Day One: Saturday 10th August
Journey: Tromsø, Norway to Narvik, Norway
On the road to Narvik
Now that we’re comfortably situated in a cabin, drifting in the middle of the North-Atlantic Ocean on board M/S Norönna (and equipped with fast yet hellishly expensive internet) it is time to recall our first day of travel.
After the horrendous task of packing various wares such as clothes, books, toiletries, musical instruments, sharp-edged knives and other miscellaneous into our now heavy backpacks it was finally time to be put in motion. This first leg of our journey proved to be the least complicated and fastest of all as we only covered the meager distance (less than one kilometer) between our home and the Tromsø bus terminal.
Once there, we boarded the Narvik-bound route and spent an uneventful four hours that were nevertheless marked by quite incredibly warm and sunny weather.
When at around 8 PM we arrived in Narvik, we visited the deserted train station before retreating towards the strategically placed Shell gas station and snacked a bit before returning to the train tracks to spend a night in one of the station’s abandoned railroad cars.
We spent the night in this railroad car.
This train car should be in a Museum!
This trick, that I discovered last year when coming back from a two-week Swedish hiking tour, was rendered even greater by the discovery of an even cozier railroad car. Indeed, while the one I slept in last year was exposed to the four winds and dangerously close to the actual station, the one we found on Saturday was almost an attraction in its own right.
After an uneventful night of warmth, comfort and history (the train car was actually a Norwegian Ice-Scraper built sometime in the Fifties) we packed all of our stuff again and moved the couple of meters to the station, ready to cover much more ground on this new day…
