Aboard the ferry boats

A highway at sea

The period of good weather ends. Dark clouds accompany me for the next days. I stop at the less interesting village of Fauske after 65 km because of rain. The road leads through two tunnels of which the longest one is 1,7 km, however well illuminated. Next day I start early in the morning. The road follows the coast line except for those peninsulas that are crossed directly and steeply. To make 100 km a day I have to work hard.

And so I have to overcome many hundred meters of altitude. * Scenery, however, is really great. The mountains stand out of the waters upto 1000 m. The european highway no. 6 quits the land to be continued by ferry boats. While car tourists have to wait upto one hour to get across, I overtake them and get on board without delay. The weather becomes very special. It is very cloudy but dry on the shore and starts raining as soon as

I start climbing the hills. But there is one advantage about them - in the lee I don't suffer any more from the steady head winds. In the evening I usually camp on a meadow on the shore. In the morning I often wake up with a view scenic like that on the photo taken near Narvik.

* From now on I call the trip a «way of pain». There are many hills to climb and nearly every evening I have to fix and replace a broken link of the chain. In the end, however, I succeed in reaching Narvik. I remember the words of a friend of mine: «Bikes don't die fast».

* I get to Narvik in the early morning of a sunday. So I have to wait a day to buy some equipement for the bike. The day is sunny and warm and I take a day off, now that more than 2500 km are done. At midnight I have a wonderful look at the harbour from the window of the local youth hostel. Most of the ships load iron-ore from Kiruna, Sweden.