Terveisiä Tomilta

Rostock 15.5.2009
Hej Lauri!

Hope you´re fine and had a pleasant trip back home to Helsinki.

I just returned from Norway a week ago after 3600km, walking like an injured cowboy and thin as a stick after having "enjoyed" norwegian food and its prices for too long. Had a good and windy beginning in Växjö/Småland, visited an old friend in Vetlanda for 3 days. There my trip seriously started. Had nice, though chilly weather and constant heavy nothern face-winds almost up to Trondheim. Sweden was very pleasant to ride, because it`s possible to avoid the principial roads and use minor ones instead, so I had a quiet week riding across forgotten swedish countryside. I went up to Vänersborg, through Dals- and Värmland across the green border south of Kongsvinger. Having no alternative, I had to roll mostly on riksveger, sharing my narrow space on the road with cars and huge oil- and timbertrucks, which wasn´t funny at all. Southeast Norway is probably the most boring area I´ve ever biked through, but finally I reached the fjellareas north of Rena, where I had 25° and three days of pure summer in that beatiful area at the end of May. Of course it became colder again and 150km before I arrived in Trondheim it began to rain and temperatures dropped down to 3° and it was heavily snowing in the mountains where I just had come from. From Trondheim I took the train up to Fauske east of Bodø and to my big surprise temperatures where higher than in the south, but the traffic became even worse. Was glad to reach the Lofot Islands one day later and finally found what I´ve been looking for. Unbelievable steep mountains and rocks that looked like the Alpes being drowned into the sea.
I stayed for 10 days and also went up the Vesterålen Islands on mostly quiet small roads - as long as I didn`t have to use the E10 - to Nyksund, an abandoned former harbour village as my personal North Cape. On the way back south I broke my back wheel due to bad roads in this poor country and I urgently had to get a new one in Bodø, of course incredibly cheap like everything in Norway. From there I went down the old famous Kustriksvegen 17 and slowly I rode straight into the summer, ending up with 2 weeks of 30° southwest of Trondheim. Landscape was very much varying. Agriculture like in Bavaria, almost no places to build up my tent near potable or at least usable water in Trøndelag, wild canyons, fjords and mountains between Ålesund and Bergen. Trip became more expensive with every single day being forced to use many ferries in between to jump across the fjords, often several a day. Flies almost drove me crazy during longer uphills in 30°. They´re pretty fast actually and they really seem to like my sweat. Got Vitamin B12 from a german tourist and that really helped against these little fuckers. Had to finish the tour in marvellous Bergen due to financial exhaust, spent the hole 3-months-budget in 2 months without having eaten well, almost without campgrounds, cafés or anything else that costs you money, but also sick of the enormous traffic, which turned bike-riding into pure hard and dangerous work.
Travelled by bus to Kristiansand and took the ferry to Hirtshals/DK, from there train back home to Regensburg, Germany.
An interesting trip through real Norway, which sometimes has nothing to do with postcard-Norway. It´s rich, it´s loud, it´s expensive, it´s a hype.
Only if you´re far away from bigger cities and if you´re there before tourist-season begins, you`ll see and feel and taste Norway as you expect it to be: beautiful, quiet, astonishing, sometimes lonely and wild. I´m happy that I travelled so early, even if it still was very cold up in the north.
Hope they´re running out of oil before I die.
Maybe within the next years I´m going for a bike-trip with boat on my little trailer to Finland, maybe it´s quieter, where people are not that disgustingly rich, the social distance between Norway and me was just too big.
But it was the most adventurous trip of my life and I don´t want to miss that experience.

Maybe we´re gonna meet again one day on some road or on a trainride somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Best wishes

Tom

I wish you good luck, nice wheather and little traffic on your trip through Germany. If you don´t like mountains, you can easiliy use the Isar-cyclepath, then Donau and from Regensburg along the river Naab northbound. South of Munich, the Isarpath was partly destroyed during the 2005-flood, at the moment only recommendable for mountainbikes. We did it last year and it was a bit rough with all our bagage and partly difficult to find or even non-existant, but the landscape is at least as wild as Norway. North of Munich it´s a grusväg through a sort of jungle, but a good one till the end in Deggendorf. Donaupath has a hard surface and everybody can use it. Don´t underestimate nothern Bavaria, even if there are no Alpes, there are some really mean climbs, same in the southern parts of Thüringen and Saxony.