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Norway Day 6 - 66° 33'

Added: September 11, 2008

Tags: Norway mountains photos waterfall
Wednesday 23rd of July - we are on road again. And it will be long trip again. If you check map posted in Norway Day 1 - Bergen, Voss and fjords you will see we are catching what we did not travel through first 4 days. Distance planned for today is 511km!

On the other hand we plan to cross Polar Circle and to see maelstrom in the evening. Two phenomenas we might not see again soon.

On the road

I do not have better name for this section. We left Grong in the mornning and we are heading to north along Arctic Highway. It is cloudy and rather cold.

We are not stopping much, our plan does not allow to.

Short stop at Sandåmofossan. We've just noticed it from road.
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Laksforsen Falls is our first planned stop. Rather nice, but not very tall waterfall. Other interesting thing here is slippery rock under our feets. It is smooth, sloping gently and rather slippery. Some caution is needed to walk around. It looks like glacier could help to achieve this finish. See it on next photo.
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Mosjøen

Nice small town with attractive historic street Sjøgata. We stopped here to take photos of colorful houses (again ;-) ) and to buy some supplies. Then we went to see those houses from other side.

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Mosjoen

Road again

Did I mention we made 511km this day? ;-) Well, we are going through not so interesting (but still very nice) country again.

We stopped shortly at next geocache place, but failed to find it. At least it has attractive bridge over 2 small waterfalls.

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This is new bridge next to old one.
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Polar Circle

While going more to north we can see how country changes. Previous photos were full of spruces, but now we can see weak small birches around. More to north and another change happens. Moss is everywhere around.

Finally we reached important milestone of our travel - Polar Circle at latitude N 66° 33'. We stopped at Polar Circle Centre, took a few photos, went inside and nobody knows how, but we spent there about one hour! Between souvenirs and other stuff! When we got finally out we found beautiful rainbow making nice impression for this "circular" place. Still one nitpick - it could be perfect if icicles were hanging from the rainbow :-)

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The right photo shows marble from Fauske - town we will go through later today. Very nice colours.
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Here it is - double rainbow over Polar Circle!
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Country short distance from Polar Circle Centre.
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Saltstraumen

After leaving Polar Circle we are heading to north again. Road is slowly getting to lower sea levels and trees are occuring again. Before reaching our destination - Bodø it looks normal again.

When we got to Bodø we went to camp site. As expected they were not aware of our reservation, their boss looked like he never seen computer before. That might explain strange feeling I got after he told me 2 weeks ago that he got my mail. I could hear in his tone something strange then. Fortunatelly they had cabin for us.

After solving our accomodation we needed to return about 30km back to see maelstrom. We went to Saltstraumen - place where this phenomena occurs (but word "maelstrom" got to English from other place, not this one). It is interesting - it looks like river with whirpools. It would be very hard to guess it is actually sea during tide. Later on it stops just to revert its direction in 6 hours. And so on. We came here also on Friday to see nice calm water (see photos later when they are published to compare).

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But water was nicely calm only a few meters away.
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A few photos from surrounding area.
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