Km covered - lots, but on boat and coach!
Having already completed the Alta - Nordkapp section of our challenge during the Northbound cycle, we decided to save our legs and not waste time re-cycling old ground going south back to our starting point of Alta.
So we hitched a ride on the good ship Hurtigruten, a lovely vessel which doubles both as a cruise ship around Scandinavia for elderly American tourists in tracksuits, and as a local ferry which gets folk from town to town a lot quicker than on twisty mountain roads!
Just our luck.... there's an all you can eat buffet for breakfast! Hustling our way through the oldies we tucked into a smorgasbord of delights for the entire 3 hours of our ferry ride from Honningsvag to Hammerfest. It should be noted at this point that 90% of all our meals on the trip so far have been sandwiches, constructed during breakfast buffets and smuggled into our panniers, wrapped in numerous napkins! The original reason this blog was called "sandwiches to sicily" was because Philippa and Alice met whilst delivering sandwiches on bikes together at Darwins Deli. It was planned that after leaving Darwins, sandwiches would stop being such a feature of everyday life. Perhaps exotic local cuisines would be sampled! But no, why spend money at restaurants when you can get filled bread packages for the next two days at breakfast for free! Lovely little waitresses turn a blind eye! At first we kidded ourselves that they didnt know our game......
Anyway so we progressed speedily through blue seas to our destination or Hammerfest, a charming little town (or very large conurbation by Northern Norways standards) on a nearby headland, approximately halfway back to Alta. After so much isolation in bleak mountainscape it was quite pleasant to be somewhere with humans, and even a brand new cinema, ahem, sorry, KULTURSENTER!
We boarded a bus and after doing the classic trick of falling asleep, hitting head on window, wake up, repeatedly for 3 hours, we were back in Alta! As it was glorious sunshine we braved a campsite, and got introduced to the local wildlife, a delightful swarm of mosquitoes who decided they liked us so much they would follow us across Lapland for the next few days........
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