Norway and Germany

Well, since we last blogged we have travelled with Ian from Umeå to Trondheim in Norway, picked up a hire care and driven down the Norwegian coast to Bergen. We stopped off at Innfjorden, and Vang i Valdres on the way and saw some amazing sights.

Turns out Ian has a lot of friends in Norway, most of whom he met while back in Australia through the dive club at UNSW, and a few he has met while in Sweden. So as it turned out we managed to spend most of the trip staying at his friends houses - saving us a lot of money!! So a big thank you to Eivind, Rigmor and Catrine who all put us up in theır homes. Also a big thanks to Elizabeth and Aril who showed us around Innfjorden and took us to see Trollveggen and to Sølvi who took us sheep collecting on a mountain just outside of Bergen.

We were glad to have the car as it gave us lots of freedom to stop wherever we wanted and make side trips as we chose. The highlights of the drive were definately Trollstiegen and Geirangerfjorden. Trollstiegen is a road with a series of switchbacks up a very scenic mountain, that we felt the need to stop at almost every turn to take more photos!! Geirangerfjorden is one of the more famous fjords in Norway and we caught a ferry through it with our car, which was thoroughly enjoyable - also because we didn't need to keep stopping the car to take photos.

We aslo visited this really cool Stavekirk (timber church) at Borgund, they built them using a particular method of timber contruction, but the building is pretty much entirely from timber and really funky (you'll just have to wait for photos).

On our final day in Norway Sølvi took us to a mountain just outside of Bergen to 'collect sheep'. Basically what happens is the sheep of several small farms graze on the mountains in summer, our job was to 'collect' them. We walked about an hour and a half into the mountains, formed an approximate line with Ian, Jeremy and myself in the valley, and Sølvi and her sister on a ridge on either side of us. We walked back in the direction we came from, us behind them so that any sheep that tried to run down the ridge and back up the valley we would stop (hopefully). It was a fun, but exhausting day and we brought about 13 sheep down ourselves, and assisted with another 10 or 15, whıch is a pretty good.

Norway was also bloody expensive...
A 400mL beer in Bergen, 13AUD
A 'cheap' curry, 30AUD
Petrol by the litre, 2.50AUD
'Spending' a week meeting wonderful people and seeing fabulous scenery... PRICELESS

From Norway we flew to Munich to spend a few days celebrating Octoberfest with Dan, Jeremy's friend from uni. We managed to do some sightseeing while we were there, we saw the concentration camp 'Dachau' and made a trip out to Neuschwanstein Castle with some new friends we made - and thanks to the travels we did with Steph in Germany earlier in the year we knew to ask for a group ticket for the train saving the five of us 175 Euros all up!!

In the evenings we celebrated in the beer halls paying around 14AUD for a stein of beer (still better than Norway). Even Jo had some beer, she was not able to finish her stein, but did manage to put away a stein of Radler (Shandy).

After farewelling Munich, we flew to Istanbul where we will be meetıng up wıth Tori in a few days to travel down the Aegean Coast.