The tent

So, about our checked bag. Our first KLM/Air France flight from Boston to Paris CDG was late and we missed our Paris-Amsterdam connection. An Air France agent rebooked us on a flight several hours later and assured us that our bag would be transferred as well (as she ripped up the original boarding passes including the bag check sticker). A couple of long layovers later, we were in Bergen and our bag was not. We gave KLM our info, and stressed repeatedly that we were only going to be in Bergen for one night and we really wanted them to just keep the bag at the airport when they found it, since we only had very vague ideas of where we were going to be after the night in Bergen but figured we probably wouldn't have made it too far and could just pop back around to grab it.

12 hours after arrival: No update to the KLM tracker site, so we get the rental car, hang out in Bergen a bit and come up with a short-term plan. The first place we'd intended to go was Trolltunga, so I do a kayak search and find the cabin in Røldal, which is further south than we'd planned to go but good enough for winging it last minute.  

36 hours after arrival: Still no info on bag, so we book another night at Håradalen, do some migraine recovery work on Cam and hike it out.

Migraine beans

60 hours after arrival: KLM's tracking website now has the bag as "out for delivery" with no other information, which is both auspicious and troubling since we'd asked them to keep it at the airport. We make several phone calls to KLM that give us a whole mess of contradictory information. The general vague consensus, from the subset of agents that seem to be able to find out anything about it at all, is that our bag is probably out for delivery, probably to our poor airbnb host in Bergen despite our repeated requests that they hold it at the airport, that the courier should have already contacted us but we'd probably hear from them soon, and that it's impossible to get in touch with the courier to redirect them back to the airport so tough shit. At one point they request the next address we'd be at so we quickly google a hotel near Gudvangen, the next day's destination. But we continue to insist that, if it comes back to the airport, it be kept there. 

The last agent that I talk to this day is a particularly vile mansplaining French turd who says, essentially, that we should be enormously grateful that they had somehow managed, against all odds, to find our bag at all without our bag check sticker and that if we do not intercept the bag at our airbnb host's address in Bergen it will almost certainly be lost forever. I mean, I may not be a professional travel logistician but I am pretty sure this is not at all how it works. But we are nervous and in need of some straight answers from actual in-person humans, so after some frantic correspondence with our saintly airbnb host (who, despite her busy lawyer life, gives KLM all her contact info at work and assures us that she'll somehow manage to intercept the bag if it arrives at her home), we take off for the Bergen airport.  

The only 15 min of rain of the whole trip

69 hours after arrival: At the Bergen airport, we're told by one KLM representative (who then, conveniently, promptly disappears forever) that our bag had actually shipped out for Gudvangen that morning.  We call the Gudvangen hotel, they don't have our bag.  Then a second KLM representative at the airport calls literally all of the couriers and none of them actually has our bag or has ever had our bag.  So, unable to revise the status of our bag from found to not found, a yet third KLM representative opens up a second lost bag ticket.  At this point (and actually still to date) our bag is in the KLM system as both delivered and at large.  Determined not to let any of this bag fuckery screw anything up more than it already had, we set off for Gudvangen.

83 hours after arrival: I receive a strange email from someone named Javed claiming to have our bag in his car and wondering what time we will be at home to get our bag. We're slightly confused but elated. After stopping in at Nordic Adventures to make kayaking arrangements, we give Javed the Nordic Adventures address and let him know that the bag can be delivered here at any point this day.

88 hours after arrival: After kayaking, we receive a post-it message from Javed that the bag will arrive at 4:35 across the street from Nordic Adventures. We settle in and watch the cars and buses go by. For hours. We try to call and email Javed to no avail. Finally at around 7 he answers one of our calls: Evidently the bag is no longer, in fact, in his car, as he had put it on a Bergen-Sogndal bus and just assumed that we would intuit that from his shitty message. And of course this possibility never even remotely occurred to us (or to the British Nordic Adventurer that took the message): to our TSA-addled minds, the idea of approaching a bus driver to ask for a random black duffel bag that someone else put in the luggage hold is so sketchy as to be unthinkable.  Anyway, the bag is now maybe in Sogndal, or maybe somewhere else, but the Sogndal bus station is closed so nothing for it but to drive to Besseggen and sleep in the Yaris in the Gjendesheim parking lot and hope that they figure it all out in the morning.

Fat-thumbing in the Yaris, only sort of holding it together

110 hours after arrival: We're maybe a quarter of the way through the Besseggen ascent when my phone rings. I briefly hear what sounded like Megan, the British Nordic Adventurer, before our mobile wifi cuts out for the better part of the day.  Again, determined not to let the bag ruin our trip, we continue up.

114 hours after arrival: The wifi is still down. I beg the employees of the closed-for-one-more-day tourist hostel to let me use their internet-enabled desktop (giving me some real flashbacks to 1996). Nordic Adventures has our bag! There's no way we'll get there before closing so I send a quick desperate email asking them to just leave it outside their little hut when they close up.

The Laerdal tunnel, which we ended up driving through 4 times, is the longest road tunnel in the world at 24.51 km: so long that, to reduce driver fatigue or claustrophobia, it has several of these bizarre caverns where the tunnel briefly opens up into this super trippy blue-light alien abduction shit and then abruptly closes down around you again

118 hours after arrival: After spending 4 hours on the road fearing the worst (not actually our bag? manhandled to death by Javed's posse? stolen by kayakers? infested with Norwegian forest cats?)¹, we are joyfully, tearfully reunited with duffel!!! But also way far away from where we need to be. So we drive, again. 

And then we stop for dinner (there will be a whole food post, or prob several, at some point).

And then after a bit more driving we tent, exhausted but triumphant.

In the end we only had one night with the tent, but my god was it gloriously comfortable. I crawled in, mumbled some incomprehensible words of gratitude to Cam, and then passed out so hard.

The other side of our campsite: the Norwegians all seem to have this compulsive rock-stacking tic, based on the ubiquity of these road-side cairns and also watching all the Norwegian hikers subconsciously stacking and re-stacking pebbles with one hand while hanging out and eating their tomato mackerel

¹ We found out after the fact that Nordic Adventures came perilously close to putting the duffel back on the Bergen-Sogndal bus when our wifi cut out on the mountain, but Megan talked them out of it. Megan is THE BEST.

Besseggen

cad:

The next day, the plan was to hike over Besseggen pass in Jotunheimen - the cool part here is you hike across a narrow band of land separating two lakes that are at radically different altitudes - this was sort of my fallback plan if the really tall mountain were still frozen over (I decided not to risk sleeping in the car an extra thousand meters up - it was cold enough as it was!) I'm glad we got to see a little bit of Breheimen, but trying to make decent time over route 55 without burning out either my brakes or the little tiny transmission in our hybrid put us really far behind schedule. (Note for anyone finding this blog out there on the internet: TAKE ROUTE 51 INSTEAD)

PS - thanks to Mer for keeping this blog going - this may have been the missing ingredient from the last several tarvel bogs.

/cad

I don't know how we both missed this during our planning (I suspect out-of-date website) -- but we arrived at Gjendesheim exactly one day before the official start of the season. whoops! The original plan was to do as most people do: park at Gjendesheim, take the ferry west to Memurubu, and hike the ridge back to Gjendesheim.

But the ferry schedule wasn't due to start until the following day, though it was out there making dry runs back and forth just to rub it in our sleep deprived faces.  So we instead set out to hike from Gjendesheim up the ridge a ways and back.

The considerable upside was that this hike, which is evidently Norway's most popular mountain walk with 30k+ hikers per year, was way less crowded than it would have been during the official season. There were a few fellow climbers that seemed to be regulars that probably lived nearby (one of them, a wiry middle-aged dude, somehow sprinting down a fairly precipitous rocky descent like a friggin mountain goat with his Australian shepherd like it was flat ground), and a handful of people doing multi-day Jotunheimen camping trips, but it was all pretty chill.

Pictures!

facing south toward Lake Gjende: the building toward the left of the picture is the tourist hostel, and the lot to the right is the ferry terminal and parking lot that we started out from

up up! occasional rock scrabbling getting up to the ridge

mostly it was scree and snow

snoooooooooooow

looking down at Lake Gjende again

please ignore my sleepy derpy face and behold the norwegian to the right who is hiking up all this snowscree with a backpack terrier

woo!

woo!

along the ridge

Gjende to the left (blue, liquid, low), Bessvatnet to the right (green, still totally frozen, much higher elevation)

the snow was about shin to knee deep with a lumpy packed down trail that was a huge pain to descend, but if you kinda did the worm walk from Dune it was possible to shuffle-run down the smooth snow to the side of the trail without sinking all the way in

me and my janky left heel were less successful :)

Breheimen

We  departed Gudvangen at about 7:30pm (much later than planned, a recurring theme) for Jotunheimen National Park. And we got further delayed by some tunnel construction. And still no tent. But, after the success of the previous night, it seemed at least possible that the park would have at least a few more Jonny Taulens that we could crash with en route.

It'll only take four and a half hours, Google said.

Yeah, see how it kinda looks like we're driving through a bigass glacier? Our first inkling that Google's estimates might be a bit optimistic occurred just after Øvre Årdal, about 90 minutes in.

At the time it just seemed like an impressively steep mountain, but then we just kept driving up for I don't even know how long and it just kept getting weirder and weirder. Like, by about 20 min in we were convinced we were driving through the moon, and then it just got progressively more moon for the next several hours. I went into a bit of a car window photo fugue in a totally futile effort to capture how alien this drive was, so just going to do a big photo dump.

Sorry for my inability to filter these

I also have several video attempts, lol sorry

Delirious 1:30am rest stop selfie

At some point my moon mania let up a bit and I passed out. Cam heroically finished the drive sometime after 3am (he got to fully experience the <1h of actual darkness, it was light again by the time he woke me up), and then we slept in the rental Yaris in the Gjendesheim parking lot under mylar emergency blankets (never leave home without them!).

Nærøyfjord

One of the things we hoped to do in the vicinity of Flåm was kayak the Nærøyfjord, a UNESCO World Heritage fjord renowned for its narrowness and depth.

Megan at Nordic Ventures in Gudvangen, another travel hero for reasons that will again be explained later, set us up with a double sea kayak for the half day, along with full garb.

Cam all suited up and ready to row:

We didn't bring our phones, so just trust that it was incredible, maybe hit up a Google image search of Nærøyfjord and you'll get the idea. Plus it was great to rest our feet and work our arms for a change! Here is where we went. 

We passed the town of Bakka and its old stave church, and another tiny village, and stopped at the base of a big waterfall to eat clif bars and hike up the sheep path as far as we could until it was too splashy to continue in our essentially treadless water shoes.

The town of Gudvangen (we had to wait here for 5 hours to not receive our bag of camping gear, so we became intimately familiar with all 3 of its streets):

After that much time we were pretty glad to move on to Gjendesheim for the Bessengen hike. Little did we know that this wasn't the last we'd see of Gudvangen...