Telemark

The International Summer School at University of Oslo is packed full of extracurricular activities. Truth be told, I could fill my days with fun things to do, sponsored by the University, and not study a darned bit. This is compounded by the whole “midnight sun” phenomenon. At 11:30 pm it is just starting to get dusk. I’m not sure it really ever gets dark. I haven’t tried staying up to see. However, I have woken up at 4 am a few times and it is bright as day out.

Included in the summer school tuition is an overnight excursion to one of several places. I chose to go to Telemark. I wanted to see the Heddal Stave Church and wild reindeer. It ended up being way better than I ever could imagine.

We got on a bus and headed to the Telemark region of Norway.

Our first stop was at the Heddal stave church – the largest remaining stave church in Norway. Stave churches are wooden churches from the middle ages. They are named such because of the “staves” or support columns that support the church. This stave church dates from around 1150 and is still in use every Sunday for church services. The inside of this church is painted richly and the outside has carved portals. Hidden in the carvings are pagan symbols relating to the old Norse Pantheon of gods.

Next we headed to the Vrangfoss Locks. Yeah, no biggie, I thought. I’ve seen the locks in Seattle many times. However, I found these are a *bit* different than the locks I am used to. The Vranfoss Locks are on the Telemark canal. The canal was finished in 1892. Five hundred men worked for five years to clear a route to Skein to the village in Dalen. It was a canal that connected east and west Norway so it was not needed to sail around the bottom of the country to transport goods. There are a total of 18 lock chambers on the canal. Vrangfoss has 5 of them. Here’s the kicker – they are still in full service with the original equipment and wood gates and are RUN BY HAND! Men run back and forth between the chambers and open/shut portions of the gates as needed. It was quite amazing. I had intended to video the boats moving down the locks.  However,  I realized that holding paper in one hand, recording with the other and trying to narrate it all in Norwegian at the same time, without dropping the phone or falling in myself, was probably a bad idea.

Next was the biggest surprise of all. We headed off in our bus again to Natadal, the place we were going to sleep at night. Boy were we in for a surprise. We were sleeping at an old old old farm from the 1400’s that had been made into a bed and breakfast, while still keeping the integrity of the farm – including raising animals and growing their food. We learned about traditional Norwegian farms – the buildings and the workings.

We pulled up to a thatch roofed set of buildings on the side of a valley. As we got off the bus, the man told us to put our things in our rooms, get a towel from the cabinet in the hallway, and follow the trail for swimming. Ok, well actually, he said to follow the trail to “Miami Beach”. At the end of the trail through beautiful flower -filled meadows, there was a small (but very deep) mountain lake – more like a swimming hole. The water was surprisingly warm. (I suppose warm is what you get when it’s between 80º & 90º F for a month or more). We had elk stew for dinner (okay, I can’t eat elk, but everyone else was impressed with it.) For dessert, we had custard with caramel sauce made from the eggs of the chickens on the farm, topped with chopped hazelnuts from the hazelnut trees on the farm. We all said we wished we could stay and should have come to the farm right away instead of making the stops on the way to the farm. The next day we got back in the bus to head home – after visiting two more places.

The place we stopped first was Hardangervidda National Park Center. This is one of Europe’s largest national parks and one of Norway’s largest glaciers is situated in this park. It has an alpine climate and many arctic animals and plants live there. We took a hike and learned about the conservation research they are doing there with reindeer and the environment. I had hoped to see some, but they had headed up farther where it was colder. It’s been too hot for them. We also learned about the role the park played in sabotaging the Germans in WW2, but that is a story too long to tell here.

Lastly we took a ride on the cable car Krossobanen. This cable car to the top of the mountain ridge above the town of Rjukan was a gift to the people there by Norsk Hydro many years ago so that the people of the valley could be in the sun during winter months. The sun never falls on the town in the winter because the mountains that surround them are too high and the sun never rises high enough to clear the mountain tops. Now the town has a giant sun mirror that reflects 600 square meters of sun into the town center during the winter, so they can see sunlight.

When we got home, I was exhausted. I woke up in the morning to find I had thrown my socks in the garbage can instead of in the dirty clothes hamper!