We emerge from the realm of clouds, surrounded only by snow and ice. The "breath of the trolls" makes the rocks glisten; fine moisture is in the air. The black ribbon of the pass road now plunges back towards the earth in dizzying loops and with it the meltwater, swelling and foaming.
At an altitude of one thousand metres above sea level, it is still winter at the beginning of June: The thermometer is barely above zero. The lakes lie stark and white in the heart of Jotunheimen, the highest mountain range in Scandinavia - and the home of the mighty Frost Giants, if you believe Norse mythology.
But with every hairpin bend, we descend further; the snow cover gives way to overgrown scree fields, wood-fenced meadows - and suddenly the view opens up before us: the Geirangerfjord, as if cut with a sharp axe into the vertical granite flanks of the mountains towering into the clouds. Norway's most famous postcard panorama, certainly, but as is the way with images, the original is twice as powerful - at least.
We take the last few hairpin bends down into the valley and through the small village of Geiranger, whose simple houses crowd together on the narrow strip of shore at the end of the fjord. We pass the "Utsikten" holiday hotel, whose location even prompted Kaiser Wilhelm II to linger - as the memorial stone next door proudly attests - and the small church before reaching the harbour.
It's late afternoon when we roll onto the campsite and secure a box seat with a fantastic view right on the water's edge. The main season is still a few weeks away here, and apart from a Bottrop camper van with lace curtains and the adventurous yellow tent of a sinewy solo backpacker from Spain, we have the vast greenery all to ourselves. After setting up the tent, it's time to make plans.
Our rolled-up Zodiac dinghy and the trusty Yamaha two-stroke await their deployment.
"Geir" is an old word. It means arrowhead, and the Geiranger does indeed bore like an arrow into the rugged fjord country of western Norway, around 500 kilometres northwest of the capital Oslo. Yet it is only one of the end branches of a widely ramified network of fjords that flow into the Norwegian Sea south of the harbour town of Ålesund. A waterway of around 110 kilometres (or 60 nautical miles) lies between the open sea and the jetty in Geiranger, with the "Arrowhead" itself only making up the last sixteen kilometres.
However, Geiranger's short length is more than compensated for by its spectacular, ice-sculpted landscape, which has led to it not only being one of the main destinations for cruise ships on the Nordland route, but also a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005.
The rattling of a heavy anchor chain wakes us from our sleep the next morning. In the grey light, the first guest of the day has arrived: the "Nordlys" from Hurtigruten. Once a mail boat line and the only reliable means of transport along the west coast of Norway, the shipping company with the cherry-red hull has long since entered the lucrative tourist business. The first tender is already being swung out on the boat deck: The coast is long and time is pressing.
Before the rain sets in, we take refuge in the small country shop right next to the marina, which not only sells everything from stamps and fishing rods to moose salami, but also has a small bistro with a covered veranda. Over strong coffee from polystyrene cups and warm waffles with hot berries, we spread out the Norwegian nautical chart 127 with the inner part of the Storfjord, which also includes Geiranger.
We want to try to get to Stranda, which is about 40 kilometres away to the north on the Norddalsfjord (see map on page 27). The route there leads past Geiranger via the village of Hellesylt and the Sunnylvs fjord, which runs in a north-south direction. Whether this is feasible with our 3.40 metre dinghy will depend very much on the weather. The prospects are not exactly rosy with wind and rain. But we definitely want to be back in four or five days and sitting on the veranda again.
Our equipment is neatly lined up in the early afternoon under the same gloomy sky in the car park next to the country store, arousing the curiosity of Italian tourists who were recently disembarked from the "Costa Deliziosa": The almost 300 metre long cruise colossus has now taken the place of the "Nordlys".
Between the back and forth of tender boats and excursion buses, crowds of people crouched under umbrellas push their way through the far too few streets and - because of the weather - quickly into the all the more numerous souvenir shops: plush trolls for Padua and Norwegian jumpers for Naples. The sellers have a smile on their faces.
We fill up our 25-litre tank and the two 10-litre canisters at the petrol station at the ferry terminal. We also pick up a bottle of two-stroke oil for our 15 hp outboard motor - although basic boat supplies are also available in Geiranger, you'd have to drive a long way (by car) for a proper service shop: "You can get everything you need in Ålesund," we hear at the petrol station. That's a good 100 kilometres.
We don't have much free space "on board": in addition to the canisters of petrol, we not only have three plastic barrels with food, cooking utensils and other small items - from a hand-held compass to a spare spark plug - but also our waterproof bags with sleeping bag and sleeping mat, a tent, photography and fishing equipment. The advantage of this puzzle, which leaves hardly any room for manoeuvre: Additionally secured with lashing straps, our load stays in place even on a rough ride, it can't help itself.
We cast off later in the afternoon and the wind has almost disappeared. Darkness shouldn't be a problem so soon: Just four degrees south of the Arctic Circle, the day now lasts eighteen hours, even though we haven't seen any of the sun yet.
The "Costa Deliziosa" glides under the mighty ship's side onto the dark waters of the fjord. We make a wide turn, and not only do the houses of Geiranger quickly shrink against the mighty slopes of the fjord walls, even the cruise ship with its sixteen decks and 1100 cabins soon looks like a miniature in a model landscape
It doesn't take long for the rocks to hide the last, clearly visible piece of infrastructure: the "Adlerweg", another road that winds its way up the northern shore of the fjord from the tiny village of Grande. There are no shoreline roads like those on other fjords along the entire route to Stranda, the banks here are too steep.
We switch to the south bank, where the water is even calmer, and pick up speed. At walking pace, we travel close to the rocks. It drips and splashes everywhere, bushes and small trees cling to narrow ridges, often on bare rock, it seems, sprouting from crevices and cracks or venturing as far into the shelter of small caves as the vital light allows. Under this pale sky, the green of the leaves looks even more vibrant against the dark rock, which is characterised by lighter layers of sediment and lichen. But a surprise awaits us behind the next cliff edge: graffiti.
Over dozens of metres, passing ships have immortalised themselves there with white paint, like hikers with a knife in the bark of a tree: the freighter "Jonshørn, 1968", for example, or the motor yacht "Windward" in 1992. Even the MS "Völkerfreundschaft", a holiday ship from the former GDR, is somewhat faded. When the white showpiece steamer, which had actually been purchased for the working people of its own country, travelled to western countries, there were no passengers from the eastern half of Germany on board - the ship was then chartered out to foreign currency-paying tour operators from the West. A piece of German-German history at this point too.
We quickly realise that it will be difficult to go ashore "wild". As the banks are so steep, there are hardly any shallow areas - and then the strip of the intertidal zone covered in seaweed and mussels is impassable, at least for a rubber dinghy, due to slippery rubble and jagged cliffs. In an emergency, the few private wooden jetties that lead to narrow, greyed huts or sheds in the shade of the cliff face are the only option for landing.
But we can easily get over not being able to go ashore, because now we get to see the biggest attraction of the Geirangerfjord: the waterfalls of the "Seven Sisters" on the north side, and the "Suitor" opposite them on the south side. The legend goes like this: once upon a time, seven beautiful sisters lived on one of the hard-to-reach mountain pastures high above the fjord, while a single bachelor lived on the other side. But despite the obvious lack of men, none of the seven girls gave in to the lonely young man's increasingly desperate courtship. And so they are still separated today and have become waterfalls.
With our rubber dinghy, we manage to do what the "free man" was unable to do: we approach the "Seven Sisters" as far as we can. The water plunges over 300 metres vertically down to the valley along the wet rock, but the wind spreads a veil of fine drops far across the fjord. At this moment, even the sun finds a hole in the clouds in the west, as if it had to dramatically illuminate the majestic scenery of billowing spray and granite reaching into the clouds for us with a single lance of golden light.
We glide westwards, sometimes under one bank, sometimes under the other. Whenever the drifting grey at the sharp peaks of the mountains breaks open, the snowfields at the highest altitudes become visible and reinforce the impression of wild, still untouched nature.
Time to think about dinner. We have a disposable barbecue in our luggage, and we've already heard a lot about the fabulous abundance of fish in the deep fjords. Our colleague Morten prepares his fishing rod and the hook flies into the water in a wide arc. Slow pace now - "trolling". Just as we are about to ask ourselves how much the rattling two-stroke engine might disturb the fjord inhabitants, the line jerks!
Shortly afterwards, the first coalfish - better known as saithe - wriggles into the landing net, followed less than ten minutes later by a second. That's enough. We perform a balancing act, scaling and gutting in the boat, then set course for the wide opening that is already visible ahead: This is where the Geiranger ends. To the north is the wider Sunnylvsfjord, which will take us to Stranda tomorrow.
For the night, however, we turn south, where the village of Hellesylt with its deserted campsite awaits at the end of a long bay and soon fine blue smoke rises from our barbecue into the dark sky. Two bottles of fjord-cold "Arendals Pils" quench our thirst, and an eventful day on the Geiranger comes to an atmospheric end.
We rub the sleep out of our eyes in amazement the next morning. A full-grown polar bear stomps across the lawn in front of our tent. But the shock is short-lived: the predator is just a bored human in white fake fur - a crew member of the cruise ship that is now moored in front of the village and has landed at the campsite pier. Those who get off the tender can have their photo taken with the friendly bear in front of the cloudy fjord panorama. The next tender rushes in with a high bow wave. The polar bear stubs out his cigarette, trots down to the pier and gets into position.
Soon we are flying over the Sunnylvsfjord, heading north now, with Stranda as our destination. There is more space between the shores here, and the profile of the mountains is no longer quite so dramatic. But compared to Geiranger, everyone else has a hard time, even in the fjord country.
