The lovely Ingvild and Marte invited me to stay at their awesome little cottage in the woods. It overlooks a beautiful little lake called Movatn. The weather gods were angry that evening, but we were nice and cosy and downed some yummy seafood chowder followed by a healthy dose of ice cream and chocolate sauce 🙂
Chilling out with Ingvild
Whilst cycling on the weekend I stumbled across a well known Norwegian past-time … ski jumping. These crazy Norwegian nutcases launch themselves off stupidly steep ramps whilst on skis. Apparently doing it in the winter is not enough, and so some of the craziest ones resort to doing it on an even crazier plastic hill during the summer months.
Here is the result …
The jumper did get up. Nothing more than damaged pride.
The photos were taken at Linderudkollen hoppsenter near Oslo, Norway.
Another day, another cycling trip. This time I headed north east to Kringlevann on advice from my friends Marte and Ingvild. It turns out they have great advice, as after a pleasant trip uphill I was greeted by a beautiful little lake nestled in the woods above Oslo city.
Some of my friends in New Zealand seemed fascinated that it could still be light outside in Oslo during the wee hours of the morning, so I took this photo at 1:15am during the middle of July to demonstrate how bright it gets.
It seems people are fascinated about where I end up on my weekends, so here are some snaps from a couple of weeks ago. I ended up somewhat lost during a cycling trip as I forgot my phone so had no Google maps, I had an awful map which barely showed any detail and I forgot my compass to boot, so kept losing my bearings. I eventually ended up sitting beside an awesome lake called Nøklevannet; I didn’t take any photos whilst there because there were girls bouncing around in bikini’s everywhere and so I didn’t want to look like the creepy guy taking photos of them (plus I was too busy staring at boobs to take photos). It ended up being a 40 km round trip, including lots of detours attempting to find something interesting. Next time I will take a good map, compass, phone and figure out where the heck I’m going first 🙂
Oslo sure does get some beautiful weather despite what the locals may say.
Ducks chilling out beside Luktvannet
I accidentally stumbled across this small lake called Skraperudtjem during my travels. There are beautiful little lakes like this hidden all over the area.
A view from above Skraperudtjem
It seems that when you go walking in a torrential downpour, you should not use Google Maps extensively. I tried that recently and promptly destroyed my trusty Huawei IDEOS X5 phone. Out with the old and in with the new though! I now have a Samsung Galaxy S3 and decided to do a quick photo quality comparison by taking the following photos with my phone, then with my Canon G12 compact camera whilst out cycling on a sunny day in Oslo. The G12 should give a much better quality photo in theory. You be the judge on the final product though …
Maridalsvannet from Samsung Galaxy S3
Maridalsvannet from Canon G12
River from Samsung Galaxy S3
River from Canon G12
I used the “P” setting on the G12 and left the Samsung Galaxy S3 to do it’s thing. I didn’t manage to get the zoom levels and level accurately aligned between the two, so there has been a little cropping to make the images match up.