We get on the train from airport to Oslo S station, and on every seat it says "Stillhet, Silence". We are talking as we are trying to figure out where are we going, etc. and we get these looks from the people here. It is strange.
[Stillhet, Silence sign on seats of train]()
At some point during the train ride, a couple of girls are laughing in a low volume (I did not even notice them until this happened), and this old lady (a passenger) gets up, approaches them and tells them to be quiet (I did not understand the words, but that seemed like what she said), and the girls go quiet. The rest of the train ride is very, very quiet. So far, I don't like this environment.
But I was quick to judge, turns out there are quiet zones in trains, and a good bunch of the wagons are quiet zones. Which I actually like, I think. If I lived in a place like this I might personally use a quiet zone when using the train.
[Quiet zones]()
However this seemed to extend to a lot of other places as well, the city of Oslo in general was pretty quiet for a friday evening, not much *seemed* to be happening from the our perspective, and there were no loud noises, except the rare music here and there from bars, but even then not super loud. Coming from Tehran and Dublin which can be quite loud (each in their own way) this was quite novel.
We left for airport to pick up our friend who was arriving late, so we ended up picking him up at around midnight, and then we set off for our first place to stay. Our strongest shock during this road trip middle of night was that at some point we had to stop because a road maintenance truck was stopping traffic, as there was another van and some people trimming grass / vegetation beside the road (outside of the road fence), which was quite surprising to us why they would spend time and resources trimming vegetation beside the road! There was traffic building up behind this (even though this was 1 or 2am at this point) because of this for a while. If you know any reason for why they do this, please let me know as I am very curious. To us it seemed superfluous and a *rich country problem*.
At 3:30am we arrived at the place, and we are lucky because the owner of the place had left doors open for us to be able to get in, so we all went to sleep straight in! This place is beautiful on the eyes, and there is a cute dog here who wants to play ball always.
The next day we got up and made our way to a short enough hike which had a cable car that would travel in a tunnel inside the mountain, but we couldn't take that as we wanted to hike up and take the car down, but the last car was for an hour, while the hike would take two hours. So we just spent a short time hiking up and then sat down for chai and chat. Afterwards we did our first drone footage of our drive, in an interesting landscape.
<videosrc="first-drone.mp4"/>
After that we made our way to a waterfall, [Lotofosen?], but just for a quick peek before we would go back to our place to sleep at night, but it was so beautiful I couldn't resist a drone shot of this place, so I was filming a few shots and just before I was going to bring the drone back to land (as it was running out of battery), the drone hit a tree and fell. It fell on the other side of this strong river. At first we were contemplating whether it is possible to cross the river at all, the consensus in he end was that it is too dangerous as the water current is very strong at one point in the river (and this point was unavoidable) and the depth was also unknown to us.
![image of river]()
I proposed we would go from the other side of the river by driving there and hiking down, the hill was very steep and my friends were skeptical of the idea, but I preferred hiking difficult terrain to crossing a river: my thought process is: humans evolved to live on the ground, and even though it may be difficult terrain, it is easier to have control in this environment than it is in water. We said let's leave it until tomorrow as it as already midnight and dark and we had to think about this. That night we also had to drive at 1am to charge the car, we didn't get to sleep until 3am!
The next morning, all I could think about was the drone rescue mission :D -- I was determined to hike the other side of the river. We went back to the waterfall, and as I was buying a postcad from the shop there, I asked him about this, and he said yeah we can probably hike the other side down, it's doable but difficult. He said it's also possible to cross the river but risky, and he personally would wait until September when the river is less strong to do it. So we drove the road around to the top of the hill and I and Emad set off to rescue the drone. The distance on ground was only 100 meters, but the terrain was very steep (about 70% grade) and it took us about 45 minutes to get down to the river and find the drone!
![drone rescue result]()
The drone's propellers were all damaged, so we couldn't fly the drone anymore on this trip (and we couldn't find a place in Norway on our way to buy propellers from unfortunately). But we got to see this beautiful view from this side of the river that not many people got to see probably :D
![In this side of river]()
We continue on to go visit another hike and waterfall and spend some time hiking there, beautiful scenery and every waterfall has its own character and aesthetics which are amazing.
Next day we have a train ride that takes an hour to go, and an hour to come back. The train ride cost €50 per person roundtrip, and we got to see some beautiful scenery, but the most interesting part for me was that the train stops at a place and there is some dance on the hills by two girls.
The train was very noisy and there are many tunnels on the way, so the train is 3/5 for sight-seeing in my opinion, driving around the country yields better sight of the beautiful environment.
Next day we go for a cabin ride up one of the mountains, this cabin ride which is only 5 minutes is also €50 per person (quite a lot for one cabin ride in my opinion), but the scenery here is better and we got to see two paragliders jumping off the mountain and flying off into the beautiful valley in front of us!
![paraglider photos]()
We set off for a "insert name here" glacier national park, and that valley is the most beautiful place I have seen in this country, there is a sense of awe in my when I look at both sides of this valley: one side a glacier that is thousands of years old, and the other side this most beautiful rock formation with trees and waterfalls and the sun casting a beautiful shadow on it.
![glacier national park]()
Our next stop is the cabin we are staying in, which has a hot tub outside!! That was also a great break from all the moving around.
