Day 15 Odda

A well earned rest day today, we decided we needed to give our bodies a chance to catch up, so we had a leisurely and extensive breakfast at the hotel.  It is included with the room and it is a veritable feast, with a huge choice.  Porridge, boiled eggs (6 min & 12 min, these Norwegians are precise!) bacon, micro sausages (see photo) scrambled eggs, fried eggs.  

Three different types of cereal, with yoghurt, prunes, and all different kinds of nuts & seeds to sprinkle on.  Bread, crisp bread, and a huge selection of cold meats (two types of salami, ham, smoked salmon), sliced cucumber, tomato, peppers and pickles, two types of cheese, plus a couple of other things that I couldn’t recognise.  Oh, and caviar in a metal tube, like toothpaste.  To drink there was apple juice, orange juice, milk, tea & coffee.  I have to mention the jam at this point, the jam here is superb, with biiiig chunks of actual real fruit.  No gluey jelly pretending to be goodness, it’s all real fruit, and it’s delicious.  This is true of all the jam we have had so far, not just this particular one.  Refer exhibit A.

So with our tummies full, we enlisted the help of staff to do a load of laundry, waited for that to finish and then set off walking to the town to have a mooch around.  There is a river next to us that goes though the town, and it has a lovely set of rapids/waterfall for a few hundred metres.  It is very pretty and it was nice to stretch our legs for a bit and ease the stiffness out of them.

The town is quite small and was quickly wandered, and I have to note at this point, not one model was found.  There was a bookshop advertising English books, but none were purchased.  I could live here 😊  I found some wooden rolling pins with Christmas patterns etched on them, duly purchased for making Christmas shortbread. 

We wandered back to the hotel, washing not dry yet.  It is in a drying room with a dehumidifier, rather than a proper dryer per-se, so it going to take much longer than normal.  So we hopped in the car and drove back the way we had come yesterday to look at the Latefossen waterfall.  This is right next to the road, and understandably causes a traffic menace as people slow down to gawk at it, and jam themselves into the small parking bay.  As we drove up, there was a large camper van with it’s back end sticking out onto the already narrow road, it had obviously got too close to the edge and dropped off the tarseal.  There is often a big drop off the seal here, presumably to allow for snow melt, but once you are off the road, it’s hard to get back on. 

We fluked a park and got out to take some photos.  

Latefossen

Traffic chaos.  That's actually a two lane bridge.

While we were admiring the waterfall, a tow truck went past, and by the time we returned, the camper van was gone, so presumably he had towed the camper out of trouble. 

Latefossen duly recorded, we set off again for the town of Tyssedal, with the idea we would find somewhere to stop for lunch. 

It was about 2pm by now, our breakfast having served us well and the daylight/height of the sun in the sky fooling us again with it being later than it feels.  Tyssedal turned out to be even smaller than Odda and did not even have a café, so we headed back to Odda and found a place to get a bite of lunch. 

Tomorrow we are planning to do the Trolltunga walk.  We have been lucky enough to book a park in the highest car park, this cuts out about 4km of the hardest part of the walk at the beginning.  I’m justifying this laziness with the fact that we have done a lot of walking/climbing in the last two days, and even with this short cut, it is a 22km return walk with about 800m of elevation to climb, expected to take 7-10 hours.  So we save ourselves 8km and 400m elevation than if we’d only gone for the 2^nd highest car park.  Works for me.

We went to the supermarket to get some food to take on the walk and went back to the hotel to collect our now dry laundry and pack the stuff we are taking.  The forecast is for rain, rain rain and thunder storms.  So we are preparing to get wet wet wet and have lots of layers plus have a change of clean dry clothes and a towel handy in the car for when we return.  Wish us luck !

And an update from our Kjerag and Preikestolen adventures, I have downloaded the photos from my camera of our ferry ride down the fjord from Lysebotn.  Here is Kjerag, as seen from the bottom.  I’ve circled the rock we stood on, as it’s a bit hard to see from this far away.

And here is Preikestolen from the Fjord.