Day 2 of our visit to Norway. We’ve been a bit worried about just how “active” our limited hiking skills would allow us to be on this holiday, and today was going to be our first test.
We resolved to at least make a start on the Laerdalstigen walk and see how far we could get. The walk takes you from Eidsborg (up a steep 12 degree incline hill from Dalen) along a ridge and then down to the township of Laerdal. The travel agent had pre-booked tickets for a canal boat from Laerdal back to Dalen in the late afternoon. There was no chance that we could manage the steep walk from Dalen up to Eidsborg, so we took our car up there, which meant that the canal trip seemed out of the question as our car would be stranded. We resolved to walk as far as we felt comfortable along the ridge and then simply return to the car.
The description of the walk as “challenging” and more dramatic than the iconic Besseggen (which is yet to come), sent a cold shiver down our spines – we really are lily-livered when it comes to the great outdoors! Our waiter at dinner the previous night told us the tale of a German couple whom he had passed one day when he did the walk, who took 12 hours to complete it and missed the ferry at the other end by 3 hours leaving them stranded at the end point, Laerdal. And Germans are better hikers than we are!
In the end, I think we under-estimated our ability and I suspect we could have achieved the full walk in maybe 8-9 hours. We discovered a sign once we got to Eidsborg with contact numbers for taxi companies that could have helped us with the stranded-car conundrum. And we managed to navigate the section that we walked pretty well. Oh well – it gives us some courage for the walks we’ll be doing in the next few days! We got as far as Urdalen (about only one-eighth of the way) and from there we got some very beautiful views.
Once we had returned to the car feeling a little despondent that we would be missing out on our boat ride down the Telemark, we decided that we would at least make an effort to see some of the locks pictured in some of the Telemark brochures. So we made the long drive out to Ulefoss with the aim of walking from there to Vrangfoff along a marked route which went past an historic homestead known as Skarravegen.
On the way, we stopped at Eidsborg Stave Church which was much smaller than Heddal and not open when we visited, but OK for a quick stop as we had about a 2 hour journey ahead of us to get to Ulefoss.
The walk started from the locks at Ulefoss, led us up to the Skarravegen homestead, through some planted fields (oats?) and gradually down the hill again through pine forest to the Eidsfoss lock.
We had to walk over the narrow lock gate to get to the other side of the river and then continued on to the spectacular Vrangfoss locks – five in all, making this the biggest series of locks on the canal. The whole trip took about 70 minutes.
It was a nice walk, and had we more time on our hands we would have taken it back in the same direction, but we decided to walk 5km down the main road back to Ulefoss hoping to save some time, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. But by the end we felt that we had at least done an “appropriate” amount of walking for the day. Hopefully we’ll sleep well tonight!
Finally, some more photos of Dalen House before I go. This is the house before its restoration:
And here is the after-shot:
And some of the interiors:
