Sandefjord airport lay no further than a ten-minute walk behind me. So, quite rightly you may be imagining that, at such a radius from a major transport hub, things would be what I would refer to as “Stansted Chic” or “The Luton Look”. But no, concrete and carparks only made it a few hundred metres from the terminal and there wasn’t the pervading sense that you’d become a statistic in the “Idiots that got stabbed because they booked a flight that landed past dinner time” graph. The only sound at the single platform train station was the wind hissing through the barley stalks behind me, which were headbanging to a shredding guitar solo only they could hear. In front of me it seemed like my hitchhiking journey through Norway might have a dusting of Hans Christian Andersen magic. A fairytale of adversity and adventure, the romantic journey taken through a land colourful wooden houses from a minimalist but distinct colour palate. Or were the rising ranks of dark clouds above a portentous warning? Perhaps this journey through Norway was not a Hans Christian Andersen after all, but a Brothers Grimm; one where the ugly duckling doesn’t realise that he’s a swan and gets pecked to bits for being a horrifying little abomination…
The South Coast
While in Brevik, the beautiful town of my first Couchsurfing host Borghild, I learned my first Norwegian paradigm; Norwegian prawns live in chest fridges…or are they still chest freezers? Those that have lost the oomph to solidify some unlabelled Ziplock bags containing something with mince? Or a curry? Definitely some sort of delicious slop. Either way, these lazy chest freezers have transparent tops so you can peruse the prawn selection before you scoop. Borghild and I got a bag and sat by the harbour, cracking exoskeletons and pulling off legs. I know it sounds romantic Emma, but I swear this was purely platonic prawn dismemberment on the harbourside. We chatted about Norway, Borghild’s various forays into unsuccessful relationships and the fascinating world of Mensa of which she was a member. After an evening of making red currant jam at the end of one of the wonderfully silent old fishing lanes then an almost anachronistic play on the VR headset and BBQ food, I went to sleep ready for my first day of hitching, not that I knew where I was heading yet. I had arrived in Norway without a single inkling of a plan. I was relying on weaponised whimsy to steer me through the country to my meeting with Emma in Bodø in three weeks time.
After wandering around the small local food festival in the morning, where I ate bacalao (dried and salted preserved cod, revitalised and cooked in a tomato sauce) served to me by an assortment of old sailors, Borghild dropped me at a roundabout and I was on my own. She had convinced me to head south instead of north, my itch for altitude had been averted and I was heading for places I’d never considered. First, with an ex-footballer and scout (not the three finger salute kind) who took me to Kragerø, where he gave me the tour of the town that not only inspired an “inner peace” from Edvard Munch creator of the effervescently peaceful painting ‘The Scream’ but was also home to the world’s only Western saloon bar with boat parking. After leaving the admittedly beautiful town and its lively summer atmosphere of seafaring families, I took up a new hitchhiking position and after a false start, a VW minivan screeched to a halt, reversed up to me, the door slid open, and I was greeted with “Hop in! Where are you from?”
It turned out I was now part of a stag do. I had a beer in hand remarkably quickly and was surrounded by a disparate group of Norwegian lads. They had already been paintballing and axe throwing and now were off for a big night out. My car neighbour, Knut, rose to the occasion as chief of merriment and provided the truest welcome to any country (the almost ceremonial teaching of swear words). With a couple of shots of Hot and Sweet liquorice flavoured alcohol lacquering my internal plumbing, I was dropped just outside of Grimstad. This was a small seaside town, soon to be the site of an undoubtedly raucous stag that Knut repeatedly tried to get me invited to and my recommended pitch for the night. The grassy park/trail/beach area where I was dropped was clearly a popular spot on a sunny day. However, I wouldn’t need to worry about crowds getting up in my business because there was meant to be howling winds and heavy rain all night. Thank God.
I found a grassy hollow on a small rocky peninsula and claimed it for the night, hoping that the depression would protect the tent from the wind rather than fill with water in the middle of the night. The rains came in a steady onslaught of heavy droplets, but the wind never mustered into something worrying. So, with a dinner of two cinnamon rolls and a book in hand, I settled into a fairly relaxing evening.
Grimstad to Kristiansand
After a visit to some very posh public loos, I walked to a suggested hitchhiking spot and waited. I waited for two hours in the drizzle, trying to figure out if there was somewhere better for me to stick out my thumb nearby. In the end though I resorted to the bus. In Kristiansand, I indulged in a Cambodian curry before traipsing through the shockingly quiet city centre towards Odderøya, an island connected to the city via a small footbridge. At first there were strange sculptural pieces finding their way out of otherwise abandoned looking buildings, but I soon made it past the experimental strangeness of the art world and into the woods. The island was small and mostly covered with trees, at its steep edges derelict defensive batteries had anchored themselves so deeply into the granite as to be part of it. I made my way down towards one of them, passed a sign that said, “No Camping” near a small cove with picnic benches, so I set up my tent out of the way in the small cove opposite. The camping spot was almost too good to be true. It was perfectly flat and sheltered, it had soft grass and a light breeze and perhaps best of all, access to the picnic benches for cooking like a king.
I had arrived nice and early at my new pitch, so I had plenty of time to enjoy the day, and what a day it was turning into. I released my feet from their laced cages, found my way down from the battery and onto the granite outcroppings. There I sat in the sunshine letting my legs dangle into the deep water. The granite formed ledges in places, harbouring sea grasses and seaweeds which anchored to the gold and red rock, its large crystal faces glinting like razor blades frozen beneath the glassy surface of the water. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in much the same way, rock hopping dodging jellyfish and finding places to perch, read and contemplate life. As the sun began its exaggerated slope towards the horizon, every footfall brought miniscule flies erupting from the ankle length grass, bright sunlight catching their burst for safety as a spiralling chaos of living sparks, of embers flung out by the hammer strike of my footfall. Swifts darted around me, catching these and other insects with every deft trim of a wing, only a few inches from the ground. I set about finding another spot where I could see the city. I skulked through the mossy undergrowth until I found a place to watch the golden light filter through the pine needle strainer of the canopy and enjoy the sweet natural perfume of salt and sea, resin and rock. Gulls cried on one of the bare granite islands while lone fishing birds hunted the icy waters, their bouncing, exaggerated flight jolting them this way and that. Beyond it all the cathedral’s spire was a lone skyscraper among the trees and buildings of Kristiansand’s shoreline.
Sandnes
The next day I was determined to hitchhike all the way to Stavanger/Sandnes, a four-and-a-half-hour journey. After a long wait at a bus stop, trying to make sure I didn’t accidentally flag down another disgruntled taxi, I was picked up by two excitable Norwegian lads who dropped me ten minutes up the road and unbeknownst to them (and me) gained a pair of earphones. Hari, a Nepalese Brit picked me up straight away and we talked for an hour and a half in his Tesla (electric cars are everywhere in Norway). While he proselytised the economic potential of Indian restaurants in Norway and the “fact” that immigration has ruined the UK beyond repair, we were moving in the right direction, so I was a willing and quiet recipient of debatable opinions. A father and son picked me up next. They didn’t chat much and let me enjoy the kilometres of tunnels boring through mountains only to emerge on a huge suspension bridges on the other side. They dropped me in a beautiful little village called Drangeid, bought me some smoked sausage and chocolate for the road and then were gone. An hour and a half later a young friendly postman picked me up then dropped me at the town most famous for hosting the largest window factory in Europe (apparently). Finally, two brothers and a sister picked me up and dropped me in Sandnes (seven and a half hours after starting my hitching) and their kindness would come to serve me well in a week later in Trondheim.
Over the course of the day, I had engaged in great conversations and had refined my hitchhiking mindset and technique. I had learned that potential hitches are much like wild animals, looking them in the eye is a bad idea. Unfortunately, this is where the usefulness of my comparison ends because no potential hitch is going to want to rip your throat out and eat you if you look them in the eye. Well, some might… and have… but on a Russian roulette game of eye contact with wild animal versus eye contact with potential hitches, I think you’d take your chances pacing the hard shoulder. But that’s not why I was avoiding eye contact, instead I was saving myself from the pain of the human-to-human connection. The unmistakable bond. The acknowledgement of self and of species when human eyes meet. Only for that fleeting connection to be torn away as the car cruised past or as they sped up to avoid their shame. On this day I had learned to disassociate myself from my evolutionary programming and instead all I saw were cars, emotionless metal boxes that stopped or not. As soon as I allowed myself to let go, from expectation and hope, from rejection and loss, I felt free. Free to pace, think and enjoy my surroundings. In these moments of free flow, of unregulated thought and unquestioned movement, characters and conversations would come to me, they would emerge from me without my conjuring. Their accents were always contrasting and wildly inaccurate, while the scenarios and situations were usually comically inconvenient or unlikely. I was writing terrible situational scripts in my head. I was in a flow state of wonderful babbling madness.
In Sandnes, I walked to the harbour and took the opportunity to read while I waited for my Couchsurfing host. Despite my general appearance as a vagrant, a young guy approached and soon began hitting on me. At first, I thought he was just chatty, maybe a traveller himself who was interested in what this backpack-wielding wanderer was up to in his town. But soon the standard twenty seconds of polite interest had elapsed and we were wading into unknown territory, someone was actively trying to sustain a conversation with me. While flattered, this hot hobo wanted to get back to his book about the evolution of space spiders on Earth 2.0 and so I quickly mentioned Emma, dropping “girlfriend” into the mix, and saw the lad scarper at a rate of knots.
Harald, my host and an absolute Viking of a man (in terms of stature, not in terms of seafaring capabilities and/or murderous hobbies), rocked up and we headed off to the other side of the fjord to walk a dog and climb a small mountain. At the top we sat and exchanged travel stories with stunning views over Sandnes and Stavanger. My favourite of his stories was when he decided to finish his beer at a tarpaulin roofed street “bar” in Guyana while two guys threatened each other with machetes outside/ beyond the coverage of the tarpaulin.
At Harald’s house I tried a range of equally horrible sounding Norwegian foods (shrimp cheese from a tube, bacon cheese from a tube, brown cheese – not from a tube!) which were all palatable at best. Then we made a simple bolognaise and ate it with Harald’s slightly strange but nice friend. She had, like every Norwegian, fantastic English. However, she had a strong, off-putting, almost affected British twang to her words. A mix of how Americans thought we spoke in the nineties and how they think we speak now. She spoke like Hugh Grant and Danny Dyer’s love child.
Aiming for Altitude
From Sandnes I was planning another long hitching day towards Odda but the hitchhiking opportunities from the city weren’t ideal so I took a bus for free to the outskirts of Stavanger (because I had no idea what I was doing and the driver felt sorry for me – genuine incompetence is such a classic ploy). Grødem was where I alighted and I wandered through the village where the streets were silent and people sat and quietly watched the fjord glittering just metres away from their gardens. I got myself to the onramp of the motorway and settled myself in for a long wait. I was sat there under a perfect blue sky with the scent of freshly mown grass and flowers for no more than fifteen minutes when a lovely 71-year-old woman pulled in and drove me onto one of the islands, another step closer to the ferry. Next, at a bus stop, a father and son picked me up, the dad was a Norwegian doppelganger of Fred Sirieix and the son was a very large powerlifter/English teacher and the first person anywhere in the world to know the meaning of “Bob’s your uncle”. They took me onto the ferry with them and while we chatted, I spotted a porpoise and got the appropriate rush of a nature-bereft Brit whose previous closest wild animal encounter was watching tactical gear clad adults launching a full-scale paintball assault on a team of prepubescent children using customised guns, paint grenades and the unsatiated blood lust of the modern-day man. Two equally majestic natural spectacles.
Dropped in a small fjord-side hamlet, I was soon picked up by an old man who drove me for a couple of hours towards Odda. He had great English and knew about everything we saw on the way. As we got closer to his home, he told me about his local community that lives beside the old road through the mountains and offered to show me. So, off we went along the single lane road, watching as old white houses sheltering in small coves passed by the window. After this he showed me his yacht, his boat house that he had converted into a stunning dining room and then dropped me at a bus stop 40 minutes from Odda.
I waited there for quite a while, happily balancing along the curb, whistling, throwing and catching things in the sunshine until two girls passed me, thought I looked suitably unlikely to do a murder and turned around to pick me up. They were called Miriam and Shada, and they were cousins from Iraqi/Moroccan families who lived in Stavanger and they soon invited me to join them on their hike/overnight camp. For me, who was arriving in every location without a single plan on where to camp or what to do, this seemed like the perfect way to end my day. They were both very friendly and I was very happy to have some company.
Having eaten a fistful of peaches, we arrived at Bondhusvatnet carpark fairly late in the day. I was ready and stood happily in awe of Shada’s naivety in the face of the outdoors. Confused why sleeping on the “floor” and wearing Birkenstocks were bad ideas, she wildly pulled the tags from her new bag and we got going. It was a couple of kilometres to the lake and yet Shada hadn’t made it 100m before exclaiming that she had a pain in her side.
“What is that?!” she growled.
It was a stitch. The first of her life. She soon had my walking poles and we made it to the famous lake. After some pictures, we ignored the no camping signs and continued to the other end where there was a small beach. There was no swimming to be had in the lake due to it being drinking water, so while they faffed around setting up hammocks I went to find firewood and started cooking some dinner.
A German couple joined us on the beach and we had a lovely evening beside the fire. Relaxation and relief had washed over me. Relaxation because there is little better in this world than sitting staring into embers that pulse, throb and flicker within the heart of a fire. All the while the stillness of night presses its cooling embrace to your back and the previously wild and vibrant mountains transform to featureless silhouettes against a smattering of starlight. Relief? Well, I was relieved that Shada had not rekindled her previous line of enquiry about my opinion on sexual assault prosecutions and the theory of evolution in front of the lovely quiet German couple. While hearing her espouse the moral benefits of the death penalty, the fact that “You can’t trust scientists because they get stuff wrong” and the assertion that her grandparents “weren’t monkeys” I had wondered why I had slowed down to chat to her. But that was in the past. Now, beside the fire, we were all happily sat close enough to hear the gently rippling water and quietly enjoying the stubbornly crimson sky until sleep called us all at 1am.
Buerbreen
Miriam and Shada dropped me in Odda (the other side of an 11km tunnel) and I was in desperate need of warm food and somewhere to escape the day’s torrential rain. I decided on Café Verket and stayed in there for three hours, eating breakfast and lunch, and reading a good chunk of my book (fictitious space spider evolution is fascinating). Soon though I was getting very tired and the rain still had hours left in the tank so I thought I should just get out there. Snoozing in a café is bad form especially when there’s things to see and slippery mountain slopes to recklessly climb alone.
With the swirling rain drops misting my face, I felt alive and rejuvenated. There was no sign that by the end of the day I’d feel a little too alive, perhaps a little too aware of my human frailty. Walking through Odda’s strange juxtaposition of a town centre, where colourful houses and cafes sat in the shadow of a giant crumbling concrete appendage of a once essential factory, I looked past the buildings and towards the banks of cloud smothering the forests in shades of grey. I had decided to head towards Buer, some sort of settlement/tourist stop where I hoped to camp before the climb to Buerbreen glacier the next day. I walked along the fjord’s edge admiring the precision of the cloud bank’s horizontal plane and then headed up and into Buer Valley. Beyond the first beautiful farming settlement there was nothing but me and the gravel road winding our way upwards between bulbous shrouded peaks. The rain was getting heavier and my decision not to wear waterproof trousers was proving to be a mistake. But the metronomic movement of my legs was propelling me towards Buer and shelter. Right? Please?
In Buer there was a posh looking lodge, lots of campervans and a very unambiguous sign saying, “No camping.” This was not part of the plan. This was supposed to be a day of recovery and recuperation, instead I was huddled under the insufficient wooden lip of a noticeboard trying to think where I could camp. Then, much like my café mood, I quickly decided to get a grip. I was already wet, what harm would there be in just going the whole hog? Glacier or bust.
The trail started in the dripping forest which was slowly flooding due to the usual streams becoming raging torrents. I crossed these streams on a strange assortment of well-made bridges anchored to the rock and emerged from the forest into the heaviest rain yet. By this point, I had passed the dregs of hikers coming down the mountain to get warm and dry whereas I was soaked to the bone, my trousers were falling down thanks to their wonderfully fast drying, but also wonderfully absorbent material and my bag was feeling heavier than ever; sounds like the perfect time for some scrambling doesn’t it? Ropes and chains up almost vertical rock faces which were gushing sheets of water would’ve been unpleasant already. But with about an hour’s sleep, a heavy bag and tired legs, holding onto the unreasonably small chain and pulling myself up the side of a river valley was a just a recipe for a bad time. I was happy to finally see the glacier’s details from the top, but I was even happier when I found the cabin from my map actually existed and was open. I had found my home for the night.
After stripping off, changing into dry clothes and rigging a washing line under the porch, a Bulgarian and his cousin turned up. Luckily, they were just there to shelter from the rain before heading down but I had a really good chat with them before being left to my own devices. The first thing I did was eat a surprisingly good meal of plain macaroni with scattered morsels of my gifted smoked sausage (gifted as in it was given to me, not gifted as in that sausage had world class skills). Although maybe its piggy progenitor was especially talented but hadn’t been picked up by the talent scouts, you know for country fair pig racing or for having a surprising knack for Tetris. And maybe that undiscovered giftedness bled into the meat, a subtle flavour profile of self-worth. Delicious. Leaving my doorstep dining perch, I took a jaunt towards the glacier and its thunderous river which was emerging from an ice cave at its base. I stood, happily alone in the not-quite-serene mountain wilderness surrounded by shattered dark rock and turbulent water, with the arms of scouring blue ice above and a valley of lush green below. This felt like my first real adventure of Norway.
After a very insubstantial sleep on a precariously narrow wooden bench in my bare box room, I sped down the now dry mountain, reaching the forest before the first hikers of the day were heading up. The plan for the day was to nip into Odda for some supplies, charge my portable charger and then try to hitchhike to Nærøyfjord where I planned to camp the night.
I left the café at midday and got picked up on the outskirts of Odda by Ørse, a 23-year-old, clearcut Gen Z chatterbox. She drove me an hour and a half down the fjord and dropped me at a small gravel area leading up to a house/vineyard/orchard. I sat at the roadside for a while happily enjoying the views over the quiet fjord, watching a huge fishing eagle heading over the surface of the water towards Odda pursued by crows. It wasn’t too long before a French girl who had driven from France pulled in to pick me up, the first tourist to meet the challenge of my raised thumb. One thing I had quickly learned on the roadside, thumb held aloft, was that those ever-present Germans in their motorhomes wouldn’t deem it safe to look at you, never mind pick you up. And despite the fact I had, at the start of my trip, hoped to get a lift quickly with these Germans in their congestion machines, I was glad that local Norwegians had been the ones to pick me up.
The French girl and I got on well and we chatted while traversing some incredible tunnels, where roundabouts were fashioned using a continuation of the ceiling, funnels of rock around which subterranean traffic could flow. Norwegian tunnelling infrastructure is beyond compare, either fuelled by the money from oil and gas, or by a unique Norwegian genetic heritage involving an oft overlooked ancestral intertwining of the family tree of mole and Scandinavian man. My French transporter dropped me in Voss only to pick me up again an hour and a half later due to all the Norwegian Molemen keeping their snouts to the road. Beyond Voss we went through another set of tunnels and at the end of one of them was one of the most spectacular road landscapes I’ve ever seen. Our road cut through a narrow carpet of green, a gently undulating valley floor where picturesque farms had settled the dreamlike scenery. However, this wasn’t the extent of the view, this farmland was hemmed in by utterly sheer, bare, grey, rock faces over a kilometre high. From their precipitous tops, most waterfalls tumbled into fits of spray and mist before they could reach the valley floor. It was a valley of such fantastical proportions that it was almost beyond comprehension that people lived out such seemingly normal lives here in what seemed to be something beyond the Earth’s capabilities.
I was dropped in Gudvangen and then decided to walk to Bakka (or as close as I could get to the village) and still wild camp. The walk took me on a beaten up path and then a small road along Nærøyfjord where my eyes were peeled for flat ground. Luckily, only a twenty-minute walk from the trailhead, I nipped off the road and found a series of grassy shelves stacked towards the shore. They were a little wet, but I managed to find a decent spot with beautiful views. However, I didn’t sit around to admire it too much because a full wet wipe deep clean of my body was desperately needed. Despite the rain’s eager attempts to wash away some of the grime in Buer, I hadn’t had a proper wash for the last few days.
Breiskrednosi
As I got ready in the morning, the water was a shimmering mirage. It was an almost perfect mirror of the rising forested cliffs and the halo of cloud that seems to adorn the mountains every morning. Having eaten my gruel, my water-based porridge with either dates or raisins which Emma would come to abhor, (I knew she wouldn’t last a minute as a Dickensian orphan), I was ready. Ready to jettison the heavy and dirty clothes in a drybag, attach it to a tree and get on the trail.
The Rimstigen trail would set me off through a wild and thick forest buzzing with life. Bees and flies attended to the many purple flowers in the undergrowth and on the most part stayed out of my face (which was surprising because I’m sure I smelt just like a flower after my wet wipe “shower”). At the Rimstigen waterfall and after over 700 metres of gruelling, constant elevation, I took the opportunity to gaze out on what I had climbed. The clouds were at eye level and traced the parallel and ridiculously closely spaced contours of the hill which followed the fjord round to the right. In front of me was my objective for the day, a huge cliff of unvegetated grey rock, Breiskrednosi.
Over the lip of the waterfall was a huge basin of stubby trees and coalescing rivers all running down from the extensive snow cover draped along the basin’s circumference. The sun was out, it was flattish and the claustrophobic forest was gone. So, I trundled along quite happily for a bit, refilling my water in an ice-cold stream but I was well aware that I still had 600 metres of elevation to climb so didn’t want to stop until I reached the lake above the next waterfall. I followed along the left of the main river’s course and began the interminable zigzags. This was the hardest section of the hike; my legs were knackered and my heavy bag was trying to drag me into the dirt. I kept my eyes on the next waterfall and willed myself forward.
Eventually it happened, low bushes gave way to another basin filled with some of the clearest blue water I’ve ever seen. There were some people camped there fishing and chatting, so I moved along the shore to get a better view of the mountains and the ice that still covered large sections of the surface. I ate as many of my awful trail mix of peanut, cashew, sweet papaya and mystery fruit cubes as I could then got going for the final climb to Rimstigfjellet. I crossed a few snow patches which were giving off a strange white atmospheric haze where they were steaming in the sun then the landscape changed to tundra. Lichens began to dominate and short hardy tufts of grass sprouted alongside stemless small leaves.
When I finally made it to Breiskrednosi I felt awful, I was dizzy and feeling a little sick. So, after finding a great little grassy spot amongst an odd lichen and rock moonscape, I had a nap and woke up feeling a lot more confident in my ability to walk to the edge and admire the view, rather than dizzily swandiving into it. Wild forests and untouched peaks made inaccessible by over 1000 metres of sheer rock faces all lay below me. The fjord itself was a narrow, meandering plane of azurite laying itself down as a barrier between our world of light above and a journey to an otherworldly darkness below. As I sat, admiring it all and regaining a smidge of signal to tell loved ones I hadn’t died, the sound of Rimstigen waterfall was my only companion, coming to greet me across the airy expanse at my feet.
The next day, after an almost unheard of nine-hours of uninterrupted sleep, I ate my gruel, refilled my water and set off. Silence reigned for the majority of my walk along the rocky tundra tops. Sunlight was pouring into the fjord behind me and to my left it was attempting to reach the sepulchral depths of Bakka and the dark swathe of water around it, the last remnant of night untouched by the new day. With its constant movement across the sky the sun probed and pushed exploratory shafts of light into the dark areas of the fjord, pools of illumination that told of the chinks in the armour of the mountain barricade, which no matter how sheer and how tall it had grown, would always be overcome by the sun.
Soon I was out of sight of the fjord and back to the lakes which were even more stunning in the direct sunlight, lenses of unmatched clarity laid out among the snow and peaks. As I was about to descend from the big lake towards the basin, I gave a little brown and black lemming the fright of its life. There he was minding his own business when some smelly giant decided to stomp a few inches from his face. Quite rightly he went absolutely mental. First he started screaming, falling over himself, cowering, baring his teeth and then started rolling around in circles. As he continued his Bollywood-esque melodramatics, I just watched in fascination. Eventually he took a hold of himself and scurried off to a hole under a stone, probably hoping none of its mates had seen that absolute shocker. Bet he’ll never hear the end of it.
Final Thoughts
Hiking Breiskrednosi with a tent was a gruelling way to end a week of wild camping, hitching and general exposure to the strangely stable and warm Norwegian summer, and now I was cooked. Multiple showers were needed, possibly consecutively, and so the city’s soft embrace called. The tent was dry, I had collected my jettisoned clothes, and I had ruined all possibilities of communing with the lemming elders, of reciting their ancient verse and of finally receiving a rodent sacrament under a full moon. But that was fine because all I could think about was the fact that I had found an Indian restaurant in Bergen. Sure, I hadn’t found anywhere to stay yet, but that, like all things would come with time and patience. So I swigged the last of my water and stuck out my thumbtip.
