I went North

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Day Five: Not the North Cape.
Lakselv - Lyngen (581 km)

When I was 24 years old, my dad said that he had always had this idea that it must be a nice hike from Levajok in the Tana valley to Lakselv. I never asked why, I have those kinds of ideas all the time. Did I want to do it? Sure. So one day, back in the late 1900s, my father and I got a ride from the cabin to Levajok, where we met one of the gold diggers up there. There's been attempts at serious gold digging up there, but this guy was part of a group of intensely enthusiastic gold diggers using the ultra modern contraption called Long Wave Radio to look for gold. A seam of heavy metal underground would interfere with the signal that normally travels fairly unchanged through earth, and they had gotten some promising readings lately, and were on the cusp of a Klondike style bonanza. Just you wait. Did we want to buy a share of his claim, perhaps? No? Clearly our loss. Once in a lifetime, this. Anyway, I think some people found some gold, but nobody has ever found anything worth more than what they spent looking, afaik.
The walk to Lakselv took three sleeps, the first of which in a Gamme, a traditional Sami hut made mostly from peat. We made a huge mistake and lit a fire in the oven inside, which led to a truly torturous night with a choice of staying in the sauna hot gamme or face the mosquitoes outside. My dad said that on days like that, you measure the density of mosquitoes by counting seconds from opening a pack of butter until you can't see any butter for mozzies, and this was a six second day. Anyway, we kinda slept there one night and two more nights in a tent. We fished and ate the catch, and we talked about everything and nothing.
I stopped in Levajok on day three, and on the morning of day five I woke up in Lakselv, so the memories of our hike back then really came alive.

Up at the crack of dawn, I now had to decide whether to go to the cape or not, and as I said in the first post, I did not. I went to Havøysund, and I am happy I did. The road, the nature, the delightfully vibrant town, the history and the mere insanity of all this being at 71 degrees north was fantastic. I haven't mentioned all the other tourists much, because I have taken to heart the saying that "you aren't stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.". I'm a tourist, too. But now that Nordkapp is within spitting distance, they are absolutely everywhere. The camper vans. The white, slow, using more than their fair share of EVERYTHING camper vans filled with people who are scared of the edge of the road and that believe that it's perfectly fine to stop right there on the road if there's a spectacular view (there is!) or a reindeer (yup, lots of those) to photograph, are all on their way to Nordkapp. So are all the buses, all the bicycle riders on once-in-a-lifetime pedal propelled trips, and so are all the every gadget included BMW GS's in the world. In delicious contrast, the spectacular road to Havøysund, in every aspect superior to the road to Nordkapp, was practically empty. I made another right choice!

Even for the northern bits of Finnmark, Havøysund is exotic. I got there early, the screen shot from my weather app says that it was 10 AM when I looked for the temperature. 24 degrees at 10, and it rose quickly to over 30. I was in one of the northernmost clumps of people on the planet, it was high summer, and again I had that feeling that this ride is for the books! I stayed a couple of hours, then I did something I never do: I rode slowly and stopped often for pictures!

Here are some shots from Havøysund and the road leading from it back to what in this context constitutes 'the world as we know it':





















TBC...