Today it was time to say goodbye to the Lofoten, and I think it was one of the harder goodbye’s in my life. To leave a place behind where you’ve experienced happiness in such a pure and beautiful way, is never easy. At the Lofoten I’d been experiencing feelings I never experienced before. I had been on adventures before I got here, but never in such extreme conditions. I had seen miraculous places, but never been to a place that was a complete miracle itself. I have made beautiful journeys, but I don’t think any of them could level with the Lofoten. I usually do not like to compare, it is my strong belief that journeys are beautiful as they all come with such different adventures, lessons, and memories. But I really took a bow for the Lofoten for being such an extraordinary experience, and the only way to express that was by shamelessly shedding some tears when leaving the islands.
One last look at the purity of this place, as if my eyes were taking pictures for my brain to hold onto. The mountains would always be the kings of the Lofoten, with their bizarre pointy but intense green tops. The waters would always be the clearest waters possible, where you could see the sand beneath your feet and the shades of blue stretching endlessly. The fields would always be peaceful, rolling onwards, greener than green, with some little fairytale farms scattered trough them. The lakes would always be mysterious but alive, fishes in it and birds above it. The little hidden bounty beaches would be endless treasures to hunt, where the ocean found its way to by means of a lake, a river, or a waterfall. Abandoned little churches, burning red with the favourite colour of the Norwegians when it came to making a building look desirable. Lonely, mysteriously, peacefully, it disappeared as quick as it showed up on top of the hill. It seemed like the road would never be ending, and despite the island being big enough to drive for hours without seeing people, while experiencing several climates, it was still just one little group of islands on this massive world. But for me it was enough, I would have been fine building myself a little life here on this island with nothing but untouched nature and a tiny curvy road passing through.
As we passed trough the last valley with insanely high mountains surrounding my tiny car on the tiny road, blinded by green, I saw the Lofoten sign popping up behind my back. And it was as if some magical porchway closed itself down, as if Alice just left wonderland, because I was not going to see a nature like this again in Norway. Not to be confused with ‘not as impressive nature’ because Norway is an endless journey of natural beauty. But there was no doubt, that there was no place like the Lofoten islands anywhere else in the world. But what’s the best way to deal with goodbye’s? There’s 2 actually, the first being to not say goodbye, but simply ‘until we meet again’ and the second way is to say hello to a new adventure awaiting. And that adventure had a name; Sweden. The first 3 hours were the same as a few days ago when I left for the Lofoten, and it felt strange to take this route again, as if I was time travelling. My trip towards the Lofoten seemed likes ages ago, instead of 5 days. The weather was a lot sunnier now which made it very tempting and acceptable to stop every half an hour by the side of the road, glaze at the mountains and feel the sun burning on my face, or take a quick pee behind the bush, which is part of the roadtriplife. When the sun shines in Norway, there’s something about this golden spotlight shining on the massive mountains that just makes me want to sit by the road to grow old there. When I passed trough Narvik again, where again it was a grey and rainy day, the sudden change of climate in Norway was still very impressive for someone coming from a small country, the route changed. From now on it would be only 2 hours left to cross the border to Sweden, and I was extremely excited to be passing that one, as it was the only Scandinavian country I’d never set foot in. The country of Avicii, my never forgotten music hero, the country of mystery, as it’s overwhelmed by spectacular nature. The country of development, as many of our beloved brands and stores were born here. A peaceful country, at least this is how I imagined it, and I don’t know much about the south, but I was betting my ass that Swedish Lapland, in the heart of Scandinavia, would be.
Nature started to make a surprising turn after 2 hours of crawling over small, curvy mountainroads, trough endless dark tunnels, passing by the water violence of the rivers and waterfalls. The sun slowly set, but as I knew very well by now, it was not going to disappear. And that gave me the feeling that time had disappeared together with the darkness. It was no longer relevant what time it was or how much of it I spent. And I started to realize how big we made this thing called time in a world where so much bigger things are happening, and how much better we’d be feeling if we stopped caring so much about this circle of numbers wrapped around our wrist. The mountains started descending, but this came with a whole change of character. The mountains were no longer pointy and rocky, but flat. Even more remarkably, they had this strange orange glow as if they’d been standing in the dessert for some centuries before settling in Sweden. As if the cool midnightsun was powerful enough to completely dehydrate them. Yet at the foot of these convex mountains, the grass was green, and stretched itself all the way to the same road I’d been following for 5 hours now. The grass was covered in trees of all kinds, gathering in little groups only as if they were afraid to face these plains alone, which was indeed a massive surface of emptiness. The only thing breaking this motionless, hypnotising sight, was a river, more powerful than any I’d seen before. So powerful, that the water was a deathly mass that created a silver shine with sparkly steam around it, the violence of water truly was one of the more beautiful means of violence. And there it was, the sign to confirm it all: new landscape, new country, new adventure; I was entering Sverige.
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