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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