Martin and Susan's Road Trip to the North Cape

2008 was the year that we finally got to see Norway. Having seen the Chilean fjords and the New Zealand fjords, we thought it about time we saw the original variety. The excuse was a conference that Susan was attending in Oulu in Finland, so the idea was to travel the length of Norway from south to north, then head down to Finland and return through the Baltic States and Germany. We were away from late May to late July.

If you click on "Photos" on the right, you can see some of our pictures of each section of the trip.

From Oxford we drove north to Newcastle, and crossed on the ferry to Bergen. We started our exploration of the fjords with the Norway in a Nutshell day trip from Voss - train, boat and bus. We headed north in the car to the Briksdal and and Kjenndal glaciers, and then to Geirangerfjord, through scenery as spectacular as we have seen anywhere. In Geiranger we did some hiking, and stayed in a grass-roofed cabin, with an amazing view of the fjord.

The Norwegians have spent a lot of their oil money on roads and tunnels, and there are ferries everywhere to cross the fjords that even the Norwegians could not bridge or tunnel under. One of the more spectacular roads is the Trollstigen, north of Geiranger, which we crossed just a few days after it had opened for the season.

North from Fjordland we stayed at a fishing village on the island of Averøya, then took the main road north to Trondheim and Mo i Rana and across the Arctic Circle.

The Lofoten Islands are now connected to the mainland by bridge and tunnel, but to save almost a day's driving we took the ferry, with a spectacular view of the Lofoten Wall of mountains. We were very impressed by the Lofotens - a surprise was the number of people living so far north, living off fish, farming and tourists. Dried cod is a speciality of these parts, particularly of the fishing village at the end of the road, the laconically named Å.

We took advantage of the fine weather to see the midnight sun from the north coast of the islands - a bit odd to look for the sun in the north, but we finally figured out that that was the way it works. Just as spectacular was the light on the mountains at 1 am.

From the Lofotens we drove north to the Vesterålen, and from Andenes on Andøya took the ferry (the longest and roughest crossing) to the island of Senja.

Senja is another spectacular island, less well-known than the Lofotens. One idyllic spot was the village of Husøy, on its own island connected to the main island by causeway. From Senja we island-hopped to the city of Tromsø, where we visited the Botanical Gardens.

We then rejoined the main Arctic Highway northward to Finnmark, the northernmost part of Norway. At about 70° north is Alta, a town of over 10,000 people, where agriculture finally gives way to reindeer herding. People have lived up here for thousands of years, and at Alta we saw the Stone Age rock carvings, 6,000 to 2,000 years old. For a change from fjords, we went inland for a yomp across the tundra to the canyon of the Alta River.

Then north again to Hammerfest (claimant to be the northernmost town) and the North Cape (where everything is northernmost). We were lucky to be there on a day when the midnight sun was visible (midnight rain and cloud are more usual, and the next day it was snowing). We admired from afar the actual northernmost point in Europe, Knivskjelodden, and stayed at Skarsvag, the world's northernmost fishing village.

From Honningsvåg, near the North Cape, we took the Hurtigruten ship across two long inlets of the Barents Sea to the Nordkyn Peninsula. The Hurtigruten is a Norwegian institution. Every day a ship leaves Bergen for the 5 day trip to the Russian border. It takes cars - we just phoned the ship to book a place for the car.

More northernmosts in Nordkyn - the wooden church at Gamsvik, and the lighthouse at Slettnes, near where we looked for the remains of abandoned fishing villages.

We drove south to the main road across true Arctic landscapes, and headed east to the town of Kirkenes, just a few miles from the Russian border. We were now 2,626 kilometres from Bergen and about as far east as Cairo. We reached the end of the road at the beach at Grense Jakobselv, just a stone's throw (across the river) from Russia. Heading back, the sign told us that Narvik (still above the Arctic Circle) was over 1,000 km back down the road. We turned left for Finland.

The Norwegian language is a bit of a challenge, but Finnish is something else again - especially when the signposts insist on the Sami translation too. Fortunately most people also speak English.

Finland lived up to its reputation for lakes and forests - lots of them. There were interesting buildings too - a painted church, the largest wooden church in the world, the castle at Savonlinna built by the Swedes to keep the Russians out (the Russians are back again, trucking hundreds of cars back across the border). At Lappeenranta the Finns build the world's biggest sandcastles every year.

We spent a few days in Helsinki before taking the ferry to Estonia.

We liked Tallinn, where the old city has survived Estonia's chequered history remarkably intact (with a little help from our friends in the EU). We also spent a few days on the island of Saaremaa - in Soviet days closed even to most Estonians, let alone westerners. Its isolation has preserved many of its medieval churches.

We used at least 20 ferries on the trip, but the oddest was in Latvia, where the ferryman pulled us and the car across the River Gauja. Riga was quite different from Tallinn - the old city less well preserved but compensated for by the magnifcent Art Nouveau buildings.

In Lithuania we skipped the cities and went to the coast - the Curonian spit which the country shares with Russia. On the spit we found the Witches' Hill, where local artists have carved some pretty wierd statues. Inland, we saw something of the Lithuanian countryside before heading for home across Poland. We stopped briefly in Berlin (our first visit since the Wall came down), then headed straight for Calais and the ferry home.