Hurtigruten: Day 4 - part 1

We woke up to greyer skies, higher mountains and more snow this morning, but the major change was that we are now north of the Arctic circle!

We had a quick stop for freight in the morning and then we were away again and heading to Bodo for our major stop of the day.

We decided to give the kids a break from our forced marches through the snow so we signed up for one of the exorbitantly priced excursions so we could have the comfort of a bus! So after docking at Bodo at noon we headed to Saltstrummen which is apparently the strongest tidal current in the world - with water speeding at 41km/hr through the 150m wide strait every six hours.  I just liked the sound of the trip as it was about a 1/2 drive from the boat so we got to see some of Bodo as well along the way. 

That's the current swirling around in the photo below. Apparently as it's not physically possible for all the water to go in and out fast enough, the water level in this fjord can be 1 metre lower or higher than its neighbouring fjords at particular times.

While Jon and I dutifully admired the current, the kids engaged in their favourite game - try-to-smash-the-ice-with-rock-stick-or-self..

The shorter days are even more obvious up here and it was getting dark as we got back to the boat at 3pm.  

Tonight we dock at the Lofoton Islands at 9pm - it will be dark but I'm going to get off and have a look around anyway. Then at 11:30 we are going into the very narrow Trollfjord and using spotlights to check it out - so it will be quite a big day by the time it's done!

Sorry I got a bit excited with the file size this post - the images are a bit bigger in size and quality. Hopefully it's not caused you to burn up your bandwidth. Any complaints, please send them to me care of the north pole.