At the top of Prekestolen, in Stavanger, Norway
Yes, when I decided to do the hiking to the top of Prikestolen, it was one more episode of “my wife is gonna kill me” saga.
If you didn’t understand , take a look at this post.
As the hiking at the Jostedalsbreen, the track to get to the top of Preikestolen was at my initial plans of natural tourism.
After all, what is the Preikestolen?
Prikestolen in norwegian can be translated as “The pulpit rock” or “Preacher’s Pulpit”.
This is a cliff that is 604 meters above the fjord Lysefjorden, approximately 25 by 25 meters square and almost flat.
Image taken from Wikipedia
Image taken from Wikipedia
Where ?
The Preikestolen is located at Stavanger, the third biggest city in Norway.
This city is famous for being the headquarters of oil company Statoil(Stavanger Oil) which is one of the most advanced petroleum companies in the world. Petrobras often send people there for training and research.
Unfortunately we didn’t have time to visit the city, as we I arrived on the 12th at night, made the hiking at 13th and left Norway at 14th.
We were in Solvorn, so we had to catch a plane with connection in Bergen to get to Stavanger.
Starting the hiking
One more time I need to thank a person for the help in my planing, my American friend Alex Berger. He has a great blog about travel, take a look: Virtual Wayfarer.
Alex did this same hiking to the top of Preikestolen, take a look at his post:
http://virtualwayfarer.com/hiking-preikestolen-aka-the-preachers-pulpit-in-norway/
Well, we started by taking the ferry near the hotel to a village called Tau, where we took a bus to the initial point of the hiking. During the trip we met a nice Malaysian couple who accompanied us throughout the day.
This is the view when the bus left. It looked like a painting!
Starting!
A guide map
Looking at the map above, it seems to be very simple, after all, is just over 3km walk, and if you look at the top right of this map it shows that even dogs can do the trail.
I said to Roberta: “Relax baby, this is easy!“.
The hiking is done without a guide, you just need to follow the trail.
“See Roberta, I told you that would be easy to walk here”
“Hey woman, we walked for 30 minutes and I’m even laughing so easy that it is”
…
Going up
…
And up
…
Peace of cake
…
Damn…. wait!
Damn… not that easy 😐
At first it seems a traditional walk, with some rocks and stuff, nothing difficult, but after a certain point, it starts to get very steep with loose rocks and moist. I came back with some bruises and a torn shoe!
Our Malaysian friends
Every time I reached the edge to take a picture, Roberta looked to me like this
As I said, the path is not so long, a little more than 3km.
With all my naivety I thought: “Well, I walk 2.5 kilometers every day to get to the office and it takes me 30 minutes, so, to arrive at the end of this trail will take approximately 50 minutes”
It took us 2 hours and 30 minutes to reach the top… Epic Fail
If in doubt along the way, just follow the arrows. OK, OK … looks more like a “T” than an arrow, but believe me, they point the way
Have you seen Benjamin Bastian from Germany? This was nailed in a section of the track.
Almost there! At this point, we had already walked for around 3km.
After 2 hours and 30 minutes, weak breath, some bruises, torn shoes and wet socks … we reached the top !
The view up there
The best view possible of the fjord! 😀
Go up there and not be on the edge is unacceptable!
Well, I don’t need to say that Roberta swore at me the whole way, right? OK, I agree that it was not easy and I didn’t thought that the effort would be that much, but it was worth every minute.
The most beautiful and magic about reaching the top of Preikestolen is not just be up there. It is all the effort that you have to go through to see the scenery during the hiking, the lakes that form with the rain, the fjord became increasingly apparent, listen to more than 10 different languages of the people who are hiking with you, and after all that, get up there, have the most beautiful view you can imagine and say “I made it, I’m here”
This my friends, is priceless 🙂
