Just another way of fishing...

Very nice week, we fished and ate fish a lot, we tied knots, rowed with rowing boats, sea kayaked, snorkeled and survived in the island.

The moment when I will find out if  I will have to pay pay my scholarship back had come… 🙂 I was feeling confident enough about what I’ve learned so far here during this course, but I wasn’t confident in my English skills… I struggled speaking in my native language for more than five minutes and now we are required to speak on two specific topics for half an hour 😮

But it’s healthy to be worried about sometimes, because when this came to the past I felt slight relief. Looks like I could talk a bit more than five minutes, although my performance wasn’t great 😉

Life saving test wasn’t that bad either, I managed to “rescue” Miriam in 4 minutes and 40 seconds. It wasn’t a “best” time but I knew my limitation on this one – I’m not a good swimmer and didn’t had much swimming practice lately.

The time has come to use our knowledge in a veileading way – that is what we were trained for this semester. I was really happy with this very successful week although it was very very wet. Our efforts in a heavy rain paid off.

We organised 10 activities for Norwegian students… a lot of Norwegian students -each day we received more that 40 of them. Orienteering, canoeing, abseiling, fire making, stretcher making and a bunch of other group dynamics games – these were our prepared activities. Our task was to challenge teams of students and evaluate their performance and group dynamic processes.

In the evening we would return to our own gapahuks (simple construction wooden shelters). There we light fires and celebrate birthdays… there were 3 birthdays this week alone – Luke’s, Katja’s and Jochen’s.

This week was brilliant as we had a chance to meet so many new faces and put some friluftsliv and veileading skills into action.

Since I got a package from home containing home made products from Lithuania, I was keeping an idea to host a little party with Lithuanian cuisine. Turned out there was never a good time for that. Until NOW.

8 liters of cold beet root soup with 3 kilos of hot potatoes (traditional Lithuanian dish) just vanished. Everyone told that they loved it… I hope they weren’t just polite 😀

Yup, just like that...

This time less snow and cold, this time the sun and her warmth were smiling on us. We arrived to Byglandsfjord – huge lake formed by the river of Otra. Clear cold water is reaching over hundred meters of deep. The bottom of this lake in shallow areas is ornamented with thousands of tree branches witch formed into beautiful drawings of nature.

We got canoes into the water, put on our floating devices and were instructed on how to canoe. It soon turned out that even with my canoeing experience it was a challenge to control the canoe by paddling only on one side. Soon enough when everyone had a little of this practice we set off… to the south.

The challenge was to keep the constant speed so the group would stick together – that way in case of capsizing we could perform a rescue with minimum amount of time. Being in that kind of cold water even hurts… Trust me, me and Petr tried it out in the evening.

It wasn’t hard at all to navigate in this fjord. Sometimes it was harder to see where the islands were because from our horizontal point of view they blended with the shores. Other than that we had huge mountains with ridges around, bends and curves of the fjord were also a very obvious orientation points.

Mountain tops were still covered in snow and the lake surface reflected the beauty above. It was all like a beautiful dream taken out from Tolkiens books.

We stayed overnight in one of the islands in the middle of the fjord, there we’ve learned how to build an improvised shelter using the equipment we we had. In this case it was canoes. They turned out to be a very good shelter material combined with a tarp and few ropes.

We enjoyed the sun in the evening, me and Petr went swimming, then we returned to the camp, started a fire, ate supper and one by one we went to our newly made beds.

Next morning we reached the point where this lake turned into a river, we practiced some river canoeing. One canoe capsized. We made some mistakes that could have made the situation even worst by rescuing Daniel and Jais. Some of us jumped into canoes without life jackets and some of us (me, to be more precise) went to a canoe alone 🙂 .

In the evening we stayed at Troll Aktiv – the place where I am going to spend a lot of time this summer. Some of our guys tried out rafting. I took a part as a photographer from the shore, I was very pleased with the result, because I got some really nice pictures. The river seemed mad and my heart chilled by the thought that this might be my new job 😮 .

On the next day we set out on some nice looking mountain bikes. We scared the shit out of a couple of badgers and found ourselves at a nice crag where we climbed for the rest of the day, fortifying our skills. That night I was sleeping on the edge of a cliff, I tied my sleeping bag to a tree – just in case. It was one of the best night sleep I’ve ever had, braking my bones into the void didn’t concerned me.

The next day – the last day we made the last push towards home and 70km evaporated quickly. On the way there we experienced on of the most beautiful bike paths in the world leading us through tunnels along mountain river…

Learning outcomes:

We acquired and strengthened our practical and safety skills in mountains and fjords. By the end of the trip our group felt more close to each other.

This was a very successful trip, it was much more challenging than the previous trip in Hovden. We covered 80 kilometers in four days enjoying the beauty of this national park.

Everything went according to the plan, we reached every checkpoint in time, there was no lack of food or equipment nor good mood.

We changed our plans for the last day, we headed towards the road instead of going back to the cabin where we stayed the first night. We got a bit out of course when the track that was supposed to be marked disappeared half way through, so we had to use our compasses and some low quality digital map (pictures of a map). It didn’t helped much because we found ourselves in a light whiteout where we couldn’t see any features of the area anymore – we could only see each other.

„Gipsies have arrived“ I thought when a huge pack of friluftsliv students (local and international) got off the bus from Kristiansand in Oslo. I hate to admit but I just followed whoever led us, because I trusted that Norwegians knew the way.  Few circles in central station and  we found ourselves in a bus going til Fram museum. To be honest I didn’t knew what Fram was so I was really excited to see a ship which was used for polar expeditions. What a great museum, at first I was frightened by all the information that was there, but patient reading let me have a little glimpse at the expeditions carried out by brave men of the past century.

I always confused Nansen and Amundsen.  I wasn’t sure which of them went to the South Pole and which tried to reach the North Pole. It’s pretty amazing to take a closer look at these adventures (if we might call it that way… these were no fairy tales). These men were away from their families, comforts and without any guarantees of success. And all of that was for purpose of exploring the unknown, maybe to explore their selves, I would presume. Sounds pretty epic, doesn’t it? I think reality was a bit different than I could imagine, but in the end of this visit I felt like I started understood these men. I could have imagine myself among these men, away from boring daily life…

Later that day we went to Holmenkolen – the famous ski jump. We set our own camp in the area near the stadium along with thousands of Norwegians – devoted fans of winter sports.

50k cross country ski race took place there. We observed as these remarkable athletes fought this distance through a very challenging terrain. We took a visit to Holmenkollen ski jump when even more extraordinary men and women jumped from this crazy structure! While there I was wondering how much practice and time it would take me to attempt such a stunt. I knew that you didn’t need to be a superman to dare such a mad sport. Desensitization is the key in my opinion.

Full of this unique aura we had to go back home once again – five hours on a bus with some dude sleeping on my shoulder… Awkward.

And if you look really closely you might see some children...

10th of March and we are on the boat to a mysterious island called Bragdøya. Our objective – observe children play in a local outdoor kindergarten. We got totally confused when our teacher Len left us on our own. He accompanied us to the boat and after all of us got onto this boat we just saw him waving goodbye from the jetty. After we landed onto Randøya we found our way to the kindergarten. Well, basically the whole island was one huge playground for the kids. Teachers welcomed us but they didn’t seem to to have been expecting us neither did the children. They were looking at us with large scared eyes from a back of their teachers – like little wild creatures as if we were some kind of scary aliens. It’s easy to understand them, while there were quite a few of us – eleven big-ass outlanders who didn’t spoke norwegian. As we didn’t want to scare them too much, most of us headed to explore the island – the amazing playground provided to these children by Mother Nature.

This island is huge! We made a big lap and returned to the place were most of the children were. This time as we approached in more little groups kids didn’t seem to be afraid of us anymore. If any of us made some effort to entertain them they fell in love with us instantly, specially Jochen – this guy just has a gift with children.

For the rest of our stay we talked with children teachers and observed children’s play. Teachers did not interfere in their play, they just peacefully observed them letting these children to explore the world and their boundaries with their own eyes.

As I asked a teacher about the worst case scenario in regard to these “risky plays” he answered that only once one girl had broken her arm after falling out of a tree. We both agreed that that is a fair risk compared to the great outcome that these children gain using Nature as their playground and it barely ever happens. Children get a chance to learn the lessons of our world and life by heart, by doing. That is more powerful than thousand verbal restrictions and warnings

I am happy to know that these kindergartens are becoming more and more popular in Lithuania.

And this is a trip to remember… It’s my first more “real” trip. Read about it in the “Studies and assignments” section.