Day 626 - Bodø to Narvik, Norway
Goodbye to Bodø
Mountain View from the Bodø to Narvik bus.
The answer to getting to Svalbard turned out to be complicated: get to Tromsø first, a city even farther north than Bodø. But getting to Tromsø (pronounced Tromsah) we must first take a bus to the town of Narvik, half way between the two. We were now well into the boondocks of Northern Norway.
In Narvik we would stay one night, and hop a morning bus that would haul us through high mountains and around an enormous fjord to Tromsø. Each trip would take close to six hours each. Then and only then would we have a shot at getting to Svalbard by boat.
The morning is black and dead quiet as we await our bus. It's 40°. By now we have hauled our cold-weather gear out of our suitcases. Rain slickers, long an essential part of our travel wardrobe, now joins with gloves, scarves, boots and a fleece sweater over our other layers. (Layers are always the key to keeping your packing to a minimum while still keeping warm or cool, depending.)
Our previous days in Bodø included a delightful self-guided audio tour of the town that took us through the city, and all along its docks. We learned about the city's history, the bombings and the remarkable geography that surrounded us. Visit: https://voicemap.me/tour/bodo for more information. We enjoyed a similar audio tour when in Trondheim. All of Voice Map's tours are very well done, and they are available in lots of locations. Prices are very reasonable.
Before that, Anke drove out to an enormous park outside of town that gave us breathtaking views of the great bay and mountains. Anke clearly loves her adopted town and eagerly told us about everything that the area has to offer.
"Go to a nice restaurant, visit the swimming sauna along the main dock, explore the city beach at Breivika and walk on to the little island when the tide is low and enjoy the best panorama of Bodø from there," she said. She suggested a visit to Tuvsiyen Saltsbraumen "where you can see the Maelstrom Tour, and visit an outdoor museum nearby. (Visit: saltstraumenstories.no for more details, and for general background visit https://visitbodo.com/en/.
We didn't visit everything that Anke suggested, but we did make it to the outdoor and indoor museum and pretty much covered all of the town's main streets and enjoyed several excellent restaurants. You’ll find some Bodø suggestions below. See our Bodø recommendations page for more information.
Riding The Bus from Bodø to Narvik
We are well into the Arctic now and the balmy days that we had passed in Copenhagen and Stockholm are behind us. The bus stop was on one of Bodø's streets, only a couple of blocks from our hotel. No bus terminal for this ride. Past experience had taught us to make certain where to catch buses that weren't located in terminals, like this one. We had nearly missed several in Spain and Chile and Argentina and it wasn't fun.
At 7:20 precisely a big and gleaming white bus packed us and a tiny, elderly woman with salt and pepper hair who had been dropped off by her son onto the rumbling vehicle. We guessed she had come in for a weekend visit. Her son helpfully nudged her up the steps and she found a comfortable seat where she settled into the darkness.
We did the same and I watched as we swung through the little town, past a few suburban houses and into the twilight countryside. Stop by stop the sun slowly crept higher as we rumbled into an orange horizon of low black clouds. Far away, beneath the clouds, we swept slowly away from the still gray fjords into unforgiving basalt mountains that sat before us like a mangled fence.
8:30 AM - We stop for 20 minutes at the little town of Fauske. I grabbed coffee and a sandwich at the Seven-Eleven style stop for both of us. Cyn sleeps. People on the bus are all ages. They use it to find their way to small towns and villages that pepper the northern Norwegian interior. There aren’t many other ways to get around so the buses stop often.
Into the morning, we climb upward into the mountains that once seemed so far away, and find ourselves among great stands of mist-filled birch, now stripped of their leaves. Winter is coming.
While on the bus, seemingly out of nowhere, emerges the town of Straumdal dominated by an enormous Alcoa plant. I thought how strange that this place existed among these rugged forests and mountains and how it was somehow connected to Pittsburgh, my home town, where Alcoa was founded and remained headquartered.
Onward the big bus rolled, hugging the rocky mountains. As the hours passed, the machine rolled us through every kind of weather – rain, mist, bright sunshine, snow, long, dark, tunnels, hewn from the hard, volcano-spewed rock, the Porvasstindene mountains.
Three hours into the trip we hit the snowlike and the views become overwhelmingly beautiful. The word beauty, in fact, does the views an injustice. To our west lay long, broad fjords, surrounded by forests of pine and gold, brown and red autumn colors snow peaks. One, especially sharp and crooked reminds me of Mt. Crumpet in the Dr. Seuss book, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It seems to beckon, ready for trouble.
Buses sometimes have their advantages, and the one we were riding right now had to be one of the most stunning in the world. No jet could ever deliver views like the ones Cyn and I were taking in. Even after Patagonia, Peru, the Rocky Mountains, Alps and Pyrenees, I had never seen mountain landscapes as majestic as these. There was something about the steepness and expansiveness of them against the still beauty of the fjords that made them unique. These mountains are the vertical variety, impossible to climb. And there is no evidence anyone here has tried. No trail heads or hotels or villages for tourists that I could see. Just wildness, forbidding and unforgiving. All I could do was blink in awe, and look on like a little boy stunned by the sudden appearance of Santa Claus.
After four hours we hop off of this bus and onto another one bound at last for Narvik. We had passed through towns with jawbreaking names like Buktamoen, Krakseng, Andslimöen and Bardufoss, sometimes stopping as the bus re-arranged its riders, sometimes plowing on through. Not long afterwards the road took us to Bognes Ferjekai where we boarded a ferry across the X fjord. This far north in mid October, even at noon the sun lays low.
Finally we swung into Narvik, a hardworking arctic town. We would spend less than a day there before grabbing the next bus to Tromsø. That was the goal so we could figure a way to get to Svalbard. We'd be back, it turned out, when it came time to cross into Finland.
Bodø Recommendations
If you’re considering travel to Bodø, consider some of these options for a fantastic experience. And please review our entire collection of Norwegian recommendations.
Sometimes called the “hourglass of the universe,” the Saltstraumen Maelstrom is the strongest tidal current in the world. Water from Saltenfjorden and Skjerstadfjorden fjords conflict in an impressive display of natural forces. Image from visitnorway.com.