The guy at Sixt bilutleie in Narvik gave me a car that’s probably the worst choice for Norway – a tiny Kia Picanto. Although the streets here are in perfect shape – much better than you might think in this remote area, I would have expected them to be more like in Iceland – they curve around the steep slopes and I have to kick that car up the road. I miss my dear old Volvo.
After I crossed Ofoten, the area preceding Vesterålen and Lofoten, I enter the maze of islands. They are all connected by either bridges or tunnels, so you lose this peculiar sense of being on islands quickly, you rather lose your orientation.
My inner compass is in very good shape, I usually orientate myself easily; my sense of pattern recognition is well trained, so I know maps by heart fast. But here I enter a tunnel through a mountainside on the southside, and come out on the northern side of the archipelago, where the climate is different and the landscape structure too; I drive around this cove and wonder how this road leads me back to the east; I cross a bridge and enter Austvågøya, but the sky looks so very different here. It’s like when you would spin around before you played hide and seek. North and South are not only alignments here, they are two distinct faces of the same stretch of land.