißenfels and a man from Aschersleben we make it onto highway A14. Short after arriving with a young guy near Hannover, we got a bus ride from the owner of an overland bus company. Our last ride for the day was a curator bonis in his speedy Mercedes Coupe, who meant that in the night he was not driving so fast. With only 230 km/h on a scale of 350 km/h he might be right. The night we spend near Hamburg under a huge tree in the resting area of a gas station.

Morning procedure - breakfast and making notes about the previous day

Again we enjoy a long breakfast, and catch up with our travel notes. Heino helps us getting straight through Hamburg to nearby Kaltenkirchen, from where a silent man with a well-behaved dog brings us near the Danish border. With a Dutch man on his way to a business meeting we finally get to Haderslev in Denmark. Hours of hitchhiking pass without any success. When the clock strikes 9pm we decide to give up and disappear after our evening meal in our little portable house.

good morning Denmark! a German lady in bathrobe slurping to and from the public toilet

“I want to travel far today”, states Augustas. Unfortunately, the morning brings not much cars neither. While watching an old German lady in her dressing gown and slippers on her way to the gas station’s toilet, Afif arrives who turns out to be our saviour. We enter Sweden together, and he decides to bring us past Helsingborg, although living in Malmö, and gives up chain smoking while driving. His suffering for us brought him a new record of 1 hour 20 minutes no smoking. With a physically disabled woman and a guy in shorts with 3 curious dogs in his trunk we get near Göteburg. Here we are stuck for hours, until three Germans on their way to their yearly fishing holiday in Trondheim, Norway, bring us to Moss. We finish the day with meeting Audrius, a Lithuanian, who invited us for the next day to Kongsberg, as he sleeps in his car in the same gas station.

so Polish drivers spend their weekends on gas station in Norway

We enjoy a relaxed, sunny morning, working on updating notes about our journey and waiting for Audrius. Two hours after the latest time he said to pick us up we decide to leave towards Bergen. It is 2pm and two young guys with a camper advertising a Norwegian circus bring us to Drammen, where we get on time to fill up our groceries. With a future gardener we get to Bagn, from where a man in his thirties working in an alumium factory brings us until Blåflat. Although 10pm a woman brings us through all the tunnels, of which the longest counts 24,5 km, to Flåm. Here we do not even have time to put down our backpacks, when a young tiler gives us the last ride for the day – directly to Bergen.

Here in Bergen we enjoy until now sunny weather. We spend lots of time with our Latvian friends Rasa and Davids and their cute son Ernests. Both of them arrived in Bergen mid March, currently trying to settle down with their first jobs as kebab seller and car polisher. Not the best jobs, yet they are happy to have something to make their living in Norway, which is not all that easy. Later on they hope to get back into more challenging jobs as travel agent and photographer.

Bergen gives us mixed feelings. It has beautiful corners, but occurs rundown in others. Drug addicts, homeless, and drunk are among usual sights in the streets on our weekend city tour. A big part of the population seem foreigners. Remarkable are the many women with strollers filling side walks and cafés. Summing it up, Bergen is nice, seen from the mountain it is even beautiful. The wind is bearable as long as the sun is shining, rain we experience only once and for very short. Food is pretty expensive up here, so we are happy to discover a small Turkish shop with international food items for modest prices. The second hand shop comes in handy for finding cheap gloves for Katja whose fingers do not adapt easy to the cold wind.

We are thinking to leave Bergen this weekend, but as things are changing often, it can also happen we continue enjoying our stay at Rasa and Davids’ house. At the end, it is always nice to spend more time with friends.

Pictures