Siân's Magical Adventure in Norwayland: Rallarvegen: An epic journey

This week was a reading week for a lot of people studying at UiB, so we decided to go hiking. What, actually read? There's an idea. Well, what's done is done, and we had a great time. Made for a good birthday as well.

We decided we were doing to walk along part of Rallarvegen, and old construction road running from Haugestøl to Flåm - 82km in total. We did 42km of it in the end, over two days.

On the first day, we got up eary and took the train from Bergen to Finse, and then walked 21km to Hallingskeid. I've made a video slideshow of the photos I took on that day below (overlaid with some nice Norwegian music):

It was a fascinating walk, very barren in some parts, and at one point we even decided it was a bit like being on the moon, with the rocky landscape and boulders strewn about in places where boulders really had no business being. We also walked past a number of small lakes that were almost completely frozen over. I wouldn't have thought that it was nearly cold enough yet.

From Hallingskeid we took the train to Vatnahalsen, where our hotel was. It was a very nice hotel, although we spent a lot of time outside in the freezing cold staring at the sky. There were no lights there, so we could see all the stars, a couple planets, the milky way etc - we even saw a couple shooting stars! It was absolutely incredible. In fact, the sky's been a matter of interest for a lot of people in the Hordaland area this week, because we were also paid a visit by the northern lights:

On the second day we walked from Vatnahalsen to Flåm - another 21km. This was a lot different from the day before in terms of what there was to see. Everything was a lot greener. Here's a video slideshow of photos I took that day:

By the time we got down to Flåm we were knackered. We'd even tried running a couple of kilometres, thinking that at least then we'd be using different muscles. All it really meant was we ended up with a second set of aching muscles, but ah well.

The funny thing about doing something lik this with someone else is you end up with loads of pictures of them and none of yourself, so below you'll find some photos of me that Sara took :)