Jotunheimen

The next morning we started the drive from the wonderful red hytte to Jotunheimen via route Hwy 55.  We took a lot of time along the way trying to buy gas. The credit card machines on the gas station pumps said we needed an extra code after we swiped the credit card that we didn’t have even when I called the credit card company about it. This wouldn’t have been a problem if it wasn’t Saturday. On week days the gas stations have someone working in them and we could just take our card in to be read and signed but we were discovering that most rural gas stations are left unmanned on weekends. Like last week when Saturday found us in urgent search for an ATM we were again in a bind due to it being a weekend.  At least it wasn’t Sunday when just about everything stops. We drove to a town with a mall and asked around, “did anyone know of a gas station going towards Lom that was open on Saturday”?  A woman in a toy store yelled at a customer, “You!…” The man must have got all the information he needed from this because he opened his cell phone and made a call. “Yes, yes, okay.” There was an open station in Fortun half an hour’s drive up the road. Skjoldun also had one open.  It was a relief to fill up before Sunday but the open station didn’t take credit cards at all so we were again cash poor.  When we asked where the nearest ATM was we were told it was a day’s drive away.  We counted our bills and looked over our food and decided we could hold out until Monday as long as we got cheap lodging.

After driving for a little while we spotted a sign for a bakery (bakeri) in Luster and thought we would try it.  The room was warm and smelled of fresh baked bread. There were several people already there sitting at tables with cups of coffee and large rolls.  Everyone seemed to know each other and conversation flew from one table to another easily. When a new customer came in the baker-lady behind the counter would call them by name and a chorus of hellos would start up from around the room – the good side to slow weekends. We ordered cinnamon rolls, which also were rich in cardamom,  and coffee enjoying the friendly atmosphere. It reminded me of the General Store in Spring Green WI where I used hang out.  When we finally pulled ourselves away and headed for the car I saw an old-ish looking stone church nearby that looked interesting. It turned out to be the Dale kyrkje, one of the oldest stone churches in Norway!  I loved it.  The stone walls were over 4 feet thick and covered in paintings of the saints dating from the 14th, 16th, and 18th centuries while the church itself went back to the mid 1100s.

Our mood was good as we left the church.  We checked the map and decided to aim for Turtagrø ‘s trailhead for the day’s exploration of the Jotunheimen mountain region.  We were surprised when we got to our destination that Turtagrø was just a hotel as we were expecting it to be a town but figured that because Jotunheimen is a vast unpopulated area, like eastern New Mexico’s empty grasslands, the map makers will mark any human habitation as worthy of notice.  It looked like rain as we got out of the car so we bundled up more than usual in case the temperature dropped sharply in the high mountain tundra and headed out gingerly across a muddy oozing trail in what seemed to be a cross between tundra and a bog.  For more than a quarter of our walk through the thick brush and scrub up the mountain-side Paul and I tentatively remarked to each other that we didn’t quite, “get-it”. We knew that the Jotunheimen region was considered to be, to use the guidebook’s words, “Norway’s most celebrated walking area” (pg 291, The Rough Guide to Scandinavia 2006) but weren’t quite feeling the vibe especially as along with the mud we were having to navigate a cow herd inexplicably grazing in the middle-of-nowhere non-edible scrub of a National Park.  Soon the path left the lower area of dense vegetation to go steeply up the slope beside a fierce river.  There was mist and drizzle with a chill in the air and very high mountain peaks obviously all around us if we could just see them beyond the clouds.  We got up to a bowl of a filled in high mountain lake where we ate a packed lunch. As we finished lunch we decided to call it quits as the cold rain was starting in earnest now.  By this time I had gotten into the swing of things and was highly enjoying myself cold rain and all. When we reached the boggy area with the cows I saw how beautiful all the lush vegetation was in its already-autumn-in-August hues of red and gold.

We drove on figuring we had seen all there was to see. We were wrong in this. The rain lifted, the road wound ever higher, the scenery got more and more astounding and it took us three hours to drive 66 kilometers because of how many stops we made.

When we finally made it down from the high country in a state of complete bogglement at the intensity of beauty we had just seen we began to look for a good camping place.  Given that it had now started to pour a steady cold very wet rain we were quite sad about the gas station drawing our cash down to the point where camping rather than renting a hytte was the most prudent course of action.  Gray wet bleck.  We stopped at the first campground sign we saw and I went in to the reception office to ask prices. On a whim I asked for a hytte price quote too. Incredibly, unbelievably cheap! Yes! We would take it! And, there in the wilds, in the living room reception area of her home, with her kids hanging on her while she talked to me, she had a credit card machine and could take my credit card and no she didn’t need a code! It was a very good end to a very good day.