Norway in a
Toyota Yaris
Lofoten islands, a drone that nearly drowned, and the northern lights — when we finally stopped expecting them
Mumbai → New Delhi → Kuwait →
Paris → Oslo → Evenes →
Kabelvåg → Henningsvær → Ryten →
Reine → Å → Narvik →
Harstad → Tromsø → Svalbard →
Senja → Oslo → Kuwait → Home
I asked them if we could do New Delhi to Kuwait instead and keep all the other legs the same. They said yes, but it had to be done through the agent. So I emailed the agent — budgetair.in — and then proceeded to spend the next 3 or 4 days in a low grade state of dread even though everyone had promised it would be fine. It was fine. Obviously. But you know how it is.
Before any of this we had another logistical problem. The kids. We were leaving them with Mariya’s parents in Pune, and they were flying alone for the first time. Minor tickets, unaccompanied minor forms, the whole thing. They were actually excited about it which honestly made it easier for us. Their first solo flight was more of an adventure for them than it was a worry for us, once we stopped thinking about it.
Paris in three hours
In transit · CDG
When we landed in Paris we had our luggage with us, which was not ideal for sightseeing. We spent about 30 minutes looking for the cloak room at CDG. When we found it there was a queue. Paris airport is enormous and the signage is not as helpful as the airport seems to think it is. You need to be paying attention or you end up walking to the wrong terminal twice.
We tried to get a train to the city and there was a queue for the tickets. So I got my phone out and downloaded the app, bought the tickets there. The app was not user friendly. I have used Swedish public transport apps, which are a completely different experience — clean, simple, obvious. The Swedish approach to public software design is something else. Paris is the opposite of that.
On the train, somehow, I decided we should buy a drone. I’d been looking at the DJI Neo — good specs, compact, forgiving enough for someone who has never flown a drone seriously. Mariya thought I was going to rent one until she realized I was actually buying it. Her reaction was very much: huh. And I was very much: ya why not.
The DJI store was near the Luxembourg Gardens so we took a photo there and then walked in and bought the drone, got the VAT refund form filled out and everything. Then a cab to the Eiffel Tower. And there it was — the metal structure. I had seen it before. Mariya hadn’t. Her first impression was something like: ah, it’s not that big. Which is a very fair observation. It’s a lot of metal. It’s just metal.
We didn’t go up. There were queues and we had no time and honestly the view from the road opposite the tower is more fun anyway. Loads of people, photographers everywhere, couples dressed up for their backdrop moment. Mariya had specifically brought a red coat for this exact purpose and I had rented a DSLR which I am not a photographer and it was a bulky one and I kind of managed it without managing it particularly well. We took a lot of photos, did some couple shots, some videos for reels, spent maybe 45 minutes total. Then we had to get back to the airport.
The check-in at CDG was its own thing. Automated check-in, self-tagging luggage, and then the QR code on the boarding pass wouldn’t scan. We went to the counter, someone sorted it out, printed the tags, and then we were running to security. Made it. Flight to Oslo, almost full, everyone tired.
Oslo airport at midnight
Oct 8–9, 2024
We arrived in Oslo around 11:30 at night. Our connecting flight to Evenes was at 6 in the morning. That’s maybe 6 hours in the airport. We decided to just wait it out and sleep there rather than book a hotel for a few hours.
Oslo airport is actually one of the better airports in the world to get stuck in. Large sofas, proper sofas, the kind you can completely stretch out on. No one bothers you. Charging stations everywhere — phones, cameras, everything topped up by morning. The toilets were clean and genuinely large, which sounds like a strange thing to note but after CDG it was a relief. The one thing that was a problem was food. Vegetarian options were almost nonexistent at that hour. Whatever was open was mostly meat-based. We managed, but if you’re vegetarian and transiting Oslo at 1am you should just carry something.
The one thing that almost derailed us was the luggage. We had been told in Paris that our bags would be automatically transferred to Evenes. So we were just sitting in Oslo, almost at the departure gate, when something made me stop at the SAS counter and ask. Just on impulse. The woman at the counter made a call and then told us our luggage was in the unclaimed section. Carousel number 10. We had to go get it and check it in again ourselves.
If we had been at the gate when we figured this out, the bags would have gone on the next flight — the following day — and we would have started a road trip through Arctic Norway with nothing. So we ran to carousel 10, got the bags, re-checked them, and made our flight with enough time to breathe.
Evenes airport and the wrong side of the road
October 9, 2024
Evenes is a small airport. Two carousels. When we walked out of the aircraft it was cold and overcast and almost raining. I grew up in India where the driver sits on the right and you drive on the left. In Norway it’s flipped. This was the first time I would drive on the right side of the road and I was doing it in an unfamiliar car, in the Arctic, on roads I had never seen.
The Avis desk checked our license — I had my international license with me as well which made it smooth. They authorized a hold on my card for damages, and since it was a brand new car with no existing scratches, we filmed a quick walk-around video just to have it on record. Honestly that part was quite fun — there was nothing to note, which is the best outcome. They handed us the keys and off we went.
The car was a Toyota Yaris hybrid. Compact, very clean, seat warmers, steering wheel warmers. It was comfortable for two people. We had two large suitcases — one went in the boot and the other one had to go on the rear seat. It worked fine for us, but I’ll be honest: if you’re four people doing this same trip with four bags, you’re going to have a problem. Two people, two large bags — that’s about the limit of what a Yaris will comfortably take.
We drove out of the airport and were on the road. The first few minutes of driving on the right side were the most tense. After that your brain adjusts. Mostly.
We had been trying to get on a boat trip in Svolvær that afternoon — a proper fjord excursion — but we were too late and couldn’t figure out where to park anyway. We called the number for the boat company and the woman who picked up said she was on leave. The whole thing just dissolved. There was nowhere obvious to park, no one around to ask, and at some point we gave up and went to find the Airbnb in Kabelvåg.
We arrived at 2pm. Check-in was at 4. We sat in the car. Now here’s the thing — we were parked outside the wrong house. We didn’t know that. We just sat there waiting, assuming someone would eventually come out or signal us or something. When 4 o’clock came we called the host and she said come over, and when we went over we realized the right house had been right there all along, perfectly accessible, probably since we arrived. I had followed the instructions too literally and waited two hours in a car for absolutely no reason.
The Airbnb itself was very small. Genuinely very small. We couldn’t open both suitcases at the same time — you’d open one, deal with it, close it, then open the other. But it was well equipped: good shower, a proper kitchen, everything worked. Private parking. And that’s actually all you need when you’re just sleeping there and leaving early. We settled in around 3, unpacked in turns, and it was fine.
The hostel in Kabelvåg
October 9, Evening
We arrived at the address at 2pm. Check-in was at 4. We sat in the car, tired and hungry, eating snacks we’d been carrying since India. Now here’s the thing — we were parked outside the wrong house and didn’t know it. We just sat there for two hours assuming someone would eventually come out or signal us or something. When 4 o’clock came we called the host and she said come over, and when we went over we realized the right house was right there the whole time, already unlocked. I had followed the booking instructions too literally and waited in a car for no reason.
The room was very small. Not small in a charming way, small in a practical way — we literally could not open both suitcases at the same time. You’d open one, deal with it, close it, then open the other. But it had a good shower, a proper kitchen, and private parking, which is more than enough when you’re just sleeping and leaving early. A French woman was staying there too, with a dog, who had just come back from further up the islands. She helped us figure out the heater. We were cold and had no idea how to operate it and were too embarrassed to ask for longer than we should have been.
We tried to see northern lights that night. Completely cloudy. We went to sleep in separate beds in a small cold room and it was genuinely fine.
Henningsvær and the football stadium
October 10, 2024
We had brought ready-to-eat vegetarian and vegan meals from home — the kind where you pour hot water and wait. Made some coffee in the kitchen, took everything outside to the porch. It was windy. Very windy. But we sat out there anyway and had breakfast in Lofoten, which is a sentence that still sounds slightly unreal. Then packed up and headed to the football stadium.
We left Kabelvåg in the morning. The light in Lofoten in October is something unusual — when it’s not raining, which it often is, there’s this low golden quality to it even at midday that doesn’t exist further south. The mountains come straight out of the water with no preamble. It doesn’t build up to anything. You’re just in it.
Henningsvær is famous for the football stadium that sits at the end of a peninsula, surrounded by water on almost all sides. You drive all the way to the end of the village and there it is — a real pitch, painted lines, goalposts, just sitting there with the sea on three sides and mountains behind it. We took a few shots on the ground. I wanted to get the drone up for an aerial — that’s the iconic view of this stadium — but the wind was too much and honestly I was still too new to it. If you want the aerial, Google it. There are plenty of good ones. We just didn’t manage it that day.
While we were there, a film crew arrived. They had booked the stadium for the whole day for a private shoot and politely asked us to leave. We were only there maybe 10 to 15 minutes total. Lucky we got there early — an hour later and we’d have seen nothing.
After that we were back on the road and the whole drive from there onward was just relentlessly beautiful. Narrow roads, wide roads, tunnels through mountains, bridges over water, fjords on both sides. Lofoten doesn’t let you get bored for a single kilometre of it.
The drone and the very cold sea
October 10, 2024
A bit further down the road we stopped at a beach. The kind of beach where the sand is perfect and the water is obviously freezing and the mountains are right there behind you. We got out of the car and I decided to try the drone again.
The drone went up, drifted sideways immediately in the wind, and then drifted further sideways toward the water. I pulled it back. It was not a graceful maneuver. It did not go into the water. I retrieved it. We both laughed about it but for a second there I thought I had lost a brand new drone into the North Atlantic on day one of the road trip, which would have been an extremely expensive way to spend an afternoon.
The Ryten hike
October 10, 2024
The Ryten hike had been on the plan from the beginning. The parking is at a private farm that’s been converted into a paid lot — 100 NOK. When we pulled up the booth was empty. No one there. A few German tourists were also standing around, also confused, and they said someone on the phone had told them to just park and pay on the way back. We were about to do exactly that — and then, literally one minute later, someone appeared at the window. So we paid, got our ticket, and went. That whole thing cost us about 10 minutes. Not a big deal at all, we were just exploring with no fixed schedule.
The trail itself is one of the nicer things about Ryten — throughout the whole hike there are these wooden plank walkways laid down across the path. They go through some private farmland and it gets very muddy otherwise, so the planks serve two purposes: they give you a clear guided trail so you’re never guessing which way to go, and they keep your boots completely clean. Someone clearly put a lot of thought into them. The whole thing is well maintained.
We made it to the top. There were surprisingly a lot of people up there — turns out there was some kind of Chinese national holiday that week so a large group had come out. We got talking, or as much as you can get talking when nobody shares a language, and we helped each other take photos. They took some great ones of us, we took some of them, everyone was happy. Cold, very cold, but we had a lot of fun up there. I did not take out the drone — the wind at the top was just too much, same problem as Henningsvær. The drone stayed in the bag.
Reine for lunch, Å for the night
October 10, Evening
After Ryten we passed through Reine. It’s the kind of place that looks like it was designed to be photographed — red rorbuer on stilts, water all around, mountains that look almost unreal. We had been following a couple online called Guide to Lofoten — they run a page where they answer questions about travelling here, and they had been genuinely helpful when we were planning the trip. We had asked them a bunch of questions on Facebook and they always replied properly. We tried to meet them in Reine since we knew they were based around there. Turned out they were out somewhere. We didn’t manage to connect, which was a small disappointment, but we left it at that.
We had vegan burritos from a food cart just outside Reine village. I don’t know what I was expecting from a vegan burrito at the bottom of the Lofoten archipelago but it was genuinely good. Then the drive to Å — the town that’s literally named the last letter of the Norwegian alphabet, pronounced “ao”, the last stop on the E10. The whole stretch of road between Reine and Å was just stop after stop of photos. We couldn’t help it. Every bend in the road looked like someone had put it there on purpose.
The Brygga Inn at Å was the proper treat of the trip. It’s technically a hotel but the room was simple — bed, skylight that opens above you, and a shared toilet just outside. The toilet sounds like it should be a problem but it was spotless and honestly almost private because there was barely anyone else around. The whole place felt peaceful in a way that’s hard to manufacture.
That night we went northern lights hunting. Walked out into the dark, stood around in the cold for a while, looked at the sky. Cloudy. Again. The lights didn’t come. We came back inside and accepted it.
The area around Å at night is dark in a way that city people don’t really register until they’re standing in it. No streetlights, no cars, no movement. Just the sound of water and wind. Cold and quiet and completely still.
Morning at Brygga Inn
October 11, 2024
The morning was one of the best of the trip. Cold, calm, and the view outside was exactly what Lofoten is supposed to look like — red rorbuer on stilts, fishing nets hanging and drying everywhere, old equipment scattered along the waterfront, the sea flat and grey, mountains behind. Nobody around. It was like the place had been set up for us.
Breakfast at Brygga Inn was lovely — proper sit-down breakfast with a view of the water. What surprised us was how many vegan and vegetarian options there were. We ate stomach full, which after days of managing on ready-to-eat meals and burritos felt like a luxury. There was no kitchen in the room so you couldn’t cook yourself, but with a breakfast spread like that it didn’t matter at all.
We set up a camera on a small tripod outside to get some shots of the property. The camera fell over. Nothing broke. We got some photos anyway.
The Reinefjorden ferry
October 11, Morning
Before heading back north we did the Reinefjorden ferry — a boat trip through Kjerkfjorden. We hadn’t done this kind of thing before so there was the usual figuring-it-out process when we got there. Parking was the first problem. No obvious place, no signage telling you where to go. We worked it out eventually, parked, and then boarded. You pay inside the boat, not at a booth beforehand, which we didn’t know going in.
The boat was almost completely empty. Which meant we could sit wherever we wanted, move around, go to whichever side had the better view. The ferry does a loop — it picks up people from one or two remote villages along the fjord that have no road access, so the boat is their only way in and out. At one stop a couple got on whose clothes were absolutely caked in mud. Not splashed, caked. They had clearly been out trekking for multiple days somewhere in the back country. We didn’t talk to them but you couldn’t help wondering what they had been through.
The whole trip was about an hour. The fjord is dramatic in a quieter way than the open sea — enclosed, steep walls on both sides, very still water. Good for just sitting and looking.
On the way back we stopped at Reine again. We walked past the burrito cart. We thought about it. We skipped it. Then we drove through Hamnøy — a tiny village that’s almost too photogenic. Red houses on small rocky islands connected by a bridge. We took what we needed and kept moving.
We also stopped at Storvatnet on the way — a small lake along the road to Nusfjord. This is the spot famous for the batman mountain reflection, where the peaks on either side of the lake mirror into the water and form what looks exactly like the batman symbol. It’s one of those things that’s better in person than it sounds. The lake is calm, the reflection was there, and the mountains really do look like that.
Then Nusfjord. Another fishing village, very well preserved, the kind of place that feels like it hasn’t changed in 80 years. We walked around, took photos, and then headed toward our stop for the night.
The Harbour House, Ballstad
October 11, Night
The Harbour House in Ballstad is right on the pier. It’s a self-service hostel and it’s small — smaller than Kabelvåg, which was already very small. The whole thing felt like a converted shipping container, which in hindsight might not be far from the truth. We had a private twin room to ourselves. There were five or six other people in the dorm area who were cooking and doing their own thing. Inside it was actually quite nice and cozy.
The night was something else. We were on the pier, and there was a large ship parked right there alongside. The wind was loud. Not background-loud — properly loud, the kind that keeps you awake. It was hitting the tin walls of the place continuously, this low thumping that didn’t stop. And the road outside was wet so every car that passed made that hissing tyre sound. We were both lying in bed feeling slightly uneasy about the whole situation, not scared exactly but also not fully relaxed. It’s a very different experience from Brygga Inn. We cooked our own dinner, went to sleep, and by morning it was fine.
Eggum, Harstad, and a key in a mailbox
October 12, 2024
We left Ballstad early. The plan was to make it to Harstad in time for the ship to Tromsø, which meant we had a full morning to play with if we didn’t waste it. We headed toward Haukland Beach first — one of the most photographed beaches in Lofoten, white sand, mountains, the whole thing. Then we went to Eggum. Eggum is a tiny settlement on the northwest coast and the drive out there is a bit of an adventure — remote, exposed, the road just ending at the sea. There were sheep everywhere. We took a lot of pictures of sheep.
At some point we looked at the time and decided we were cutting it close. So we skipped anything else and pointed the car toward Harstad.
One thing worth mentioning: we had picked up the car at Evenes airport and we dropped it at Harstad. One-way, no extra charge. I had found this online when planning — Evenes and Harstad are about an hour apart and Avis treats them as the same zone. This mattered a lot because if we’d had to return the car to Evenes and then get ourselves to Harstad for the ship, that would have been a much longer, more expensive, more stressful day. The one-way drop made everything clean and logical.
Harstad itself is a proper town — shops, roads, traffic, the kind of place where you remember civilization exists. Finding the Avis drop point was not straightforward. We drove around in loops two or three times. Eventually we found a fuel station, figured out that was where you leave the car, parked it, and then stood there looking at a key with nowhere obvious to put it. There was a mailbox. We dropped the key in the mailbox. A Chinese group who had been on the same road as us all week arrived and did exactly the same thing, which confirmed we had it right.
The ship from Harstad to Tromsø was a proper large passenger vessel — not the small ferry we’d imagined. Almost full. Luggage everywhere in the corridors, people from all over, the same Chinese group we’d been crossing paths with all week. The journey takes a few hours and the views along the way were exactly what you’d expect from a coastal Norwegian route in October — fjords, islands, low cloud, occasional breaks of light. We found seats, sat down, and stopped moving for the first time in days.
We arrived in Tromsø and walked to the Airbnb from the ferry terminal. The wind that evening was something. Not cold-wind normal — properly pushing you, the kind where you lean into it and it still moves you sideways. Welcome to Tromsø.
The hotel window at midnight
October 12, Night
We arrived in Tromsø in the late afternoon off the ship from Harstad, checked in, walked around a bit, ate something. That was the extent of Tromsø. We had a 6am bus to the airport the next morning for the Svalbard flight so it was always going to be just the one night.
And then sometime in the middle of that night we looked out of the hotel window and there they were. Northern lights. Not the dramatic full-sky version you see on Instagram — a proper quiet green shimmer moving across the dark above the city. We both stood at the window for a while without saying much. You don’t really need to say anything. It’s one of those things you either see or you don’t, and when you do, every cloudy night before it instantly stops mattering.
Next morning, bus to the airport at some unreasonable hour, and off to Svalbard.
Svalbard
October 13–16, 2024
We flew out of Tromsø on the morning of Oct 13. The flight to Longyearbyen takes about an hour and a half, and at some point you look out of the window and realize there’s nothing below you anymore — no towns, no roads, just tundra and ice and ocean. You’re at 78 degrees north. It recalibrates something in your head about where you are on the planet.
We stayed at Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg in Longyearbyen for three nights — Oct 13 to 16. It’s one of the more well-known places to stay in Svalbard, a guesthouse that’s been there a long time and has a personality to it. Basic but right. Everything in Longyearbyen is either very expensive or very basic or both, so finding somewhere with character is worth it.
Longyearbyen is a strange place to process. It’s technically a town — it has a supermarket, a university, restaurants, people who live there year-round — but everything about it feels provisional. Like civilization decided to try something here and hasn’t fully committed yet. The mountains around it are bare and grey and enormous. There are signs warning you about polar bears as soon as you leave the town perimeter. Not tourist signs. Actual signs.
The big thing we did was Pyramiden. It’s a Soviet-era mining settlement about 100 kilometres from Longyearbyen, accessible only by boat. The Russians built a whole functioning town there in the middle of the Arctic — apartment blocks, a cultural centre, a swimming pool, a hotel, a bust of Lenin that still stands — and then abandoned it almost overnight in 1998 when the coal stopped being worth it. Everything was just left. It’s been frozen in time since then, literally and figuratively.
Walking through Pyramiden is eerie in a way that’s hard to put into words. It’s not haunted in any dramatic sense — it’s just frozen. The gym equipment is still there. The piano in the cultural centre was apparently still playable for years. The mountain behind the town is perfectly symmetrical, which is why they named the place Pyramiden. The glacier is right there at the end of the road. Our guide kept reminding us to stay together because polar bears come through. We did not see a polar bear. I was half relieved and half disappointed.
We flew back on the morning of Oct 16. There’s a photo from 6:34am local time of Mariya in Longyearbyen before we left — it was still dark outside. In October in Svalbard the sun barely rises at all. You exist in this long blue twilight and then it’s dark again. After four days of it you start to feel it in your body in a way that’s hard to explain.
Driving toward Finland at night
October 16, Evening
We landed back in Tromsø from Svalbard in the afternoon. And then someone — I think it was me — suggested we drive toward Finland that night. There were forecasts that the aurora might be visible further east, away from the coast and the cloud cover that had been following us all week. So we got in a car and just drove. East. Into the dark.
The road out of Tromsø toward the Finnish border goes through Kautokeino and it’s the kind of road that in the dark, in October, in near-zero temperatures, feels like you’ve left the inhabited world. There are no lights on the road. There are no other cars. At some point we pulled over and stepped out and the sky was doing something. Green bands moving slowly, brightening and fading. Not violent or dramatic — more like the sky was breathing.
It’s funny because we had spent days in Lofoten, nights at Brygga Inn with the special skylight, multiple evenings in Tromsø actively trying to see the northern lights and getting clouds every time. And then on the last stretch — exhausted, just back from Svalbard, driving east on an impulse — there they were. Standing on a dark empty road somewhere near the Finnish border with the aurora above us. It was worth every cloudy night that came before it.
Senja
October 17–18, 2024
Senja is the second largest island in Norway and gets a fraction of the visitors that Lofoten does, which means the roads are quieter and the viewpoints are less crowded. We drove out there from Tromsø on Oct 17 and spent parts of two days driving the island.
Senja doesn’t have the same postcard fame as Lofoten but in some ways it’s more satisfying to drive — you’re not stopping every 5 minutes for a known viewpoint. You’re just moving through a landscape and occasionally stopping because something looks extraordinary. On the second day we drove back toward Tromsø and started heading home.
The way back
October 18–19, 2024
We flew from Tromsø to Oslo on the evening of Oct 18. The Oslo photos from that night are at 9 or 10pm — airport again, same large sofas, but this time heading the other direction. Mariya in Oslo airport at 10pm. Some things you photograph for no reason other than it marks a moment.
Then Kuwait, one more transit, and then back. The kids were fine. The trip was done. 599 photos with GPS coordinates, a drone that nearly got eaten by the North Sea, two northern lights sightings, one Soviet ghost town, one football stadium, two airports slept in, one car returned with zero damage, and a Toyota Yaris that handled all of it without complaint.
We saw the lights twice. Once from a hotel window in Tromsø — unplanned, just looked up and there it was. And once standing on a dark road somewhere near Finland, on a total impulse. Both times we weren’t really trying. That seems to be how it works.
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