Flood on the Sjoa

From the beginning of the season we were all complaining about there not being enough water on the Sjoa River. Suddenly on the second week of June we got a lot of rain and the Sjoa rose to above cut off levels for rafting with in about 2days.

At first my friend Erika and I were excited because we had a couple of surf sessions but pretty quickly all the surf spots got completely washed out and the river was one continuous rapid with huge waves (and holes!).

I had a lot of fun on the river but stopped paddling for a few days when I saw whole trees and stuff floating down the river! It was so amazing, the river came up to some parts of the road (and detroyed houses, sections of road, trees etc) and a lot of rocks got moved around in the river (you could hear the rocks moving and even feel the vibrations - crazy!). There is now one gianourmous rock in the middle of Chocolate Canyon!

Sjoa Rafting seemed to suffer a lot with most of their camp getting washed out. The guide house was evacuated but lucky the river started to come down before the river started coming through the door!

Now the river is back to normal and we actually are happy when it rains so we can hopefully have enough water to last the season!

From India - Sweden - Australia - Norway!

So I am now feeling the shame of not updating my blog since November after seeing how fantastic my friend Toni's blog is. So instead of writing a long-winded post about what I've done the last 8 months I decided it would be easier to break things up into a few posts chronologically....

So after returning to Sweden after Bjorn and my adventures to India and Nepal things didn't exactly turn out as planned. My VISA to Norway took 7 weeks to process (about 4 weeks longer than the usual processing time) so I told my employer in Norway I had no VISA and a day later it arrived but my job had already been given to someone else.

I decided to return back to Australia and Bjorn and I took our own separate directions. It was pretty weird returning to Australia as the longest time I've really spent in Aus since 2006 is around a month or so in between travels, this time I was spending 5-6 months in Australia.

While trying to land back on my feet at home I did some bar work and then at the start of the year finally landed a job at Vic Uni lecturing in Nutrition and tutoring Nutritional Therapy students in clinics. It's a different aspect of being a dietitian that I am used to so it kept me interested and I really enjoyed my work in Australia. The only weird thing was sometimes teaching students my age or older!

In Melbourne it's also pretty hard to go kayaking (the main reason is it being a spread out city with very little nature!) so I kept busy by doing Swedish classes once a week and joining the gym and starting yoga and boxing classes. Yoga is something I've made fun of time and time again when I'm in India but I decided to give it a try to see if I could get any of the benefits people talk about and now I will do it for the rest of my life! I've never been able to touch my toes before and now I can wrap my hand over them, I sleep better, feel more peaceful and don't get as stiff from work and exercise.

It wasn't all work and no play in Melbourne. I did my fair share of re-living Melbourne nightlife, saw a few bands (which I haven't done in a few years and realised I missed live music so much!!!) such as Tool, Sparkadia and Dead Letter Circus and spent more money than I am used to on things which are not kayak related!

Boat shed at NWR

But in May my downtime at home came to an end and I flew over to Norway to work in Sjoa again for the summer. This year I've been really lucky to get a job at Sjoa Raftingsenter (NWR) as a photo kayaker which is like a dream job for me. Not many people get to take photos and kayak everyday AND get paid to do it!

NWR is a pretty great set-up and one of the best rafting companies I've worked at so far. We've got a proper guide-house all to ourselves with our own bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, drying room for gear, laundry room and a walk-in fridge (which is now turned off and used as the beer brewing room! It's okay we have 4 fridges in the kitchen, it seems like each morning I wake up we have another new fridge in the kitchen!). We've got it pretty good here and best of all our bosses are super nice.

View over the Sjoa River

I also saved enough money to buy a decent car this season. NWR is a bit further away from the river than the other companies so by not having a car you kind of leave yourself stranded. I was lucky in May and June that I had a lot of free time to catch up with old friends in the Valley such as my Norwegian friend Erika so I could go kayaking lots (for fun not work!). One of the best kayaking days we had was just Erika and I doing a Birthday run down Åseng (Sjoa River) with chocolate birthday cake in the back of Erika's boat. Nothing hardcore but it was nice just to have us girls on the river with a big slab of cake!

Start of our hike in Bessheim

Another thing which is a little different this summer is now there are heaps of female kayakers in the valley. I didn't realise until the other day that pretty much all of my boating this summer has been down with just girls. It's pretty awesome because usually it's such a male dominated sport.

So far I am really enjoying this season in Norway. So as promised I am going to update my blog so there is lots more to come including high water on the Sjoa, Ekstremsport Veko Week in Voss, Sjoa River Festival, running my first 'thing' and slide and more about Norway and my job!