Måned: juli 2006

Femunden is located in the middle of Norway, south of the town Røros, along the border against Sweden. The area has forests, lakes and mountains, and is among the most beautiful and most untouched pieces of nature in Norway. (It also stretches far into Sweden, by the way.) Since most of the tourists go to the same places, it is very easy to find areas where there is hardly any opportunity to meet others. Many tourists go fishing in Roasten, with canoes or boats. This might be the reason why it seems very hard to have any luck with the fishing. There are several other lakes, however, where there are loads of fish. No other hints from me than this picture:

By the way, me and two friends had a funny experience while tenting for a couple of days by the lake Roasten in July 2004. The Norwegian TV-hero Lars Monsen popped up with a camera man, and another person who tried to shoot fish with a revolver. We were sitting and chatting by the fire place, when the camera man asked us to be completely silent. So, the man of the wilderness (Mr Monsen), made a recording with a lot of people around (Roasten is the highway in Femunden), and while people were sitting and holding their breath not to disturb the impression that he were somewhere deep in the wilderness. The program which the recording were intended for was sent on the NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting System) on the 25th of March 2005.

I don’t actually think they ever used the recordings from Roasten, though.

While I was spending my summer holidays in the forest of mosquitoes (Femunden National Park) I read The Epic of Gilgamesh, a wonderful epic – four millenniums old, preserved on clay tablets, in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages (see article in Wikipedia). The story is about the semi-divine king Gilgamesh, who goes on certain adventures with his friend Enkidu: They conquer the dangerous god Humbaba (or Huwawa) in the Forest of Cedar, and they kill the Divine Bull brought upon the land by a sexually frustrated goddess called Ishtar.Humbaba is a powerful god cloaked in seven deadly “auras” (I wonder what the original Sumerian/Akkadian word really meant), but of course our heroes manage to defeat the god. It struck me while reading the story, that the deadly cloaks or auras would have been highly efficient against mosquitoes. Me, my wife, and our dog Umberto, were at times heavily attacked by clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. A divine and deadly cloak would surely have helped us.

Another problem we met, at our walk to my favourite place in Femunden, was a (seemingly) endless fields of rocks (Norwegian: “blokkmark”). A 1.5 kilometers (4–5 thousand feet) distance took us five hours… On our return we chose to walk a few hundred feet more north in exactly the same direction, and guess what: It took two hours calm walking in much more comfortable terrain… Now, it is time to mark the map properly for the next expidition!