It was time to go Hiking!
Norway has a similar set-up to New Zealand for hiking. There are lots of huts around so you don’t need to take a tent with you. Even better most of them have gas for cooking and duvets for sleeping. We did not have to take much gear and so our bags were nice and light. DNT is the trekking association for Norway and they mark tracks and provide lots of well maintained huts around the country. Tracks are marked with a red T, often painted on a cairn. For our trip to Hardangervidda we walked on DNT marked tracks and stayed in DNT huts.
Hardangervidda is a large mountain plateau in central southern Norway. Once we got up onto the plataeu (about 1000m above sea level) it was mostly flat walking. The scenery was very beautiful and wild and there weren’t many people around when we were walking. There was a lot more snow on the plataeu then we thought there would be. It looked a bit strange to us having so much snow at the same level as lush green bush. Apparently they had a much colder summer than normal and there wasn’t normally this much snow around.
The walk started off well with a friendly sheep greeting us at the start of the track. We wondered for a moment if we were back in New Zealand….
The first hut we stayed in was called Krakkja. It took many Norwegians to get us to pronounce this correctly. This area is famous for having large herds of reindeer, unfortunately not at the time of year that we were there. Near to the hut there were a couple of historic reindeer traps and reindeer bones.
We spent a couple of nights at the second hut called Kjeldebu. There we met the man who looks after the hut maintenance and sets the ski tracks in the winter. He had been looking after the hut for the last 20 years and his father was looking after it before that. He had brought with him some of his homebrew - a fermented apple juice that was very different to cider. He spun a few yarns about it being fermented for 7 years in oak barrels but we weren’t sure if that was actually the case. Whatever it was, it was delicious and not too strong and we enjoyed a glass or two. The area around Kjeldebu was varied and great for exploring. On our free day we climbed one of the nearby hills where we got a primo view of the nearby glacier.
