Norway Continued
We had one stop left in Norway, which was the coast town of Stavenger. We opted for a bus trip here, but ended up with more than we bargained for. En route to the south, the road is not continuous, and so there is three ferry trips. After about an hour on the bus, Mari and I had fallen sound asleep. We woke and found the bus had parked beside a grey wall, and was obviously just stopping to let people stretch. We decided to stay on the bus. When everyone but us was off the bus, the driver approached us. He could speak some english, and was very nice.
He said " We have several ferry trips tonight"
"Okay" said we
Confused that we were not understanding him he said " When we are on the ferry, you cannot stay on the bus"
"Okay" we said, "we will get off when we get to the ferry"
The driver sighed "Here is a schedule of our trip, With the TIMES of the ferries"
Absolutely clueless, I looked at my watch. "Okay I said, we will be ready"
Finally he said "This is the ferry"
Crap. We grabbed our stuff and scampered off the bus. The ferry immediately departed. Evidently it and a couple hundred people were waiting for a couple of idiots to get off the bus, before they could leave.
As per norm, we arrived after dark and had to find a campsite and set up by headlamp. We woke and found that we had stumbled upon a gorgeous site on the shores of a lake. We were truly impressed.
We had come to Stavenger to experience two natural phenomenom. Both of these were sheer rock faces, one of which was a piece of outcrop that was sheer on three sides, and the other one was a rock about 1 m wide which was stuck 1000 m above the water between two cliffs. We wanted to stand on the later, but the ferries had stopped their summer run and we could not get there. We found that we could still get to the former, so we opted for that.
Preikestolen, as the precipice is known, is fairly easy to get to in the summer. By fall, you must watch timetables and we arrived on the last day of the regular season. Because of this, there were several hundred people who also wanted to visit. It was a 6 km walk uphill to the formation, and since we took an early ferry, we arrived to find only 2 people mulling around the top. We snapped several photos, and peered over the edge to see the rock curve inwards underneath me (a strange sensation) and the fjiord 600 m below. We loved it, until after about 2 hours there were over 100 people hanging around. Oh well, last day of the season.
We headed down, and spent another couple nights camping before heading back to Oslo. We treated ourselves to a warm bed and a good meal. On the last morning we had a buffet breakfast at our hostel. I counted 12 items available that had fish in them. I was laughing, but tried several different products. They were good, and I enjoy caviar for breakfast as much as the next guy, but it was the coffee I liked the best.
We headed out that morning, and had one more layover left on our trip.