Categories: Travel Updates

Wiebe Wakker

July 1, 2016

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Day 106 | Tuesday June 28

In this nice, warm and free hotel I woke up and breakfast was even included! Still very thankful to Gisli who arranged this for me.

Around 11 I started driving to Sandnes, close to Stavanger. My host Viktoria let me know that she had to work at 14.00 so I had to be there before that. Viktoria is a 20 year old Greek girl. During this trip I stayed a lot at families or people between 30 and 40 years old so it was nice to meet some other aged people. She moved to Norway 2 years ago because of her boyfriend but she grew up in Sweden in her early days. Viktoria works at a hotel and she told her colleagues about me and the project. They wanted to hear more about it so I came with her and shared what I have been doing the last months. They took a picture with me and the car and spread this on their Facebook groups so I might get some invitations from her colleagues in other places throughout the country.

When Viktoria started her shift I went to her house and met her boyfriend Christeas, a 25 year old guy also from Greece who works in the oil industry. The economic situation in Greece is not so good so with the money he earns here he pays for 3 homes in his homecountry.

Viktoria’s hotel offered me dinner so around 6 I went back to get a nice pasta bolognese.

Day 107 | Wednesday June 29

Stavanger seemed to be a beautiful place so today was time for some sightseeing. The city is build around a harbor and it is Norway’s oil capital. Big oil companies have their office here and there is a huge on and off-shore industry. You don’t see a lot of that in the old town but what I believed was pretty cool is a skate park made from old parts of oil platforms.

Boths sides of the old town are very different from each other. The left side has cute little white houses and on the right side it was more of a hipster area with different colored houses.

Day 108 | Thursday June 30

Today was a day were I have been looking forward to for a long time, some years even. I would go to Preikestolen. It is a 600 meters high rock with a beautiful view of the Lysefjords. I saw many pictures of people standing on the very end of the cliff and I wanted to have the same. The translation for Preikestolen is pulpit, which you will understand when you see it. At the top you can watch 600 meters down and if you fall you have a serious headache. 

Preikestolen attracts a lot of visitors, especially Japanese Selfiestick Terrorists, and the cliff can be completely filled by them. Because I wanted to have a picture of me standing alone there I decided to go there early, the sun is shines at 4 here so enough hours to shoot the perfect pic.

The alarm went off at 3AM but because I slept only 1 hour I snoozed a few times and got out of bed at 3.45.

At 4.15 I arrived at Lauvvik were the ferry to Oanes goes. Unfortunately I missed it by 3 minutes and had to wait one hour to catch the next one. I think this was meant to be because from when I left it was raining and when I drove off the ferry it stopped. For electric cars most of the ferries in Norway are free, which is one of te reasons this country is heaven.  From Oanes it was a 15 minute drive to the carpark. When I arrived there were already people coming back so I was afraid the rock was already full of people.

It was a 3km walk and a climb of about 600 meters. At 6.30 I started walking. On the way up I saw rocks, forests and had views over the fjord, all of them stunning. Also people camped over night close to the edges. Funny thing is that you don’t see the famous rock until you arrive there, which I did exactly at 8. And what a relief: no-one was there! I was the only one on this rock and had been screaming for a few minutes, lovely.

The wind today was very strong and I couldn’t reach the very end of the rock. My goal was to take a picture of myself standing there but I found out that someone has to take that picture then…

I waited about 20 minutes and then 2 Finish girls showed up. They camped here overnight and were also wanting to get the pictures without anyone else on it so we made them of each other. We had to wait until the wind laid down and the sun started shining. At one moment the sun started shining so we had to take our chances, I walk toward the end of the rock and crawled the last meters. We shot all the pics we wanted.

The experience of being at the rock was amazing. The view you have from there is stunning and especially because I have been looking forward to this a long time it was a great relief that I got the shot.

Around 10 I started walking back and many people came from the other way, making me even more happier that I got here in time.
At noon I arrived back in Sandnes and went for a long sleep.