Day 18: Kvam to Varphaugen

What a day.  The luxury of not having to get up early very quickly became a tedious wait to get going.  I ate a lot of breakfast, washed down with three cups of coffee and made myself a cheese sandwich for my lunch.  Then I waited for the bus.  I’d had two options this morning, either 01:51 or 10:53! And the early bus would have meant that I missed breakfast!

I sat in my room and watched the rain.  I did some admin stuff for my upcoming trip to Tiree with the Gold DofE Army cadets and got myself an eSIM - all this in addition to the really important tasks of completing Wordle and doing my Duolingo for the day! And checking the progress of my bus every two minutes.  It was delayed.  Eventually arriving at around 11.30am.  At least, with my room only being a few metres from the bus stop, I could wait in the dry.

The bus ride was only about 10 minutes long, a fifth of the time was spent in a tunnel, meaning I was back on the trail by noon.  In my original plan yesterday and today were one stage which, according to the planning tool, was 33.6km long.  I’d walked just over 22km yesterday so was anticipating a short and sweet 12km today.  

There must have been a million stiles in tbe first kilometre and a half!  I thought that stiles would be the main feature of the walk and wondered how the lady from the Netherlands who was walking with her dog was coping. 

Then came the forest trails.  Every so often there would be a fallen tree across the path.  Sometimes I could step over them, sometimes it was an ungainly scramble and on more than one occasion I had to crawl underneath them!  The soil is very shallow so often when one tree falls it takes several other with it. 

One multiple tree falls looked a bit tricky to navigate my way through so I thought I would ‘just go around’ it.  Big mistake!  These trees are huge and I ended up so far off the path it took me ages to get back on track.   

The forest was beautiful!  The rocky floor was covered in a squishy carpet of mosses and lichens. Lichens are a pollution indicator, I’ve never seen lichen on such a huge scale (all the whitish bits in the photo above are lichen) which bodes well for the air quality.

Cheese sandwich for lunch

It was super slow work today.  A couple of missed turns didn’t help:

There’s a signpost here!

I was also very aware that the vast majority of this section was rife with trip and slip hazzards, especially after the rain earlier in the day. Even getting to this bridge was tricky:

What I thought was going to be 12km was closer to 14, but took forever!  I was very glad I preordered dinner and even happier that I arrived in time!