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NORWEGIAN UPDATE: Guest journal by Diana! 2nd October 2008

Rhian, Amy and I are in Norway to play soccer. However, I want to update you all on some of the activities we have been doing to keep ourselves busy when not playing the beautiful game.

First, there was our trip to Gaustatoppen. For those who do not know, Gaustatoppen is a mountain about three hours from Oslo that is known for its spectacular views. The mountain itself has a peak at 1 883 m, and on a clear day you can reportedly see 1/6^th of Norway. When we went, it was not perfectly clear, but the views were still amazing!

Rhian, Ella, Lindsey and I set off at about 10:00 am, after a light soccer practice in the morning. The drive was long and took about three hours, just as we had been told. However, when we came to the bottom of this mountain Gaustatoppen, we could not find the road we were meant to follow to climb part way up the mountain. Eventually, it took about another hour for us to orient ourselves and reach the beginning of the trail. When we did start up the trail, we could see that from our drive to the starting place, we were already fairly high up, and the lakes on top of the lower hills were already an impressive sight.

On our climb, the trail was fairly rocky, and as we were quickly above the tree line, there wasn’t much else around. The mountain side was covered with green lichen covered rocks and as we climbed to each summit, we felt as if we were walking towards the end of the world.

We set ourselves a decent walking pace on the way up, but the uphill climb was definitely tiring. We stopped a few times to rest and to take pictures of our surroundings. Overall, it took us just under two hours to reach the tower that marked that we were approaching the top of the mountain. We knew that the tower itself was not the summit , but we couldn’t tell from where we had been climbing just where the summit was.

It turned out that we would need to cross the horizontal ridge of the mountain that protruded and snaked behind the tower to reach the real summit.. And, although this summit was only about half a kilometre across the ridge, we probably took about half an hour to follow the path. The climb took us over and through huge rocks, while on both sides of us there was a steep drop not very far away. Pictures do not do justice to the height or steepness of the drop.

I should mention here that Ella is afraid of heights, and it was only after long contemplation that she decided to attempt a crossing of the ridge. She started off on hands and knees for the first part of the traverse, not the fastest pace we could have made. I went on ahead at this point, but by the end of the last part of the trail, she was looking fairly confident up there! Ella never did come too close to the edge of the ridge, and in the photographs, you can see an uneasy look in her eyes. In any case she was very courageous and made it right to the end!

The view at the summit was a 360 degree view over Norway and it was simply spectacular. Again, the pictures probably don’t do justice to the view. This summit is definitely the highest up I have been.

After crossing back over the ridge and returning to the somewhat flatter ground by the tower, we enjoyed a quick lunch before starting back down. The return trip down the mountain took just over an hour! Even then, we arrived home fairly late and within minutes of arriving back home, we were all asleep!

This trip to Gaustatoppen was by far, the best adventure we have been on. However, we have been doing other things too. We have hiked and walked around the forests near Oslo. As Rhian's journal described, we took a four hour walk here, which conveniently included lunch in the middle of the trip, and a subway trip at each end of the walk to take us home.

Please click on thumbnails for pictures of our visits

We have gone to the Vigeland statue park in Oslo that houses over 200 granite statues of the human condition. We have walked through Akershus fortress in Oslo, and we have seen a number of museums, including the museum of Natural History, the Norwegian Cultural museum which is a cool outdoor museum with many old Norwegian buildings and houses, and the Fram Polar exploration museum.

Our favourite of all these visits to museums is definitely the Polar Exploration museum. This houses the Fram, a ship used in many of the earliest polar expeditions. We read about Nansen and Amundsen, the great Norwegian explorers who pioneered polar exploration. Rhian even left feeling a little bit of a crush on Nansen.

The Fram was built out of wood and it was designed to travel to the Pole by being pushed up onto the ice, and then riding on the ice as it drifted. The ship's explorers could then explore the ice and travel to the poles. For over 100 years, the Fram held the record for the farthest North a ship had traveled. The record was only broken in 2007! Very impressive!

As you can see, with all these trips and our Norwegian language lessons, we are keeping busy outside soccer.