Day 30: Sørmela-Andenes (54 km)
Today started with a tech emergency when I discovered that the memory card of my GoPro camera was full. I hadn’t even been aware that it was close to being full. In addition, my iPhone battery was very low. Therefore there are few pictures and videos from today.
We started cycling at quarter past nine. It was cloudy, but the grey sky in combination with green meadows and the turquoise sea gave a very picturesque landscape. The first few kilometres were the wildest and prettiest, but from here I don’t have any pictures unfortunately.
At Nordmela, we stopped at a local store/café – they seem to always serve as both here. Here I charged my phone and deleted some files from my GoPro since I assumed that I wouldn’t find a memory card anywhere before Tromsø. I also used the time to book a hostel in Honningsvåg, book a Hurtigruten ticket from Honningsvåg to Bodø, and a train ticket from Bodø to Oslo. So the plan is to end this cycling trip with a fraction of “the most beautiful ship journey in the world” (according to Hurtigruten’s advertising). And the return date to Oslo is set.
From Nordmela we continued to Bleik where we had fish soup for lunch at the local shop/café/restaurant. I originally considered to stay in Bleik for the night because they have a beautiful beach there. But then I realised yesterday that today would be a half cycling day only and that we would have time for a whale watching trip from Andenes. So we only admired the beach passing by and continued to Andenes instead. Here I spotted a small computer shop, so I tried my luck and asked for a memory card. And they had one indeed.
Andenes is special for Whale watching because there is a deep sea canyon, the Bleik canyon, pretty close to the coast. This makes it possible to watch species that would normally only be in the deep sea like sperm whales. When we left the harbour, however, instead of turning west towards this deep sea canyon, we turned southeast into the sound between Andøya and the mainland. Apparently the sperm whales were rather far outside today (both previous departures today had seen some). We counted on finding orcas or other whales in the more shallow waters instead. It turned out after three hours of unsuccessful searching that this was a bad strategy. So we came back without having seen any whales. The organiser is very fair though and pays back the money in such cases. So we had a nice dinner instead and plan to continue to Senja tomorrow – which I believe will be another highlight.
Bleikstranda
Maybe the whales didn’t like our orange jackets