The AARoads Blog

Day 3 features us exploring inland, into the Finnmarksvidda. So let’s see about the etymology of this word: “Finn” is Finn, to reflect the locals; “Mark” is Mark, as in the Experience; and “Svidda” is the land of snow, ice, and a whole everloving metric ton of reindeer and not much else – except for that one guy with his airplane.

No, I didn’t get a photo of the airplane – I was about five kilometers away by the time the logistical awesomeness of the guy with the airplane dawned on me. Let’s think here; we’re about three hundred kilometers from anything approximating civilization – and here’s a guy with a little airplane (a Cessna 152 or the like) parked in front of his house. From where does he take off? And where does he land? Well, there’s a really flat and straight section of highway 93 running past his house… and a car comes by once every 45 minutes, if that…

now that’s badass!

We start not too far away from familiar Nordkjosbotn, and then head southeast into Finland and Sweden for a bit, before crossing back into Norway. The sky remains overcast for most of Day 3, and thus the scenery is correspondingly bleak. This is about as “middle of nowhere” as it gets.

Then, a mad dash back to the coastline, where the weather is supposed to improve, a crossing of the Tana river – the unofficial boundary between “the hinterlands” and “the even-more-hinter lands” – up to Vadsø, a brief excursion into a snowbank, and hey, the northern lights, just to say we did.

Surprisingly, there are some places where one can walk down to the water’s edge without stepping in eight feet of snow. Note the clear sky, and remember it well. We will not see it again for quite some time.

Rainbow skies, just west of Vadsø. This, by the way, is right after I plugged a snowbank. I tried pulling over, and, well, the snow may be deeper than it looks at first glance. Sink!

There was a very nice active phase right overhead, but I had no time to look; I was busy standing in the middle of a dark road wearing an American-made orange reflective vest… waving my arms, flagging down a cute Norwegian girl in an Audi A6, for whom it was apparently second nature to pull a dumbass tourist in a subcompact out of the snow. 255 horsepower and survival gear is par for the 70-degrees-latitude course.

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Norway, day two on the ground.

We pick up from Day 1 near Nordkjosbotn, and dash south in the middle of the night on highway E-6, to where it hits E-10. E-10 west, across the Tjeldsund bridge, all the way to the village of Å, and then back along the same road, because northern Norway is – like Alaska – very sparsely connected. E-10 all the way east to… well, almost to Kiruna, Sweden, because there is a big snowstorm blocking our path! Retreat again, down to Narvik to get gas, then up again on E-6 – almost back to Nordkjosbotn, actually, but we’re branching off on a slightly different route. The good thing is that even though I covered the same spots over again, there was different light and weather each time, making it highly interesting.

The same northern lights as the previous night – still visible, as the sky gets brighter with dawn. The village of Steiro is on the other side of the fjord.

Typical view in the Lofoten islands.

The Tjeldsund bridge, in late afternoon. E-10 is Kong Olavs veg (“King Olav’s road”), whose modern incarnation was built in 1967 over an old Viking trail from Luleå, Sweden to Å.

Don’t be fooled: this isn’t a sunset in Norway. It’s actually in Sweden, as we look back westward on the way to Kiruna. Originally the plan was to go through Kiruna and into Finland, but then nature intervened.

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Picking up in Tromsø, we proceed to learning to drive stick shift in ten minutes on the road to Hansnes, and then march onwards to Nordkjosbotn and a spectacular northern lights display.

you may note that Hansnes and Nordkjosbotn are in opposite directions. I drove to Hansnes, turned around, went back to Tromsø, verified that I was all right at stick shift by driving around downtown some, and then headed south to – and past – Nordkjosbotn. Memorize these names, and the spelling thereøf. There will be a quiz låter.

Traditional dusk. Actually, this very first night was just one of two times I got a sunset without it being absurdly overcast. (The other time was … the second night!) My ability to avoid rain and snow was pretty iffy, but it sure led to some very interesting conditions!

World-famous glowing trees of Norway. Actually, don’t tell anyone but there’s some car headlights involved. On the road to Nordkjosbotn, in the very last light of the setting sun.

Northern lights over the villages of Seljelvnes and Nordkjosbotn.

Same mountain, but totally different appearance of the northern lights several minutes later.

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the first batch of Norway photos. Not quite on the ground yet: these are all from my insane amount of flying, from San Diego, to Chicago, to Oslo, and finally to Tromsø.

Northern lights! We’re not in Norway yet, and there they are. Mission accomplished, a whopping eight or so hours into the expedition – before the first official night, even. Don’t mind the Brownian star tracks: I managed to keep the camera still relative to the airplane quite nicely, but the airplane of course was moving. Note the purple fringe on the right in the northern lights. Green is the usual color – purple is rather uncommon.

About one-third of the way from Oslo to Tromsø. That nearby peak in the center is at least forty miles away.

Landing in Tromsø. One can see the runway at lower right.

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While I go on a road trip of somewhat large size, here is your chance to see some photos from grim, frostbitten Norway. I took this week-long trip in March, 2008, and will be posting the photos in about seven installments in the upcoming few weeks.

This is just a teaser … three photos from that week.

The northern lights over the town of Nordkjosbotn, from the second day of the trip.

The northern lights over the town of Hammerfest, from the fifth day.

The bridge to Hammerfest. Well, in this case, the bridge going back from Hammerfest to the mainland. The weather was overcast about 75% of the time, so it was a miracle I got any northern lights at all… in the case of dense clouds, I went for the municipal lighting.

Fans of that sort of thing will be pleased to note that there are plenty of suspension bridges in Norway. And a whole slew of other things… I originally wrote most of this post on the flight from Copenhagen to Seattle way back in March ’08, and it is likely very incoherent, but hey we’ve got the Death Tunnel story in here!

The what tunnel???

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American cities may be attempting to be more European, what with pedestrianization and density being buzzwords in urban planning communities, but Europe is emulating the US in one way: ring roads. While some roads like London’s M25 or Paris’ Peripherique are famous – many former Warsaw Pact countries are racing to update their infrastructure to adapt to their new status in the European Union, and it seems that the first thing many countries do from an infrastructure perspective is to build a beltway around their capital. Here is a look at some of them:

Budapest’s M0 Ring Road has been around for a while, at least on the southern side of town where it is not full motorway standards. At the turn of the century, work began on the eastern half of the beltway which has since been completed. The northern side, which includes a cable-stayed bridge over the Danube opened in September of 2008. The M0 is slowly being extended westward, however the western-most side of the road is not funded as of yet. M0 is a curious number but, as it is the wheel from which most of the country’s other motorways begin, it is logical (Brussels’ ring road is also numbered 0).

The Megyeri Bridge takes the M0 Beltway over the Danube River north of Budapest. Photo: AAK Hungary
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The craze now in various European capitals seems to be the Beltway – Vienna’s S2, Budapest’s M0, Belgrade, Skopje, Warsaw, etc. I came across this image of part of Stockholm’s new Södra Länken (the Southern Link) – the southern part of the beltway there. It’s a huge picture and makes for a great desktop wallpaper (click it), and it also shows something lacking on this side of the pond: any semblance of artistic or aesthetic senses. The decor as the tunnel splits reminds the driver of both an EU flag and Sweden’s national colours. American roads, quantity over quality, maybe?

Belgium has been updated, with some new pages on the Brussels Ring Road, and the B401 spur freeway into Ghent. Check it out.