Lofoten

From the Hamsun centre we drove a little further South and boarded a ferry towards an archipelago named Lofoten. A couple of hours later we arrived in Svolvær, where the ferry's lights picked out circles of rock in the darkness. Just over a year ago we came through Svolvær on our boat trip North and had an hour or so to walk around the harbour. At the time I was really impressed by the look of the Lofoten Suite Hotel, and a year later this was where we stayed the night. Checking in, I thought I must be exhausted, because I found the receptionist helpful but very difficult to understand. Marthe explained afterwards that this was because she was speaking Swedish.

Lofoten Suite Hotel is the one in the middle.

A red-brown cylindrical building studded with massive windows, sitting above two restaurants right by the waterside, the Lofoten Suite Hotel is weird. The rooms have their own bathroom but they share a living room and kitchen with another hotel room. This wouldn't be so strange were it not for the fact that a lot of the walls are made of glass (one of the main views from the balcony was the interior of our bedroom.) It's a bit like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, except you don't need special permission to draw the curtains. It was the off-season so we had the whole suite to ourselves, which was unbelievably luxurious, but if I ever stayed there again I'd want to be in a group of four so that I would at least know the people in the adjoining room.

All the towns in Lofoten were or are fishing towns and Svolvær is a mix of a modern port and a National Romantic painting. It's so much a place of water and boats that it made me wish my Dad was there, since he has more of a connection with the ocean.

On Saturday we drove through the middle of an enormous mountain and on to another fishing village called Henningvær, which sits on a constellation of small islands at the end of a long winding road and over a long narrow bridge. When local guidebooks compare it to Venice what they mean is that there's far more water than land. 

Driving back we kept stopping to try to take photographs, but the scale of the landscape in Lofoten really defeats amature photography. Even the sky seems bigger.