We had an amazing day in Oslo (check out my
Oslo post here if you missed it) but we were so excited to check out the natural wonders of Norway! One of our first destinations- Preikestolen, known as Pulpit Rock, on the Lysefjord. Surprisingly, it was equal drive time to cut through the country as it was to drive south and along the coast to get there, so we made a day of it, stopping at Kristiansand for the afternoon (more about that stop in a later blog).
It was our first glimpse of seeing the wild side of Norway, and it was simply breathtaking. Warning right now, none of my pictures are even going to be a fraction as beautiful as what we saw in person. YOU MUST GET TO NORWAY! Lol, you’ve been warned, but I hope you enjoy my pictures all the same. Kinda kicking myself for not investing in a cool camera, but my iPhone camera pictures will have to do. One thing that we learned to love, appreciate and expect from everywhere we went, were the sheep wandering around the roads.
If you are planning on driving Norway- which I highly recommend because we were able to see so much and stop when we pleased- there are some things you should know.
Driving Norway Tip #1: The roads around the fjords are often two-lanes, around 80kph. You won’t see police out on the road, but you will see cameras that will take pictures of your speed, though they are usually announced ahead of time. Speeding tickets are expensive we heard, so be warned!
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| If you see this sign, make sure you’re going the speed limit! Camera ahead! |
Driving Norway Tip #2: If you are claustrophobic- be warned! There are A LOT of tunnels. Some of them are 5km or longer. Often times, you will enter a tunnel and come out 20 minutes later seeing a different terrain and experiencing weather that is completely unlike what it was like on the other side of the tunnel. It was unreal. Sometimes in the tunnels there were lane changes or exit ramps, so pay attention!
Norway was so spectacularly beautiful, but since I was driving I wasn’t able to take tons of pictures. The fjords are absolutely amazing: the beautiful water with the high mountains next to them.
Driving Norway Tip #3: There are often ferries to take you from one side of the fjord to another (though our GPS also had an option to avoid ferries, but sometimes can’t be avoided. Of course, taking a ferry involves a cost and waiting for the ferry to arrive. Also, we didn’t always know that we were going to be catching a ferry on our route, because the ferries are considered just part of the road (Route 5 for example).
We were getting near our destination of Stavanger, the home of Pulpit Rock, but we had to take our first ferry.
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| On the ferry, make sure to overfart |
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| On the ferry |
We had learned from our pre-trip planning that in Norway, people can camp wherever they’d like, as long as you respect the nature and keep 492 feet away from the nearest house. Also, from April 15-September 15 you may not have an open fire. We had planned on doing that often in Norway, and I’m not the biggest camper…alright, I have never camped before in my life, but we had the tent and I felt confident to go. Okay, I wasn’t confident, but when in Norway…
So after the ferry, it was getting late into the evening, and we needed to find a place to camp. We knew we could basically pull off anywhere and be okay, but what we hadn’t put into consideration in advance were these mountains. Where does one find a suitable place to set up a tent 492 feet from the road without falling off a cliffs edge? Luckily, as were were approaching our hiking site for the next day we passed a sign for camping.
Driving Norway tip #4: “Camping” signs are everywhere, and usually mean that there are cabins for rent. However, most of the camp sites are also for setting up a tent or parking a camper, and reservations are not needed in advance. These camp sites are must more prevalent than hotels in the Norway countryside.
So we pulled into the campground and found out that we could set up a tent for the evening for $30. We started setting up our tent site near a babbling brook and some trees, but after spending about 10 minutes setting it up we were more busy swatting away gnats than we were with anything involving the tent, so we made a run with our almost-set-up tent to another spot near by. It took us about 30 minutes and then we had a completely set-up tent and we were celebrating! Girl power! We had done it!
However, watch these videos to find out what happened after we had set up our tents.
Right, we hadn’t set it up correctly, so a nice German man came over to tell us what to do to fix the problem, mostly, he said, because he didn’t want to hear us crying in the night when it started to rain. And rain it did, but we stayed nice and dry, albeit cold. We had on several layers of our clothes to keep warm through the night, which was pretty helpful. We got up fairly early to get a start on the hike before the crowds set in, and we were very close to the park entrance so we were able to get started around 9am. We had been told by a very nice American Norwegian-transplant that we met the day before in Kristiansand that the weather was going to be bad today, and she warned us that it was supposed to be stormy all day and that we would be better off hiking Pulpit Rock on the following day, but our schedule didn’t allow us any time to spare, so off we went!
So Pulpit Rock is also called Preikestolen, but it is well marked by both names so it’s very easy to find. There is a fairly large car park, which costs 200NOK, about 25 dollars, which you pay as you leave. So, like I mentioned, it was a rainy day so it wasn’t busy when we arrived. The hike is about 2.4 miles long each way and the destination, the lookout called Pulpit Rock, is 604 meters (thats 1,982 feet for all us Americans) above the fjord. There were so many beautiful views along the way, and it’s a pretty moderate hike up, we were bundled up in our rain gear and it wasn’t a bad hike on the way up. Look at the all the beautiful sights we saw.
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| View of the carpark from our hike |
The hike was pretty varied, as you can tell from the pictures. There were often steps, made of large stones, flat sections, walking along stone boulders, of course lots of trees and even some waterfalls. But it definitely was very green! There were many places where there were stones stacked up. We saw this all over Norway: you are supposed to stack up the stones and make a wish, and the higher you are able to make your stack, the better the chances that your wish will come true.
The higher we went, the foggier it got, and also the rainier, and did I mention that it was pretty chilly? So we weren’t feeling very optimistic about having a great view of the top. It took us about 2 hours to get to the top, and although it was foggy we were ecstatic to reach the summit.
At the top of Pulpit Rock there are no signs warning you about falling, no barriers, just you and nature and a big BIG drop-off. However, we couldn’t see the fjord below at all, so I had few qualms about laying down and hanging off the edge a bit.
Now, here is a photo, not taken by me, of what Pulpit Rock looks like on a clear day. If it had looked like this I’m not sure I would’ve done that, but I guess I can call myself a daredevil now.
There are over 200,000 visitors to Preikestolen/Pulpit Rock every year. Loads of tour buses bring people here every day, and I had read a lot about people just hiking along like in an assembly line, so that was one very nice thing about our hike. We didn’t have to deal with crowds really until our hike down, then we did at times pass hoards of people, so it took a little bit longer to descend.
The hike was really not too difficult; it would be easier for people with longer legs because there were times when the steps were pretty far apart, or pretty big stones that I had to kinda hoist myself up on. I did slip and land on my bum one time, but it wasn’t an overly dangerous hike. It was well worth it and I can only imagine the views when it is a nice day. You don’t really need to imagine, there are pictures all over the internet.
So it wasn’t the most beautiful day, but I still loved it, the hike was great, with beautiful views along the way, and it was our goal to make it to the top and we did!
Once we got back to the car we were soaked all the way through our layers (for the record I had leggings and rain pants on, two pairs of socks, a t-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt and a rain jacket- and it was June 12), chilly from being wet (our hands and feet were freezing!), and hungry. The interesting thing was changing out of all our wet clothes in the public bathroom, and then trying to figure out what to do with all our wet clothes (which was most of our cold-weather gear that we had with us in Norway) while we drove towards our next destination. Our original plan was to spend another night camping, but we were so cold and with most of our clothes being wet we decided to change our plan and head toward Bergen and stay the night in an AirBnb, which we had to book in the car (thank goodness Heidi had an international phone plan- though it didn’t always work). So we turned the heat in the car on high to make it a sauna, made some PB&J sandwiches and headed off.
Our driving route from Preikestolen to Bergen was almost a 7 hour drive, and we didn’t realize it at the time, but our route was mostly a scenic road. I kept seeing these brown signs along the way and a few times I even wondered aloud what they meant, while also exclaiming over and over how beautiful it all was, only to find out later that we were on the scenic route.
I don’t know the names of everything we saw, but enjoy the pics of beautiful Norway!
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| Is it me, or does this waterfall look like a walking man? |
There were many times when we were driving and we just had to stop, or sometimes pull a U-ie to go back and enjoy the view/snap some pics.
There were lots of mountains, dozens of tunnels, and sometimes construction. Like this time when we had to wait 20 minutes just to continue on our route. I will say that driving in a country where you don’t completely understand the rules of the road can be a little intimidating, especially when you are driving and just come up to a car facing you in your lane.
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| Blue skies for a moment! |
Driving Norway tip #5: There are public bathrooms all over the roads of Norway, labeled by road signs as WC. They are basically porta potties, but look at the views that some of them come with!
Now to one of the most amazing moments during our drive that day. It had been raining off-and-on all day, and we had passed multiple waterfalls. We were heading for a specific one actually. I’m just driving along a fjord, the Hardangerfjord, the second largest fjord in Norway, fourth largest in the world, and all of the sudden the road gets very misty and I have to turn on the windshield wipers, but it was odd because it wasn’t coming from the sky, and then we drove by this amazing waterfall, just right next to road. I had to stop to look at it.
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| The road we were driving along |
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I was literally in tears (which I sometimes do when I’m so extremely happy) when I saw this. There were some parking spots because there is a little shelter that sells ice cream, but otherwise it was not touristy at all. I didn’t even know the name of this waterfall until much later in the trip when my amazing friend Dan researched it for me. Latefossen is a 541 tall waterfall, special because it is actually two streams flowing down the mountain, under the road 13 we were driving along.
We continued our drive, and though it was a long day in the car, we barely noticed because of those amazing views. Here’s a few more:
Driving along the fjords were just spectacular, and you pass all these little villages, all the communities pretty small with all the buildings in a little area, but they were so charming!
Finally, we made it to our final destination before going to our AirBnb in Bergen for the night- Steindalsfossen waterfall. We were still in Hordalang county along the Hardangerfjord. This waterfall is one of the most visited in Norway; Emperor Wilhem II of Germany even used to visit this waterfall every summer from 1889 until World War I started in 1914. We got there late, when there were no crowds (because it is definitely built up a little to be touristy). This is the first time that I’ve mentioned the late nights- it wasn’t even ever getting dark! We were there after 10pm and there was still plenty of light out. So back to the waterfall, there is a nice path from the parking lot up to the waterfall, and the cool thing about this waterfall is that you can walk behind it!.
There you have it, June 12, one of the most spectacular days of my life, can’t believe how much we fit in in just one day, and it was completely unforgettable!
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