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???


But first, the story of the snowbank – was looking for a turnout around Vadsø, and – well, let’s just say not all of the rest spots are plowed regularly. Oops. The roads are plowed round the clock, but some of the turnouts feature snow that originally fell during the Reagan administration. Note to self: in case I didn’t learn this in Colorado in December of the previous year – do not drive into snow!

After a moment that rhymes with “oh sweet Jesus, this can’t be good”, I flagged down the first car coming down the highway, and she (like everyone else in Norway) spoke perfect English and carried advanced survival gear – including a rope. No tow truck necessary: apparently an Audi A6 has enough horsepower to pull a Hyundai Getz out of a snowbank.

Of course, while this all transpired, the northern lights that I had originally intended to photograph came and went … and I was tying two cars together. I wasn’t about to stand and stare while getting rescued, and for this girl from north of the Arctic Circle, it was “yeap, the usual, I’ve seen that before”. I can’t imagine getting jaded to northern lights, but I’ve only seen them a handful of times!

And that’s most of what you need to know about Norwegian roads: don’t trust the turnouts! They occur once every 50 miles, are not often marked in advance, and half of them are no more than snowbanks at this time of year. So, what to do? Just stop in your lane. Pull over as much as you can, but there’s no need to leave the road. Traffic on even the major highways is very light – especially past 10pm or so.

Hell, pedestrians walk down the traffic lanes of main thoroughfares! They wear their orange safety vests and take the dog for a walk. There is no obligation to yield to vehicular traffic – if a motorist wishes to get around something (human, reindeer, parked car, dog wearing a safety vest, etc etc) occupying a lane, then they’d damn better get in the other lane and make a suicide pass!

Also, one should note that roads are small. There are no freeways in northern Norway – I’m sure there are some around Oslo, and downtown Tromsø has some grade-separated expressways, but out in the sticks, all roads are two lanes, and meet at traffic circles.

Nope, no red lights, or stop signs either – it’s a stick shift country (more on this later), so the need to make full stops is minimised. Intersections of equal importance get a traffic circle, while a smaller road coming up to a bigger one gets yield, not stop. What’s the use in having to go all the way down to first gear when you can see that there isn’t anyone coming for three kilometers?

To complete the experience, these little roads are – more often than not – narrow as Hell, winding, frost-hoven half to death… and occasionally the rekkverk is mangler (an alarmingly common warning sign: it means “guardrail broken”. Hey kids, don’t be the second guy to go off a cliff here!). Curve advisory signs are minimalist – if something is marked as a “gentle bend”, one should assume it’s a brutal hairpin curve.

That said, everybody speeds like the dickens. Speed limit is 80 km/h nearly everywhere, and that appears to be taken as a mild suggestion. Even in towns, when the speed limit drops to 50 and there is automatisk traffik kontrolle (photographic speed trap)… people are still doing a hundred.

Yep, even around the hairpin curves, and when passing a reindeer wearing an orange vest. If you’re driving a tiny little Hyundai, it’s best to just indicate “pass me” with your right turn signal, and watch as a large truck, immediately with no regard for the possibility of oncoming traffic, passes you and disappears into the distance.

Given this sort of driving, you’d expect to see mangled parts of orange vests – belonging to man and beast alike – spread all over the highway, but surprisingly I didn’t see any accidents, and in over 6100 kilometers, only one roadkill.

My rental car was a Hyundai Getz, and let me tell you, this is a great little vehicle! One statistic reveals all: fifty-six miles per gallon. I had been budgeting 30 or something, which is what I’d get in the US, and I nearly doubled it. I’m sure that if I were an expert at stick shift, I’d have beaten sixty.

Those Europeans love their small cars. For $9.39 per gallon of gas, they’d better! Maybe one in every 20 was an SUV, and those all seemed to be playing the role for which they were intended – going camping or ice-fishing or bear-chasing or whatnot. Lots of Volkswagens and Audis and Volvos and other midsized-at-most cars, and also a seeming proclivity towards utility vans for light commercial hauling. I didn’t see a single pickup truck – just vans with the name of a small company on the side. “Johan’s Polar Bear, Bait and Tackle”, “Sørenson and Son Orange Vest Sales”, etc.

Of course, all stick shift. Including mine. I learned. Quickly. My one bugaboo was putting the car into third, not first, upon start and then wondering why I’ve stalled four times in a row attempting to take off.

(Also once shifting into first, not third, and being nearly flung through the windshield!)

I soon got the hang of it, though. I started from a full stop going up icy 11% grades, made plenty of three-point turns, handled those second-gear tight rotaries… erm, traffic circles, and even once coasted 14.3 kilometers down a hill with my engine off before clutch-starting the beast into 3rd gear.

So I declare myself competent at the ancient art of the manual transmission. That said, I still prefer automatic – there are a few photos that I biffed because I was busy attempting to drive – but if that’s what I get in Europe, I will take it.

What else is on the roads of Norway? You guessed it, there are even old signs. I found them on the secondary roads of all three countries I visited: Norway, Sweden, and Finland. I took plenty of photos. In fact, I nearly went and died thanks to a brief moment of sign-blindness: “oh, that one looks pretty old. It’s got a different arrow than usual; I wonder when … oh noes, it indicated a gentle hairpin! Brakes!“.

What isn’t there? Gas stations. Well, there are, except my guide book proclaimed them to be frequent and this is patently false. Sometimes they are 200 kilometers apart, and half of them aren’t open past 10pm or on Sundays. The procedure is something like this: Step 1, fill up tank, paying $109 for the privilege. Step 2, note 800 kilometer range on car. Step 3, congratulations, you’re low on gas.

Oh and what was that about a death tunnel? Much to the consternation of Princess Diana, Europe loves its tunnels. Some tunnels have doors (imagine a garage door) on each end to keep snow from blowing in when the weather is bad. There are sensors located on each side of the door to open it when someone wants to go in or out.

You can guess where this story is leading. I was stuck until a car came from the other direction and triggered the functioning sensor to let me out of the dang tunnel. Given that it was 1.45 am, there wasn’t anybody coming for a while.

So I parked in such a way that I blocked both lanes of traffic, and figured someone would honk when they arrived… and got some sleep. One hour and fourteen minutes of sleep, to be precise, before aforementioned dang tunnel came to life.

And that’s it for the teaser. Coming up next … actual batches of actual photos, featuring actual road signs.