June 20th: Sogndal (218.9 kms)

Feelings: Carefree, Cheerful.

I’m looking forward to today. We are visiting an eight hundred and fifty year old stave church in Lom and then jumping on the Sognefjellet Road which is one of the eighteen tourist roads in Norway (accolades include ‘the road over the roof of Norway’ and ‘the highest mountain road in Northern Europe (1434 meters)’). We sped through to Lom via a strange little stop that had a disproportionately large statue on the top of a very high column. There were bas relief Vikings and a person on a horse with a shield and a scattering of copper bush turkeys. The only thing was I was unable to find out exactly why it was here and what it meant. In Lom we checked out the church. It was lovely—wooden and preserved with tar, dark and sticky. The carving was beautiful and I guiltily photographed a few gravestones. We coffee and (frozen strawberry and yummy chees) caked it and then headed towards the hills. Before we knew it we were back in the snow on an even more spectacular scale. Glaciers were lying beside the road like common puddles, mountains spread in every direction. The road skirts along one of Norway’s national parks—Jotunheimen National Park—which is said to have over two hundred and seventy-five peaks which are over two thousand meters high. You could see them in every direction and on every hairpin bend turn. We stopped for photos every three and a half feet; each stop had scenery more spectacular than the last.

And because the scenery couldn’t possibly get any lovelier we summited and descended into the valley of the Lustrafjorden—a glacially green and lustrous fjord which the road skirted for another few beautiful kilometres.

Can there be too much beauty? I am having difficulty finding enough synonyms for the day. We reverted to having to deny the loveliness in which we found ourselves in order to cope with its overwhelmingness. So when we landed a bargain priced cabin that was an elevated ten feet from the fjord, in a field of wildflowers, with sheer cliffs climbing up in our view across the water, we had to ask if management really expected people to pay good money to stay in such atrocious surroundings, with all that bad-for-you clean air and silence and solitude (except for the chain smoking Russians in the next cabin who put paid to a little of both the clean air and the silence).

The Lonely Planet advised that the best food in town was actually to be found at the Quality Hotel. It was a strange building. Very modern at the front, seventies style at the back. I’m reading a book about Ottaline, a shoe-mad young girl (she collects single shoes and so she buys lots of pairs, adds one shoe to her collection and wears the other with another single shoe left over from another collection addition) who has a friend called Mr Munroe (I suspect he has a troll lineage) who suddenly ups and leaves for Norway to find Quite Big-Foot, the Norwegian troll. The book is actually for children (surprise, surprise) and has the most gorgeous drawings which are for the most part black and white but are highlighted with green. I keep coming across this colour scheme, and it was also the colour scheme of the restaurant at the Quality Hotel. Because we had only had Special K for breakfast and frozen strawberry cheesecake for lunch, dinner was divine. It was still divine when the hunger pangs wore off. It was also very nice food—fresh and handmade. I had not been expecting the greatest of cuisine from Norway. I am a mixture of sad and relieved that we are yet to find the weirder end of the spectrum of Norwegian culinary offerings (elk, reindeer, whale, sour cream porridge). I am over the abundance of yellow food that we have found. I can usually only do whole yellow meals about twice a year. It was lovely to have fresh fish and vegetables and fruit in the form of cider. We had a spot in the conservatory and will possibly be in a large number of the photos a man was taking, for a whole hour (!), of the hotel. It was a little odd to behold. The evening was spent playing scrabble and reading Peer Gynt. We live a completely hard life, I don’t know how we get through each day of misery!