GappoHytta weekend 22-23

Relatively unpredicted I decided on Friday to leave Tromso for the weekend and go hiking in the mountains. It was a proposal from Bente, who would drive up to Signadalen together with an other friend, Ingvild. They would go to a cabin called Gappohytta situated at 700m altitude, a few hundred meters from the Swedish boarder. With no second thoughts I decided to join them....and so we left on Saturday morning 8 o' clock, just the 3 girls, for an adventure weekend. It was really THE weekend to go hiking as the weather was terrific, just 2 plain sunshiny days, and the autumn is at its best now. The colors are really amazing... and together with tainted forests of a million happy colors there is also quiet a lot of snow on the mountains yet! The sun rays were first shining through the multicolored leaves and a bit higher reflecting brightly on the snow on top of the mountains. There is no such painting as the one of the autumn!!
So we walked, first through a forest next to a river with high debit, than above the tree level and later through plateaus of rocks formed by tectonic activity a million of years ago. The cabin we reached after 4h of walk.
Finally there we found a nice little house striped with heavy chains to the ground so that it wouldn' t blow of with the heavy winds that can occur at that place!!! It was very impressive and the whole place with the decor was evoking fairy tales.
We spend the night there cooking ourselves some great food and sipping wine while having girls talks. The night also brought up some surprises....While the tree of us were having a pee in bush, keeping an eye on each other and possibly bears (!) suddenly the sky lighted up in green from the northernlights! It was amazing again.....You have no idea how beautiful this country is...!

More pictures on http://picasaweb.google.com/lays.natacha/GappoHytta

Finally pictures of my house

We moved in on the 8th of september and now all ready one week later the sun finally showed himself and I could take some nice pictures of the house. Unfortunately my camera totally broke down in the middle of the photo shooting, so I don`t have any outside pictures!

But I think you can all ready see quiet well how we are settled down. We`re hiring the house fully fournished. This is a great advantage, but also means that decoration is not up to us. I think the fourniture is a little bit `kitch` (like we say in Belgium), but I`m not too difficult, I can live with that at least this semester ;-)

here are the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/lays.natacha/NewHouseVesterlivegen169013Troms

week-end: whale watching and hiking

Second weekend in Tromsø, the sun was at the `rendez-vous` as well as nice temperatures, not too cold for the time of the year :-) but yet only 5-10 degree celsius!

On the program for saturday; whale watching!! Great, I love it, even if I have to wake up at 5:00 in the morning! We left Tromsø harbour around 7:00 and sailed through the beautifull fjords untill we reached the open sea. Once away from the fjords the waves became bigger and many people got very ill on the boat. I didn`t experience any sea sickness and could fully enjoy the view and the sun on the deck. After one more hour sailing in the open sea we got to the gattering point of the whales, which is exactly were the continental shelf steeps into the abyssal plate (deap ocean). On that spot there are a lot of currents bringing a lot of invertebrates and fishes, so a lot of food for baleen and other whales. We had the chances to see 4 Sperm Whales breathing at the surface and suddenly deep diving, showing us their tale. It was beautifull!!

On Sunday afternoon, in order to enjoy the precious nice weather, we went for a small walk on the mainland walking along a river. There we stopped at a sunny place to have some coffee and thee. I was with Bentha and the two Oyvinds I`m living with right now. We had a nice chilling afternoon, recovering from the partying of the night before ;-)