NPL Day 1
NPL Day 1: Saturday 17 June 2023
Nordkapp - Knivskjelvatna
Via Tunes
After waiting for more than 12 hours for the geocaching event to start, it was finally time. Luckily it had been brought forward with half an hour, so at 1 AM we went out to meet the other geocachers. They came with a ship from Svalbard and were now on their way back to Germany.
Then it was time to leave. We passed the globe one last time, glancing past hordes of people and then set off. We were excited and happy to leave all the people behind us, but very tired. We hiked on and close to the road, with a loooot of buses, some cars and motorbikes passing us all the time. For being a road in the middle of nowhere leading to a dead end, it is almost funny how much traffic there is. Many of the buses empty (at least one way) too.
Since we were so tired we decided to pitch the tent as soon as we had turned off towards Knivskjellodden, and so we did.
We woke up to a fantastic morning. The sun was shining, it was warm and hardly a breeze. Around 11-12 AM we woke up, packed our bags and continued on our way. Today the plan was to go to Tunes, one of the capes on the North Cape island. After the trail separated from the trail going out to Knivskjellodden we soon reached a lake. Here we sat down and had breakfast in the afternoon sun. For breakfast we had some food that needed to be eaten, so we ate tortilla bread with peanut butter and chocolate pudding (!!!). It's not something you would eat at home maybe, but it tastes way better than it sounds 🙂 We promise.
After breakfast we continued up a hill and for a long time it was flat with nothing to be seen except some mountains far away to the south. It felt like an extraterrestrial feeling.
Then, we also got attacked by what we think was an Arctic jaeger, that almost managed to 💩 on Kim!
Suddenly mountains showed up in front of us, but where would we go? It looked like the trail was disappearing into an abyss. When getting closer we realised we would just have to get down from a veeeery steep incline. Slowly but surely we made it down, all the way to the shore. We were on our way to take a geocache, and on our way there, as we walked along the shore, we looked in awe at all the different kinds of trash that had washed up so far away from everything.
We finally reached where the geocache was hidden, beside a beautiful sand beach, where Lukas also had an amazing swim.
After some snacking it was time to hike back. Aaaall the way up from where we came from. It was tiring but about an hour later (and almost a mental breakdown for Kim due to being hungry and tired) we were back at the flat moon landscape again. This time without being attacked by birds.
We crossed the hill and made our way down to the lakes (Knivskjelvatna) beside the trail that goes out to Knivskjellodden. Here we first had some dinner by a stream (and became humans again), then continued to the second lake and pitched our tent on the hillside.
Today's:
Distance: 21.08 km
Start time: 01:21
End time: 20:21
Ascent: 637 m
Descent: 713 m
Lukas' swims: 1
Kim's falls: 1
Tent nights: 2/2
