Olden

July 9th
Olden

I had another tour set up for today, but one that unfortunately fell through. When I signed up for the tour, I wasn’t aware there were two different departure times. I got put on the later time, meaning I had a conflict with a 4:30 rehearsal, meaning I had to wake up early to let the tour people know that I couldn’t make it. The back up plan was to rent bikes with the tenor player and go riding, but after a morning of trying to hunt down the new guy in charge of bike rentals, we found out he had been out of rentals since yesterday and that he’s a total jerk. Whatever, time to make a plan c.
Olden is this tiny little town built in the fjords, wedged between huge mountains. There’s almost nothing to do in the city but look at the breath taking views, and it really is beautiful there. It literally feels like you got sucked into a post card, and that you should be eating chocolate…though I’m not entirely sure why. Anyways, plan c ended up being my usual plan for any other place with mountains – climb them, and it was obvious this was to be my hardest challenge yet.
I got off the ship with the tenor player Ben and the pianist Patrick. Ben is a cool guy that I get along with well and enjoy playing with. He’s from Austin Texas, in his late 20’s, and really trying to get himself in shape during this contract, so he was certainly up for a climb. Patrick, as I often tell him, is one of the weirdest guys I know. He’s a character to say the least, with a very strange style of communication. He speaks in very short phrases, usually about very odd things, and I think has a talent for completely changing the rhythm of any usual conversation. Also in his late 20’s, he’s balding, quirky, and everyone loves him. He’s been getting into yoga, which is one of the funniest things I’ve seen, and was also interested in a good climb. Now I had my team.
It’s actually the first time I’ve ever climbed with a team like that. Usually I can’t find anyone who seems daring enough to go, or in shape enough to keep pace, so I was excited when we set out. As a joke, I set out wearing the bright yellow “Guide” hat we have to wear in case of emergency on the ship – I just felt like wearing a hat. We walked through the city to the other side of the valley so that we wouldn’t have to climb with the sun in our eyes. After picking our route, our first challenge was going to be to get through a cattle farm. Oddly enough, this seemed to be the hardest and most debated part of the hike, how to navigate through the farm. We thought we found a way, then saw how over grown it was, then found a steep slope with a barbed wire fence at the top. After much discussion and jokes about our ambitious goal being thwarted by cows, we sucked it up, made it up the slope and jumped the fence. The climb was on.
The mountainside where we started wasn’t especially steep, but it was very overgrown and was littered with holes and rocks. After a ways of climbing, we came to out first stream. Patrick, being Patrick, quickly ran over and started drinking the water and throwing it on his head. I’ve seen enough survival shows to know that drinking stream water is dangerous and warned him of dysentery, of which he held no concern. It didn’t take long though before the contagious nature of his enjoyment had Ben and myself drinking and playing in the fresh mountain spring water, it just looked too good to pass up. After the short break, we pressed on.
A lot of our climbing was up the rocky bed the stream flowed down. Though it was probably more dangerous, we didn’t have to deal with weird plants or the animals they may house. Also, following the stream made every second picture perfect, it was gorgeous. We had made another stop later for water and a bag of Norwegian strawberries Ben had brought along. Man were those things good, not to mention it’s just really cool sitting on a mountain, overlooking the fjord, wet with mountain spring water, and eating Norwegian strawberries. I enjoyed that moment. The next part of the hike was to take us to where our stream formed a huge waterfall, a goal we had set when we first scouted the mountain. As expected, it was gorgeous when we reached it and we took time to appreciate the scenery. We were quickly running out of time though, and the terrain was making a drastic change from hike-able slopes to rock faces. With out any gear, decent clothing, or even basic instruction…we decided not to push our luck. Sorry all you guys that would have loved to hear me say I went for it, but to climb a rock face that was wet from the water fall and at an angle that made good holds impossible, it just wasn’t going to happen. We spent the rest of our time enjoying the area and exploring the different waterfalls we could find before beginning the decent I had made sure to allow over 2 hours for.
The walk back down was nice, not to mention funny when I got to watch my friends slipping on the loose stone. Going down is always the hardest part of climbing simply because of gravity being with you. All it takes is a single slip to turn your modest descent speed into a human avalanche. Luckily, any falls my friends took were less than dangerous areas, no one got hurt.
At the bottom, we had one more challenge, the cattle farm. As we got close to one of the pastures the cows were grazing in, it became blatantly obvious these cows were extremely territorial. As we approached, the cows all turned, walked to the bottom of the hill we were descending, and mooed their angry moos. It doesn’t sound that bad, but I can honestly say I’ve never been so intimidated by a farm animal in my life. I had no doubt these things wanted to maim me, and as dumb as the thought of an intimidating moo may sound, it was obvious to all of us these were cattle war cries directed toward us. Well, we retreated, we’re not dumb, and Ben being from Texas lead the retreat. I was laughing the whole time just because I never thought a cow could be so scary. As we got scared back up the mountain, we relocated that original barbed wire fence we had to jump, jumped it, and descended the remainder of the way on the safe side of the fence. The cows watched the whole thing.
Well, we had done it, kind of. We made a climb, though not quite reaching the top, we got some marvelous views, good stories, and no injuries. We walked back around the city as to get a perspective from the ground as to how successful we were with our climb. Well, after what was 2 hours of climbing and our fair share of scrapes, we could now see we climbed nearly 1/3 of the mountain….woohoo….not. Man, I thought we did fairly we climbing this thing, and there was a lot of effort that went into it, and then to get to the bottom and see that we weren’t even close was kind of depressing. Sure, you have to appreciate it for what it is, and we didn’t exactly have a lot of time to make the climb, but after our jokes about pushing snowmen from the top of the mountain, I would have liked to have seen a little more progress than that. But hey, it was still a great day, still on of the most beautiful ports ever, and the cows weren’t successful in making meat patties out of any of us…it was a great day.
We returned to the ship just barely before rehearsal and then the day progressed in usual fashion. I was glad to have spent the day as I did and had a great time with my friends and a wonderful hike. Not to mention, it just reaffirms in my mind that the real joy of traveling comes from the friends you make, not the sites you see. Anyways, thanks for reading this long post about relatively little and have a great day. Seeya!