Today we made a bus back up. Tour buses are the bullies of the Norwegian roads: they know where they are going because they have been there before so they drive fast, they take turns wide, and they often roam in gangs.
We had made our way to Hellesylt, a small village on the (we are continually assured by the travel brochures) “world famous Geirangerfjord.” The road to the town was remarkably good until we came to a very dark, narrow, loooong tunnel. It was an old one, and (like many of a certain age we could name) it was dim, dripping water . . . and going downhill fast. Fortunately, we met only two cars in it. It spilled us out into an incredible view of the fjord that we scarcely had time to look at before the road sent us through two more short tunnels and into Hellesylt. There we found a bank, a woolen goods outlet shop, two grocery stores (right next to each other, as we often see in Norway), a ferry port, two souvenir shops and a campground whose owner shows up for an hour at 8 pm. We stayed there for two nights.
The next day, leaving Rover in the campground, we took the ferry tour along the fjord to the tourist trap town of Geiranger. The views are indeed magnificent.
The town was comfortably full of tourists disgorged from two large tour boats in the harbor, and we counted 50 motorhomes that, unlike us, had dared to drive mountains and hairpin curves to get there. In addition to the souvenir shops there was a very good museum half a mile up the hill that we trekked up to in the rain. We took the ferry back to Hellesylt for the night, and today we headed south.
Today’s adventure was a 9-kilometer stretch of very narrow road. True, it had many pullover spots, but you have to hit them right: they do you no good if you’re between two of them when the truck is coming at you. Fortunately, traffic on this stretch was light, but at a construction site, after we had wormed our way through a single-lane detour, we were met by a tour bus that had pulled up so far he couldn’t be bothered to give us full access to the road. We couldn’t back up; he shrugged sneeringly, as if to insist that he could hardly be expected to, either; finally, though, he relented and did.
Then the road went up and up with several hairpin turns before descending for miles at an 8% grade into Byrkjelo, a little village with a nice campground. We decided 67 miles of these roads were enough for today.
And then the sun came out!