Norway by www.born2travel.it

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26. 07. 2001 Narvik (NORWAY) Around four in the morning Pedro, all agitated, wakes me up to point out that it was still daylight! This is the phenomenon called the "Midnight sun", that is, the sun never sets for six months, and for the other six it rises only for a very few hours... On the train, Wolfgang and I prepared ourselves a nice little dinner of tuna, tomatoes and a pineapple fruit salad. My Austrian friend appreciated it a lot. We toast with a glass of white wine: Skol! After 19 hours, here we are at our destination in this mystical place. All our plans for camping, tents and fun are wrecked by the rain. But then lovely Inger steps in (a Norwegian girl who shared the Stockholm-Narvik journey with us!) and invites us to lunch at her house.

Ten minutes by car and we're in her cosy two-storey house, all in wood and, like the typical Latvian or Finnish houses, we walked barefoot inside! An excellent lunch: rice with prawns. After saying goodbye to the kind Viking, and after a little wander round the centre, we decided to pop down to the seashore, to one of the many famous fjords! Wolfgang takes his fishing rod and starts fishing, while we took thousands of photos, thrilled by this beautiful place. Narvik has a great feature, as I'd seen in a documentary, of having houses that show off bright colours, even though they're all the same, and this is because during the six months of darkness they want to try to brighten up the greyness of the town a little. We're in the northernmost place I've ever been, about 500/600 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. On that beach, which was actually made up of big brown and red rocks...

we prepared our dinner. Wolfgang and I the same as yesterday, Philipp and Pedro a plate of spaghetti bolognese. Two friendly local men give us a lift to the little local station. We'll try to sleep here. How strange. It's indescribable, it's now midnight and the sun is high in the sky! How lovely to be here. This place is different from all the ones I've been to so far. Now it's time to sleep because tomorrow a tough day awaits us to reach Santa's house in northern Finland. I feel so good here, I feel I have the same courage as the first interrail but with the maturity of the second. A perfect combination!

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