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Friday 30th of July 2010

Låtefossen

Waking up in the morning I know I have a long drive home and a hard day at work the day after… There was one more thing I had to stop and see though; on my way to Hardanger, just before the city of Odda, I had driven past a cool looking twin-waterfall called Låtefossen. I had a stop, took some pictures and drove home.

The total height of Låtefossen is 165 metres and is a well known tourist attraction in the area. It consists of two separate streams originating from a water above it called Låtevatnet. The waterfall was a popular tourist attraction for English and German tourists in the old days and there used to be a hotel just next to the waterfall. Tourists back then traveled by horse to see this twin-waterfall – today we use iron horses, haha! Just south of the waterfall there’s a “hidden” path up to where the hotel used to be and you can get a fantastic view of the waterfall that not too many tourists know about.

Låtefossen and the bridge beneath, watch out for tourists...

This photo is taken from where the hotel used to be!

Me in front of Preikestolen with my tiny Kawasaki Vulcan 750!

Preikestolen is said to be the result of icebergs melting about 10.000 years ago. It’s a famous Norwegian tourist attraction and more than 130.000 tourists visit this cliff every year.

Me and my girlfriend took the trip, for the first time,  last Friday. I didn’t ride my motorcycle this time, so it’s a bit unusual to blog about a car trip (cage- trip), but this is such a famous attraction that not mention it here on this blog would be letting you out on something spectacular.

You can’t drive/ride all the way to Preikestolen. You have to park 334 metres below and walk 1-2 hours uphill to reach it. It’s quite a tough climb, but we saw Italian and Russian tourists taking on the hike in their thongs (as in sandals, not as in something you would wear in Brazil) and some even in clogs(!). Please, if you’re going to Prekestolen, bring good footwear! There will be steep hills, rocks, mud, water – oh and not to mention a 604 meters above sea-level cliff on your trip.

I’m told that the view from the top of the cliff is absolutely amazing, but we climbed the hill on a rainy day with a lot of haze, so we didn’t see the view from the top, but we did see the amazing cliff itself which was well worth the trip – it really is hard to explain the feeling of seeing this cliff in real life (and you thought it looked amazing in the photos, hah!). Definitely a “must-do” in anyone’s book.

Preikestolen (left), My über awesome Vulcan 750 die-cast  – the only MC on top of Preikestolen! (right)

Crazy tourists sitting on the edge (left), The horizon on the way down (right)

 
Nice view! (left), The rocky trail on the way down (right)

Me next to Per Morten’s Honda CBR 600F, boy is that different to mine! :)

The weather was perfect last Sunday, not taking the bike out for a spin would be a shame! I was called up by an old friend from school and we hit the road together. He’s a proud owner of a Honda CBR 600F, quite a beauty! We switched bikes for a few kilometers and boy was it a different feeling riding that sort of a bike after riding a cruiser for 3 years. You can’t really say that riding one or the other is a better feeling as the experiences of riding these two bikes are totally different. One is built for speed and the other is built for cruising. Each for their own particular use I guess, but we rode 209 kilometres together and it was a lot of fun. Definitely something to repeat sometime soon.

We ended up stopping at a small town called Evje. If you’re ever up there be sure to grab a burger at the local fast food joint! It’s a small town, you’ll find the one I’m talking about :)

 
Per Morten on my bike (left), My Kawasaki VN900 Classic next to a Honda CBR 600F (right)

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Sunday 27th of July 2008

I had 3 weeks off work and I intended on using most of that time on two wheels! My girlfriend was working her ass off all summer so I was on my own – just me and my newly washed black Kawasaki VN900 Classic.

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I had planned my trip for weeks. I was going to ride to Hamburg in Germany, Amsterdam in Holland and finish off with Brügge in Belgium. I figured the trip would take about 2 weeks. I didn’t plan the route in detail and I wasn’t sure which way to take home – I figured I’d find out while on the road. I guess I like it that way; I don’t like planning every detail of my trips, that sort of takes the fun out of being free and on the road. If I was to meet someone who said that I absolutely had to go to Düsseldorf  or someplace else I’d be free to do so and being on my own meant that I didn’t have to consider other peoples opinions – perfect!

I started my trip in my home town Kristiansand in Norway. My girlfriend had arranged free ferry tickets to Hirtshals in Denmark. The ferry left at 8pm and arrived in Denmark at 11.15pm. I topped up my tank to the maximum limit and headed for Århus. The speed limit is mostly 110km/h and the roads are good. For those of you who don’t know, Denmark is extremely flat so the roads can be built very straight. It’s not a very fun ride, but the weather was nice and I was very excited to finally be on my way on my first international trip with my motorcycle.

I had a quick stop in Aalborg to log on to some random people’s unsecured wireless network… so that I could find myself a place to pitch my tent… I also had a quick stop in Århus to… well for no reason really, just because I could! Oh and I could plot in my camping site on my new Garmin Zumo 500 Deluxe GPS. The GPS, by the way, was the perfect companion on this trip. I never had to buy a road map or anything like that, I could rely completely on the GPS alone!

I guess most people ride through Denmark in one day as it’s a fairly small country and not awfully exciting. I could have had my first stop in Hamburg but I started to get tired so I stopped closed to the border of Germany. The camping site was called Lærkelunden Camping. I parked my bike, pitched my brand new tent (took a while to figure it out…) and went hunting for food late at night. I ended up finding a pizza restaurant that had opened on that very night! A brand new pizza shop, if I remember correctly I think the owner was from Turkey. He was super friendly and the pizza was awesome!

In Denmark they were promoting lead free 95 octane petrol with 5% bio-ethanol. The sticker explains that there’s no real difference, that it won’t harm your engine and that it’s environmentally friendly. 

 
Lærkelunden Camping in Denmark (left), What my bike looked like when fully packed (right)

Rinkenæs Church (Rinkenæs Korskirke) in Gråsten

Here’s what I brought with me on my trip (at least what I can still remember):

• Ultra compact 2-person tent
• Tiny sleeping bag
• Compact inflatable camping mattress
• A knife (which turned out to be very useful a few days later…)
• Toothbrush, toothpaste, some soap and other necessities
• A compact emergency kit (band aids, pressure bands, anti-burn gel etc.)
• DSLR camera (Canon EOS450D 12,2mp) with a standard 18-55mm lens
• Compact camera – Casio Exilim 5 megapixels
• My good old lightweight laptop (Dell Latitude X1) with an extra battery
• Garmin Zumo 500 Deluxe GPS crammed with maps of most of Europe.
• Pen and paper (a must)
• My mobile phone
• T-shirts, underwear, socks, a jumper and jeans
• And of course standard riding gear (helmet, jacket, boots, gloves)

What I SHOULD have brought but didn’t…:

• Water proof riding pants!
• A pair of extra gloves for colder weather
• A pair of comfortable sneakers
• A bunch of those vicer protectors that you can stick on and peel off after the vicer had been bombarded with Danish bugs from hell.
• Mosquito repellant!
• Sandals
• A better backpack (the one I brought sucked…)
• A lock for the tent
• A mobile phone charger that uses AA-batteries

Make sure you bookmark www.BikerThomas.com so that you can come back and read about the rest of the trip. Day 2 of the trip will be out real soon!

Elk signs are very popular among German tourists, they sometimes take them home mistaking them for free souvenirs…

Those of you who read my blog regularly already know that I live in Norway and that I often ride locally in the weekends. I’ve checked my blogs’ statistics and it turns out that a lot of you readers are American and some of the feedback I’ve gotten from you is that you like the landscape/nature pictures because it’s different from what you have at home, so I’ll keep on posting photos of the Norwegian nature :)

It’s middle of summer in Scandinavia and it’s quite warm during the day, but when the night comes it’s often cold to ride, so it’s useful to bring an extra sweater and some warm gloves for when the sun goes down. Just trust me and my frozen fingers on this one!

The aim of today’s trip was to see my family’s cabin in the inland, I drove E18 from my home town Kristiansand to Arendal, this is the main road around Norway so it’s quite boring. On the way back home I took the inland road which is a lot more interesting, heaps of neck-breaking turns, roads that look like they’ve been hit by a herd of Tyrannosaurus Rexes… and farms with cattle, sheep and horses. Look out for the local rev-heads/petrol heads – they’re driving like lunatics.

All in all though, a fine trip!

Vegårshei (left), Moo-moos (right). The cows were rather disturbed by the engine noise, all of them stopped eating and looked at me as if they were going to gang up on me and eat me and my bike instead…

Toudalsåna (left & right)

My bike at Toudalsåna late in the evening.

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The sun was up and there was summer all over – time to hit the road! I went up to a place called Herefoss, about 60KM north east of Kristiansand, Norway.

 
Herefoss in Aust Agder, Norway

 
There was something on my camera lens…

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