Safe Return Doubtful

A short spell of unseasonably warm weather arrived yesterday. Until then there had been the sort of wind blowing from off the sea that could be expected, bringing the temperature down a few degrees with it. But a warm front came through and with it the wind direction changed, to a light breeze from the north east, and both yesterday and today have been in the twenties, centigrade, for several hours in the afternoon, with clear skies. It’s too early still for mosquitoes, but with this aperitif to summer, they will be stirring in their beds, oiling and sanding their respective proboscises.

To celebrate such splendid mountain conditions, yesterday morning Roja and I repeated part of the hike we had undertaken the day before, ascending Kattnakken up the gravel path, this time the 400 metres a few minutes quicker, then found a different trail along the wide ridge, meandering around the remaining snow deposits, whose days are now numbered, and descended the path by the waterfall down to the car park.

We drove on after some lunch, leaving the island of Stord and taking the free ferry to the islands of Huftarøy and Selbjørn. By taking this route towards Bergen, with one more ferry, I avoid the toll of £20 payable if I travelled from Stord Island direct to the mainland, following the E39.

Some good news, that started out as bad, was that my card was charged for the Mortavika ferry from a couple of days ago, when I skirted around Stavanger. Charged for £34, instead of about half of that. I spotted that I had been charged for a vehicle over the length of 6 metres, so wrote to the Fjord1 company to bring that to their attention, and they removed the entire charge. There’s a moral, and it is.. always complain when something isn’t right.

Back on Huftarøy I circumnavigated the island looking for a good place to stop, and hiking opportunities, but it was surprisingly residential. I took the bridge to Selbjørn and it was less so, but with quite a bit of coastal industry. I resorted to a hiking car park behind a school, which it materialised, has not been in use since only December, the children now attending elsewhere. This place was actually much better than it looked initially, just a few hundred metres from a small, but very picturesque, lake, Vinnesnatnet, and a trail that led from the far end of the lake into Kvernavatnet Nature Reserve, dominated by a peak of 220 metres.

Later in the evening we walked around the lake, an excellent chance for Roja to cool off also. And this morning, we scaled a much steeper than expected path up to the Veten summit, so steep in one place that it had a permanent rope in place, for thirty metres or so. It gave excellent views on a splendid morning.

Something immediately noticeable on this visit is the number of electric cars on the road. Over the last decade Norway has emerged as the world’s leader in the adoption of electric vehicles. In 2023 87% of new vehicle sales were electric. The figure in the EU is 19%, the States 11%, and the UK 17%. They are exempt from the 25% VAT chargeable on other vehicles, and annual road tax free.

After lunch we took the free ferry back to the mainland, now only 20 kilometres from Bergen itself, and found a small and secluded peninsula, Minde, to the south, where we are parked up at the University’s Botanical Gardens. It’s 26C in the height of the afternoon, already a call to get out of the sun and into the shade, though next week it seems it will return to more like average temperatures, 12 C.

A guy just told me that today was a record temperature for Bergen in May. It will probably be the warmest it gets on this course.. well hopefully anyway, I didn’t come on this course for warm weather.