Oscar Brygga at Tonnes

Today turned out to be something of a rest day for us. I was awake at 7.30 am and looked out the window to see that it wasn’t raining, although there were a few small rain squalls coming through from the north. A nearby island was lit up by the sun and it seemed such a change from the last few days.

At around 9.00 am, the Hurtigruten ferry sailed past. Hurtigruten (“Express Route”, also known as the Norwegian Coastal Express) is a Norwegian cruise, ferry and cargo operator.The company was founded in 1893 to operate voyages on Norway’s western and northern coast between Bergen and Kirkenes. Hurtigruten ships sail almost the entire length of the country, crossing the arctic circle and complete the round-trip journey in 11 days. The trip has been described as the “World’s Most Beautiful Sea Voyage,” with stops in such places as Bergen, the Geiranger fjord, and the Lofoten Islands where we will soon be.

After breakfast we back-tracked around to Stokvagen where we had been yesterday. Without rain, the scenery was much more spectacular. We re-photographed some of the same places as the day before.

Near Stokvagen is a museum that shows some artefacts from the German occupation of this area in WW2. There is a small display of some captured weapons and on the hill outside the museum are the remains of some bunkers that were built as part of a German coastal defence battery. It’s a bit like Point Nepean at home with some old gun emplacements, and some bunkers that were used for storing ammunition and barracks for the troops. I explored one bunker that was intended to be a field hospital, although it wasn’t quite finished when the war ended in 1945.

This area was also one of eight sites around the world in which Omega signal stations were located. (We had one near Welshpool in Victoria). These were radio stations that worked on the Ultra Low Frequency Band that could tell American Poseidon submarines exactly where they were positioned. It’s no good having a nuclear capability unless you know the exact location from where you are firing missiles! This technology became irrelevant at the end of the cold war and was replaced by satellite technology.

On the way back to our cabin on the waterfront at Tonnes, we come across this elk standing nonchalantly in a field. He stood still long enough for me to get a good shot of him.

Back at Oscar Brygga, I decided to give my drone another fly and taker a few aerial shots of our location. I haven’t always been able to use it on this trip – its either been too wet, too crowded or too windy. Sometimes it is irrelevant because we are on a high point anyway. but on other times it has some value like today. Our cabin is one of the red ones along the waterfront.