The Fast Ferry
Leirvik – 8th June
Today starts with our ABBA tribute ‘From A Twinkling Star To A Passing Angel’ (1981)
Raindrops on a window pane
Stillness of a summer rain
Silently the haze drifts through the trees
Slowly dawn is breaking through
At last – the morning rain has brought a bit of darkness and we aren’t woken by the birds with the sun peering through the blinds at 5.00am.
Our next major destination is Bergen. However, to break up the drive, we are stopping for a night on the island of Stord. We could have driven inland and gone around all the fjords but that would’ve taken an awfully long time because, as you can see from the map, between Stavanger and Bergen is an ocean of islands, fjords and peninsulas without roads.
The kind people of Norway and the EU have made life simple for the tourists and created the E39 direct route between the two cities.
Here is our journey from Stavanger to Leirvik, Stord (the circled island on the map)
We drove to Grodem on the end of the peninsula from Stavanger and entered the Byfjord Tunnel. At the time it was completed in 1992 it was Europe’s longest (5875 metres) and the world’s deepest (223 metres), those titles have since ended and so have the tolls. The gradient was very steep, and we could watch on the GPS the tunnel going under land, sea, an island, sea and then coming up on the island of Sokn.
Sokn connects you to the island of Mosteroy by bridge then you enter the Mastrafjord Tunnel. The tunnel is 4.4km long, 133 metres deep, has a steep gradient and comes out on the island of Rennesoy. The E39 takes you around the coast of the island to the ferry harbour town of Mortavika (pronounced similarly to Motueka).
From Mortavika you catch the ferry to Arsvagen, this ferry service is one very slick operation. The ferry docks and the door is practically down at the time of docking. The vehicles roll off quickly and as the last one comes off the queuing vehicles are loaded three lanes at a time, 2 on the middle deck and one below. The ferry begins to pull away from the dock before you have even got upstairs, which is done in a hurry because the actual journey is 24 minutes and everybody wants to get to the canteen. No staple railway pie and chips here, it’s curry, Scandinavian hotdogs or pikelets. We joined the queue, scoffed and then got the five minute call to get to the car. The vehicles drive out the door at the opposite end of the ship that they came in from, therefore no time is wasted turning cars inside the boat and no time wasted turning the boat around, it is the true definition of ‘roll on roll off’. People are free, cars NZ$14.50, tolls NZ$10.00, the most expensive part was lunch NZ$35.
The ferry lands at Arsvagen on the island of Karmoy and after a short drive and a bridge it is back into a 1.5km road tunnel which comes out near the Equinor Gassco natural gas processing plant. The company is state owned and sells to the European market. More driving then it’s back into another tunnel.
The Karmoy Tunnel is 8.9 kms long, 139 metres deep and links you back to mainland Norway. Again we watched on the GPS as we went under land, sea, land, sea, island, sea, land. The peninsula land is not always suitable for making roads. This tunnel is even more spectacular because there is an underground roundabout connecting to another tunnel, and here was I thinking the GPS was crazy when she said “take the first exit at the roundabout”.
A few more roads and some shorter tunnels later we arrived at Haugesund, a place of many large shopping malls and car parks, although bad car-parkers. Feeling the need to stretch our legs we went in for a wander and bought bargain of the century, a Norwegian cookbook 449 Krone, reduced to 149 krone. Apparently it’s my birthday present so I’m not allowed to use it for a while; I can’t read it anyway.
We drove on for some time and then headed down into yet another tunnel. The Bomlafjord tunnel is 7.8 km long, 260 metres deep and took us to the island of Stord, where we are staying at the town of Leirvik. Another nice apartment with views to the sea. The weather isn’t the best, but fortunately our kind host turned on the heat pump for these soft kiwis.
In case you are wondering the longest road-tunnel in Norway (and the world) is 24.5km long and helps make the journey from Bergen and Oslo ferry-free. The second longest is 18.6km, so our tunnels today were short in comparison.