Summary
We spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights at NordKapp camping with a trip to the port of Honningsvag on Wednesday.
Thursday we drove to Kiby on the Varangerfjorden for a few days at the Varanger National park. 276 miles which took nearly 7 hours of driving at 38.2 mpg.
After 3 nights and some very mixed weather it was time to head East towards Kirkenes. 106 miles at around 41mpg. Not bad for a fully loaded campervan. Shame there wasn’t a ferry as we only moved about 10 miles by line of sight!
After a splendid evening meal at Bugoynes, the next day it was time to head to Kirkenes.
66 miles in just over 2 hours at 35.3 mpg.
Tomorrow we hope to continue the next stage of the trip boarding an extremely expensive ferry to Bergen. It’s a ferry which clearly states “No Motorhomes” so we are hoping the various email confirmations are good to get us on-board.
As instructed we’ve lost our Camping Gaz 907 bottle (given away at Bugoynes) but we weren’t able to remove the California kitchen!!! The ultimate decision will be the Ships Captain. Hope he or she is in a good mood.
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Like many Norwegian towns and unlike the pretty coloured houses, the architecture in towns can be quite bleak and brutal. Maybe that resonates with the many weeks of complete darkness here in the Arctic Circle winter.
Honningsvag was similar.
Thursday we drove to Varangerfjorden where we would end up staying 3 nights at Varanger Panorama Camping – located near to the village of Kiby just a few miles outside of Vadso.
The campsite is interesting. It’s a 500m walk to the main building which houses the sanitary facilities. This is pleasant when the weather is warm and sunny but was a real pain in some of the weather we experienced.
The facilities themselves are immaculate and absolutely 5 star.
Thursday night was a beautiful evening and we BBQed for the first time on this trip.
Friday’s weather was poor – very windy, cold and grey but without a whole lot of rain. We caught the bus into Vadso and looked around the town for a couple of hours.
In the 16th century, the settlement consisted of a fishing village and the old Vadsø Church, located on the island of Vadsøya.
The settlement later moved to the mainland.
Township privilege was granted in 1833, and settlers came from Finland and the northern part of Sweden, which suffered from famine. Finnish was rapidly becoming the language of the majority, and this continued for decades.
Even today Finnish is still spoken in some households.
Saturday was a horrible day with strong winds and heavy persistent rain. We remained hunkered down in the van until the evening when we headed to the campsite pizzeria for tea.
The Pizza was gigantic and was ok. The smoked reindeer topping was super but there could have been more of it!
Sunday it was time to leave the Varanger national park but not before we had visited one of the oldest fishing villages on the Varangerfjorden. There are about forty people living in the village now and tourism is an important aspect of the economy.
At Ekkeroy there is an old German fort and other related buildings. The Germans occupied this part of Finnmark for about four years from 1940.
It is one of the few places in Finnmark where pre-World War II buildings can be seen.
When the German army retreated from the Litsa front and Kirkenes in late 1944, they burned most buildings in the county.
However, buildings on the north side of the Varangerfjorden survived because the Russians advanced so quickly that the German troops in this area fled west to get across the Tana river and did not have enough time to obey the order to destroy all buildings.
We had a picnic lunch on our ramblings before a late afternoon drive to Bugoynes. Here we had a stunning pitch next to the water and Moe declared our planned meal as past it’s sell-by date.
This meant a short walk into the village to the Bistro. The restaurant is highly regarded and the food was superb.
Moe had the Pollack and mash potato main course whilst I grazed on the Viking platter.
This consisted of smoked reindeer, smoked whale, pickled herring, king crab and other delicacies.
Monday and here we are at an Aire next to the Kirkenes harbour. It’s functional and for Norway, relatively cheaply priced! Weather is sunny and warm with a high of around 15C.
Finally, to put things into perspective, we are only a few kms from the Russian border.
Before the Ukraine “special operation”, the border here we believe was open and many Russians lived and worked in the Kirkenes region. This explains the dual signage in Norwegian and Russian.