Balestrand Photos


From Flam, I took a boat to Balestrand, which is on Sognefjord. The ride was out of this world. I couldn't believe how fast the ship went and even more, how fast it could stop. I took a small detour to pull up next to a waterfall on the way and for a minute I really thought the captain had fallen asleep and we were going to crash into the shore, just before we braked like a sports car and came to a halt. Most people stayed inside the whole ride, but I spent the majority of it standing at the railing on the front. There was no real wind that day, but the apparent wind from the movement of the ship was so vicious that it made my inner ears hurt. I ended up putting in earplugs and they fixed the problem. The whole ride I was in disbelief that I was actually on a ship going through such an amazing landscape.

Once at Balestrand, I set off hiking again. I didn't reach the summit this time because clouds hung over the mountain tops, but I did make it most of the way up. At one of the intermediate viewpoints, there was one of those boxes with a pad of paper that people sign. I looked through it and the great majoriy of the signers were from the U.S., which surprised me. I added my name to make it one more.

My room in the hostel had a deck with an amazing view of the fjord. Whenever I arrive at a new hostel, when I enter my room for the first time, often the other people assigned to the room are out and it's always interesting to me to see how accurately I can guess what a person will be like by glancing at their belongings. This time there was only one other person assigned to the room and I came in to see, among other things, a lanyard with a large pink stripe and a hairbrush, so I concluded that it must be a girl's stuff. When I got home that night, in the only occupied bed was a guy with very long hair.