Horseid-vika

A rushed adventure

One of my favourite memories from Norway was hiking to this beach. Not only because it led to a beautiful sandy coastline with large sheet granite faces that tower over it, and sand dunes with grass growing out of it, but because it takes a 45 minute boat ride from the small fishing village of Rein, and we only had just under 2 hours to complete a 10 kilometre hike with a LOT of elevation gain.

The boat ride to the small village where we set off from was beautiful. We were able to experience the fjords in a way that wouldn't be possible by car, or hiking. The boat ride itself went by way too quickly, and the captain and first mate were more than passionate to be taking visitors around to various sites in the fjords.

Once we arrived at our drop off spot the captain informed us that we had to be back by a certain time, otherwise we would be stuck overnight, and that the village we arrived it was uninhabited at the moment. With nothing than our daypacks, a few litres of water and RedBull, as well as a protein bar or two we headed out on what we knew was going to be an absolute crunch of a hike.

It began uphill, as most hikes in Norway do, but to our dismay, every ridge line or top of a hill we reached uncovered another hill that we had to continue up. Due to the sheer amount of hiking that had to be completed, in such a short period of time, I did not stop to take many photographs on the way there, but was able to snap a few on the way back.

Once we reached the downhill section that was about 3.5 to 4 kilometres through an open grassy field, I started running to ensure that we would make it in time. Once we arrived at the beach the running stopped as it's hard to run on sand, and we didn't even make it all the way to the ocean because it looked as if we had at least another kilometre ahead of us.

We stopped for a few minutes, snapped a few photos, and then headed back to catch the ferry. We ended up having about a 20 minute buffer between us reaching the ferry docks and the ferry arriving, so I guess we could've made it to the ocean, but who knows if we would have made it back in time with the ferry.