Rondane National Park

After a day of driving, we arrived in the small town of Otta. There's nothing special to see in the town itself, but near Otta is the Rondane National Park. We saw a few beautiful pictures of the park and decided to see it ourselves.

We left for the park around 12:00 (a bit late, as we had to arrange some things). There is a normal road till the park entrance and from there you can walk or take a toll road till another car park (13km). To enter the toll road, you need a credit card to open the gate (in the Netherlands most cards work with Maestro, but they don't work. This also holds for some ATMs and machines for parking tickets, so take a card with your from Mastercard or Visa when visiting Scandinavia). When we drove into the park, we were welcomed by this view:

Wow! And we would be climbing one of those mountains today!

From the car park we had to walk 6 km to the first hut, from where the trail to the mountains would start. There are also bikes for rent if you don't want to walk that 6km. You call a certain number, they give you the code for the bike and when you arrive at the hut you have to pay for the bike. I looked around a bit and found an unlocked bike. So we decided to take/borrow the bike, stop a few kilometers before the hut, hide the bike and use it for the way back again. Haha, you have to do something if you want to save some money in Scandinavia! Life isn't cheap around here. After we ditched the bike we continued to the hut.

After we passed the hut, the trail quickly changed:

As we were heading up to to the peak Storronden, a few hikers already returned from the peak. It was now around 15:00 and according to the hikers it would take another 2.5 hours. They were a bit confused that we were still going up. The trail became more difficult and steeper:

After two hours of walking, we arrived at the top at 2138 meters. The last part of the trail was still covered in snow. What a view:

Around 18:00 we went back again. Going down goes a lot quicker, but it's more heavy for the knees. After two hours we were back again at the car park. In the following picture we're pointing at the mountain we just conquered:

The road you see behind us is the road to the hut in Ronvassbu. You can drive here by car (saves you 6 km of hiking or renting a bike), but unfortunately it's only accessible for personnel of the hut.

In seven hours we walked 22 kilometres and climbed almost 1000 meters. Djawid's and my knees were slightly protesting.. We quickly returned to Otta, since tomorrow we would go to the next national park for more hiking!