SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 5/1 Exploring the interior

‘I don’t want you till later this afternoon,’ said my aunt, at whose home in Kristiansand we were to spend the last two nights of our trip. ‘The house will need airing and I’d like to have a rest.’

    Fair enough. She’d been arranging the party for months and now there had been two days of intense social activity. In the last few years she’d suffered three major bereavements and a major illness. She was 75 and had two dodgy knees. A rest was the least she needed.

    In any case, Frog and I wanted to explore the interior of the country.

    ‘Why don’t you try Herefoss?’ suggested my aunt. ‘I haven’t been there myself but it’s supposed to be very pretty.’

    After a couple of hours of confused goodbyes – some were leaving, some were staying; people were heading to Kristiansand and Oslo, by bus or train or car; who was giving a lift to whom? – Frog and I escaped to our old friend the E18 and then turned on to the 404, a red through-route on the map, intending then to turn off it on to a cross-country brown route. But I missed the turning. This map, even though expensive, was nothing like our dear old Ordnance Survey ones. Or perhaps it was the terrain that was different.

    Maybe it was a good thing I’d missed the brown route. The red road was tiny – one track only. It rose steeply and had more twists and turns than a Devon lane. But we didn’t see another car and the views of rock and forest were wild and exciting. I had a feeling that I was annoying Frog with my squeaks of admiration so I didn’t ask him to stop so that I could take a photograph. Anyway, this was just the start. Things would be even better when we got to Herefoss.

  

We were puzzled. Because of the size of the name on the map, I’d expected Herefoss to be a bustling small town, with a gift shop and a couple of cafés. But all we’d found was a large wooden church and a scattering of houses – not even a village by UK standards - at the boggy end of a fjord.

    

Herefoss - a scattering of houses and some boats (and Frog)

The boggy edges of the fjord with an interesting punt-like craft furnished with sofas

Herefoss church with its rowan tree and graveyard

The sun was merciless so we parked the car and sank on to a wonky wooden bench next to the graveyard in the shade of a rowan tree, with the church behind us and the water in front. We didn’t speak. We couldn't any more after all the talking we'd done recently.

    The place was utterly peaceful. Two bicyclists pootled past. A woman came to water some flowers on a grave. Thankfully, she didn't engage with us except for a quick glance and a small smile. Another woman dragged a pink suitcase on wheels down a wooden jetty and on to a boat which then zoomed down the fjord, hardly rippling the surface.

    After about an hour we roused ourselves and went to look at the church. We walked all round it trying to get in but all of its three doors were locked – and alarmed to judge by the pictures next to them.

    We then tried to read an information board at the front but, strangely, it was all in Norwegian. There were several dates in the text including a 1200s one (1296?). Did that mean this church dated to the thirteenth century? It was impossible to know. I had yet to work out the difference between old and new Norwegian buildings. They all looked more or less the same to me.

    We wandered round the graveyard and noticed that at least half the stones bore the surname ‘Herefoss’. Not a good, sign, I thought. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps it was a sign of continuity and connection to the land.
    Frog said afterwards that our time sitting on the bench at Herefoss was for him one of the highlights of the whole trip to Norway.

We headed back to the main road, passing a dark-brown muscled man dressed only in black shorts powering up the road on wheeled skis. I’d not seen that before, ever.

    There was some sort of event in Kristiansand that day which would mean congestion and road closures according to my aunt’s daughter, who also lived in the city. So my plan was to approach from the west, reaching my aunt’s house without going through the city centre. On the way there was a star on the map which I presumed meant viewpoint. I imagined a small carpark with an honesty box and maybe a plan of the view showing what you could see in different directions. Bravely, Frog agreed that we could head on to brown (unclassified) roads and look for it.

    We went round and round and up and up and did we find it? Did we heck. All we found was trees and more trees. But somewhere - I can’t remember where – we chanced upon a lake. It was simply stunning but there was no one else around.

    ‘If this was England,’ I said to Frog, ‘you’d hardly be able to see the water for boats.’

The lake, viewed from the road

By the side of the lake

We stopped by the side of the lake and I wandered into the woods for a secluded pee. Goodness knows why I bothered. Some sort of atavistic instinct perhaps. Maybe I was hiding from the bears and the wolves and the lynxes.

    I recognised the blueberry bushes that covered the ground. I remembered climbing the nearest fjell on rainy days as a child to pick blueberries for our middag (supper) as a change from rips (redcurrants), a hedge of which grew at the bottom of my great uncles’ house and which we ate raw with icing sugar for pudding. These blueberry bushes however were dried up and fruitless.

We’d got the hang of the sat-nav lady by now. We’d realised that she was incapable of pronouncing Norwegian place names. The noises she made bore no resemblance to any known language. They didn’t even sound human. So we concentrated on the screen instead.

    A short way out of Kristiansand we stopped in a layby. Frog set the sat-nav with my aunt’s address while I texted her.

    ‘Fiveish?’

    ‘Perfect,’ she texted back. ‘I’ve just had a lovely sleep.’

    We’d had an extraordinary day. I'd been overwhelmed by the beauty and peace of the country's interior. There was zero provision for tourists. We hadn’t seen a single café or sign of commercialisation the whole day. We'd hardly even seen a human. The country had kept its integrity and nature was the star, exactly as it should be.

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