Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

Hello folks,

Hanneke’s just given me the ability to contribute to her blog. So from here on certain aspects (steepness of mountains, lengths of walks and temperatures for example) might be presented in a more balanced way ;-). Although this will require me to spend time at a computer during the weekends – something which I try to minimise these days. So I probably won’t write that much. Also as Hanneke draws her camera faster than Lucky Luke she tends to get the picture I was just about to take – thus robbing me of anything to blog about! Anyways, here’s a picture of a new sleeping bag that I bought to protect me from the freezing nights up here. You’ll notice someone else has scooped the photo as usual 🙂 .

I finally found some time to put those photos online. We had our first visitor (from the UK) last weekend – Nem came to visit! She arrived on a very sunny day, and as we already had our rented snowshoes we decided to go for a quick walk in the afternoon. We drove to a nearby lake (Finnvikvatnet) and we were hoping to catch the last bit of sun. It was really windy there, but we enjoyed great views!

That evening the northern lights were very active, so Nem got to see a really good show! We watched from the balcony so we could escape to the warm fire inside when we got too cold. The next morning we woke up to a sky filled with amazing clouds:

We took the cable car up, we were planning to go for a walk from there. I took this photo of the view, and another of the building up there – as you can see it was REALLY windy!!

We went for a walk which was quite a mission with the wind – especially for me as I have no hood on my jacket. I need a new one! Why are Norwegian jackets so pretty but so expensive… I saw a nice one for 500 pounds, hmm. Anyway… The wind was so strong you could easily lean into it, quite cool!

Nem the Arctic explorer and both of us leaning into the wind.

Soon afterwards we decided to give up, go for a hot chocolate in the restaurant and find a less windy place for a walk. We went back to the place where we went skiing a while ago, it always seems very calm there. We went for a fun walk and had some snow”ball” (the snow is so dry it won’t stick as balls) fights!

The next day was Monday and we convinced Paul to take some time off work and come with us. Nem wanted to try skiing and as we have the same shoe size she could just use mine and I took the snowshoes. On the way there, we drove past some frozen fjords, very cool! Paul the oceanographer giving some explanations…

And… we saw seals on the ice!! So cool! Unfortunately I didn’t have my SLR with zoom lens with me, so the best I could get was this cropped version below, in the big version you can see the seal 🙂

We also stopped to admire the fish racks – quite spooky!! All this dead bodies hanging there haha. You could smell them too 😉

Nem tried skiing for the very first time, but she picked it up really quickly. In these two photos you can still see the concentration on her face though, hehe.

We skied through a valley that ended at the other side of the island on the water. This valley had no road, but we saw a snowmobile going there with supplies… there were actually some houses on the other side! Wow, they live quite isolated but such a beautiful spot…

We enjoyed a little tea break before heading back… what a nice place!

Nem and I both flew back to London the next day. We did spend some time in Tromsø before our flight left – we had some amazing cakes at my favourite spot (O.L. Aune) and we visited Polaria (which I thought was quite disappointing, but we had fun there with the Antarctic suit and some big puzzle that took us ages to solve 😉 )

Right now I am in the Netherlands after a very short visit to the UK… More soon!