Day 11 was a pretty quiet one. We drove 200kms and 4 hours north out of Stavanger, under water via long and deep tunnels, over water via a couple of car ferries, past constant reminders to watch my farting (speeding), and into Bergen for five nights in an 18-bed hostel dorm. I rather enjoy my sleep so an 18-bed dorm was pretty unappealing, but it was by far the cheapest option. And as it turns out it was pretty ok for the most part. We got ourselves some dinner when we arrived and got chatting to some folk in the common area, and one guy got chatting to us - the weirdest guy I think any of us had ever come across in our lives! This guy was in his 40s or 50s, supposedly Norwegian, supposedly loaded with money (despite living in a hostel), supposedly fluent in six languages though I think we caught him out on that one, supposedly has a couple different kids to a couple different women around the world, and showed me a pair of woman's underwear some chick had supposedly given him in town a few nights earlier. In short, this dude was just strange, and we all avoided him for the remainder of our time here (including his Friday-night dinner invite later in the week) hehe.

Day 12, and this is the view over Bergen from our hostel. Bergen, like Stavanger, has only a small handful of worthwhile attractions itself, but is the perfect place to base yourself for trips into the fjords. It's recognised and marketed as "The gateway city to the world famous fjords of Norway" and as such it's usually loaded with visiting cruise ships. We, however, had a car - even better!

Bergen's weather is very mild but it pisses with rain here a lot, an awful lot! With that being the case, we decided to take each day as it came and aimed to spend the nicest forecasted days out in the fjords to see them at their best. We had four full days here and I had planned three excursions across three days in the fjords, with the fourth day free to see Bergen itself on whatever the shittiest forecasted day of the four happened to be. Today was the first of those four and it was a stunner - fjord time! The only question was which one, and after ten minutes of deciding on that, into more tunnels we went.

Driving around these parts is dangerous I've decided. For starters, the roads are very winding and very narrow in parts (down to just a single lane in many places) with many blind corners. But that isn't the problem per se. The problem is that combined with the unbelievable and breath-taking scenery - it's incredibly distracting hahaha. If I had a dollar for every time I just stopped the car in the middle of the road to get out and take a photo, this trip would have paid for itself hehe. Poor Kristina must have been shitting herself there in the passenger seat but the roads were pretty quiet. The view on the left is one example, and I found a road on my GPS that looked as though it went down to this lake which we figured was worth a look. However this was the state of that road hehe. No problem in 4WD but the little Peugeot was going to wipe its nose going through these potholes. That being the case, I made some road of my own using road-side rocks to fill in the holes (video here). Worked great but after all that the road didn't go to the lake at all - only past the back of properties that overlook it. Oh well.

Obviously none of these photos, taken with a point-and-shoot camera (albeit a good one) and shrunk to this size, are going to do this area any justice whatsoever - this is the realm of the mighty DSLR camera but even then this needs to be seen to be believed. Anyway, lunch time was nearing and we found a little store / post office / fuel station all-in-one in the middle of nowhere to buy more picnic stuff. I studied the GPS to find a good spot for lunch and this was it, on the shore of this inlet by the two waterfalls on the right - niiiiice! Video here.

We wandered over to them after lunch for a little look see before hitting the road again.

And this was the destination of the day - the mighty Sognefjord! This big bastard is the largest (and I think deepest) fjord in Norway, and the second largest in the world. It stretches 205km inland and reaches a maximum depth of 1,308 metres. It averages 4.5km in width, and some of its surrounding cliffs rise almost vertically from the water (think Pulpit Rock earlier) to heights of over 1,000 metres.

And this lucky bastard lives on it hehe.

This shot was taken using a tripod and self-timer (as were many of the two of us), firstly because there was just nobody around but us (too early in the tourist season) and secondly I find tourists don't know how to use a camera and they take utterly shit photos, which is ironic.

We drove alongside the fjord for quite a ways, as far as the road we were on could take us. This is when we started finding tunnels that weren't illuminated at all, unlike all the others we'd been through. I thought it was funny to turn the car's headlights off, and to stop and turn the car off completely - it was just like being in a pitch-dark cave. Kristina however didn't find it so funny ;) Video here.

And this was where the road we were on eventually ended - this beautiful and quiet wee village on the shore of the fjord called Ortnevik.

Absolutely amazing, and as had been the case all day, we were the only two people here (aside from the locals of course) - bliss! Video here.

Rather than take the same road we'd just come in on all the way back out again, I had the GPS take us via a different route which I'd noticed on Google Maps on my iPhone. Incidentally, this is the first trip I've done since I bought an iPhone last December, and shit was it handy!

This put us on a single-lane road that took us up high through the mountains.

Frozen lakes and very high walls of snow everywhere, and the only other vehicle we saw on the road in the hour we were driving along it (and stopping every five minutes to get photos) was a motorcycle.

I love mountain roads - fun fun fun fun!

And that was about it for our first day in the fjords - probably the best day of the whole trip.