My journey takes me northwards, though I’m not yet sure whether this is where I turn round and come back.
I walked to Oslo Sentralstasjon this morning because I was in plenty of time and am still trying to save money after the horrific karaoke beer incident. It was a nice walk through the park and I had time enough on arrival to get myself some breakfast and enjoy a nice conversation with a girl who was on her way to Hamburg, also through the joys of Interrail.
The 10:02 SJ Nord left Oslo on the dot and is a beast of a tilting train that’s clearly built to get through whatever nature throws at it. I had a window seat assigned to me in the direction of travel on a table of four, which worried me tremendously until nobody else sat next to me for the whole seven hours and thirty-eight minutes.
I helped myself to plenty of free coffee and lefse-klenning, a diabetic’s wet-dream of cinnamon, sugar, and butter in a flatbread.
The Dovrebanen from Oslo to Trondheim is 553km of raily goodness, though how long it is and where it starts depends on whom you’re talking to. It’s generally used to mean all of the line between Oslo and Trondheim but is technically only the section from Eidsvoll, making the line 61km shorter. According to the Visit Norway web site, the journey is 485 kilometres long.
The Dovre Railway was officially opened on September 17, 1921 after seventy years of construction. It passes Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake, in Hamar and then from Lillehammer runs north along the east bank of the Gudbrandsdalslågen river and past fjords and mountains and all sorts, and crosses the Dovrefjell mountain plateau.
As we charged north at a leisurely but purposeful 100kph, the landscape outside the window slowly got more and more intense until I was almost in danger of exploding from excitement, although this could also have been attributed to the enormous caffeine-charged sugar-rush I’d been riding since about Hamar and discovery of the free snacks.
Every time I thought I couldn’t be any more excited by the monumental game of River, Mountain, Church I was quietly playing to in my head, something else came past the window to surprise me. I would have been better, I think, sitting on the left side of the train because it got some stunning views, but mine weren’t to be sniffed at either.
Host met me at the station (on the dot) and after some eating and other essenetials, I decided to start my quest for northern lights. Host lives about ten minutes on foot from Trondheimfjord which is a good place to get away from a good part of the light pollution of the city centre. There was already one green cloud lingering in the sky above as I arrived at about 10pm, and I was most excited to see that but it was pretty much all I got. It disappeared as if to taunt me within minutes of my arrival, in time for some Spanish tourists to proudly show me photographs of what I could have seen had I been there an hour earlier.
Hey ho. I hung around vainly hoping for more until I lost sensation in a variety of extremeties, then wandered home having at east seen something.
I am here fore-warned. Locals seem to qualify photographs of the lights with the adjective ‘long-exposure’. I have been told not to expect anything like the postcards. In fact, apart from a wispy green cloud when I got there — which could’ve been steam on my glasses and reflected light from a nearby traffic light — there wasn’t much to see. At some point I noticed that the dim clouds I was looking at weren’t clouds (because it was a clear night) and that they kept on changing shape much faster than actual clouds, but other than a brief brightening of one green smudge over the horizon, there was nothing really to see. Nonetheless, I did actually see a northern light.
Just the one.
