Roadtripping Norway

Do you need to connect two shores? Let’s dig a tunnel below the sea! It’s nice up to the halfway point – you are riding a couple of kilometers down. But then you have to go up again, slowly, without any reference point, waiting to be run down by a truck. Sheer torment.

The ‘mountain’, whose top is conquered after a heroic battle, is as high as zero meters above sea level. Never mind. We will start after the tunnel, we still have a distance to cover, anyway. In the rain.

The road is pleasantly wavy, our legs are pedaling nicely and our spirits are high. As if we had forgotten that the journey ahead of us is so difficult that one would have to lose a serious bet to embark on it.

We are wandering about a little on some perfect tarmac and then turn to a fishing village. We have a brush with death when Wojtek gets tangled in his rain jacket right in front of an approaching truck in the tunnel. Thankfully, the driver is Norwegian and Norwegians don’t know anger so he spares Wojtek and the three of us arrive at the next fjord.

This is the wonderful landscape Norway is known for. Fjords and ferries sneaking between them. They are everywhere and using them is as natural as stopping at the red light. This is how you travel through this country. And this is why it is so difficult to organize a bike race in these most beautiful locations.

But we are not racing; we are enjoying the first coffee break, even though the coffee tastes like dishwater. That’s right, coffee is not the Vikings’ specialty. We definitely aren’t in Italy. People here drink black and very strong coffee poured from a flask – so strong that you can set the spoon upright in a cup of it.

What is nice about the ferries is the fact that when all cars drive off them and go ahead, the road becomes completely empty until the next run. You can enjoy the views to the maximum. Unless you and your mates are fully charged with caffeine and you shift into your hardest gear, get into an aero position and push hard until the road twists smoothly around a fjord, pulling through and off in turns.

Only when we see a Trollstigen road sign and emerging mountaintops covered with snow, do we start to calm down. This is where the fun begins.

The Golden Route. A spectacular road built over eight years in order to connect two middles of nowhere for a reason that seemed important to somebody. Absolute madness. Thank you Norwegians for being this mad.

Thanks to the Norwegian panache for roadbuilding we can now fully enjoy one of the most beautiful roads on the planet. It’s sort of a mini-Stelvio, but there is no use comparing the two. There are many longer and steeper hills than this one around the world, but this road is one-of-a-kind.

It’s 18km long with 800 meters of elevation gain and 11 hairpin turns on the hillside, a waterfall going down the hill and pointed mountain tops looking sternly at us. The visibility is not too good today. From time to time we can spot something among the rain clouds. No problem; thanks to the awful weather the hill is all ours. So is the climate that resembles the final battle scene from The Lord of the Rings.

This is exactly how you feel; as if you were taking part in something really big. And even when you bonk, you know that at the top there is a café with an observation terrace facing the whole hill. A café, as it turns out, which is closed. Normal.

Fortunately, right beside it is a little shop with trashy souvenirs where we pay through the nose for typical dishwater from a flask in a styrofoam cup. The temperature is only a couple of degrees above zero and it’s still raining. Our morale is barely alive and when we set off from the summit expecting a downhill what we get is a steep hill going up. This kills our morale instantly. With our lowered heads we look like Chris Froome looking at a stem.

But that’s life – sometimes you have to suffer in order to get a reward. Our reward was a magical 30km descent that gave us a bit of all four seasons. At the top the wind and rain were as strong as in the middle of winter. A bit further down the hill the golden leaves changed the scenery into autumn, then thanks to green pastures we entered spring, and finally when the sun came out from behind the clouds, summer was back. All that and another ferry crossing revived our morale. We were going to need it.

It was getting late and there was still about 50km to go, including two hills. Piece of cake. Not really.

You already know that this ride is one of those you will remember for a long time when nobody is setting sprint finishes at road signs or putting the hammer down when pulling through. The talking is over and each of us fully focuses on riding. I love this moment when the chit-chatting ends and nothing interferes with the most important thing.

We fell into this trance, and finally reached the top of Eagle Road. It leads through steep switchbacks to the famous Geiranger health resort, which is actually a small podunk somewhere in the mountains. We took a longer break under the pretence of shooting a video while going down and stop to fasten the cameras here and there as well as stuffing ourselves with cookies to delay the bonk.

We reach Geiranger, everything is already closed and it’s getting dark. The worst thing is that we are still more or less at sea level and the last mountain is about 1500 meters above us. Wojtek hits the bonk irreversibly and is out. Karol and I pack the cookies that are left and set off to complete the ride of our lives.

We got into trouble because we tried to motivate Wojtek by telling him it’s a cakewalk, only one hill. We didn’t convince him or ourselves. We would laugh at it later but now we have to do it. In the fog, without talking.

Initially, I felt surprising well. I even left Karol a little behind, got into the granny gear and kept riding without watching the views, which were covered by the clouds. While riding I am thinking to myself that I must be close to the top, and then a huge stone appears by the road and says ‘600 meter over havet’ (“600m above sea level”). We’ve only climbed a little more than a third of the hill. I feel like a deflated balloon.

Karol overtakes me and quickly disappears in the fog. I still have 400 meters of the hill until … the beginning of the final climb. Dalsnibba.

It’s a flagship gift-road that has been built specifically for tourists through hard work of many Norwegians and huge amounts of dynamite. It ends at the top of the mountain with a car park and a small café that is, yes, you guessed it, closed.

If you are going by car, you have to pay something at the gate but when you are on a bike you can simply go round it and enjoy the never-ending switchbacks and the view of Geirangerfjord from the top. Unless you’ve ridden there from Molde, in the rain and cold, and you’ve got no energy left whatsoever.

In such moments it’s hard to appreciate the switchback paradise … or hell. You are slowly zigzagging ahead, more and more snow appears on the roadside and it’s getting darker and darker. It’s really high but there is still no finish within sight.

These are the moments when you would love to throw your bike to the ditch by the road and start collecting postcards instead. But you know that if you keep going you will have the most beautiful memories. You know that the harder it is, the bigger the satisfaction, and that tomorrow you will laugh at all this.

Once at the top, the snow was everywhere and a perfect silence surrounded us. We opened a beer that tasted better than any beer ever has and basked in the feeling of happiness and satisfaction that only a ride this tough can bring.

Click on the image to see more information about the ride on Strava.