day 14 - slow boats and fast drops

The hostel has a map with pins showing home locations of all guests. These things usually end up showing a representative population distribution for any given country. The US map contains two anomalous clusters: One is the minneapolis/st paul region, probably heritage tourists. The other is Denver, which might correspond to general outdoorsy, mountain-lovin' people. Also,the Europe map is so studded with pins upon pins as to be a completely useless mass of multicolored plastic. (Though as far as I can tell, every single guest at the moment is german-speaking.)

Another net-downhill day of cycling, and this time I didn't need a train gain my altitude. Back to the ferry terminal via the much longer and supposedly flatter coastal route. (Though I think that the multiple smaller climbs probably sum to as much altitude as the one big climb of the inland route. It's impossible to predict these things, even with a topo map.)

I'm on a 3-day hop-on-hop-off pass which gives me the flexibility to define my own trip. This is nice since I'm not exactly doing the usual one-day putter down the fjord. That said, a good deal of today was spent puttering down the fjord. I'm glad I saw the preikestolen from below AFTER romping around on it, or I may not have gone near the thing.

I spent most of my time on the bow of the boat with an Inflated South African. Her too-large Springboks jacket blew up in the breeze like the Sta-Puft marshmallow man, making me want to find another similarly attired passenger and stage a sumo match.

The Diplom-IS ice cream drumstick carrying girl wierds me out and she is everywhere. Before I figured out that she is an eskimo, I thought she was some bizzare bird-creature.

I am now ashore at fjord's end. Lysebjotn isn't so much a town as a fire station and a campground. The campground is also the bar and community meeting place. As I ate dinner, a local hydro power plant worker told me that because of the high valley walls this town doesn't see the sun from november to february. Enjoy it while you can.

lysefjord
Originally uploaded by wolftone.

The nearby kjeragbolten is popular with BASE jumpers, so they cluster here and fly kites when it's too windy to hurl themselves off the 1000m cliff. They're a pretty chill group who act and talk pretty much like climbers or paddlers, though there's a touch of punk-outlaw sk8er culture mixed in. One jumper lent me the guide to this exit area, which extolled the advantages of the "E" (earth) portion of the sport because its actual legality allows daylight operation.