Returning from Lofoten back to the mainland, it was time to head South. The first night on shore was very lucky - we finally managed to see the aurora borealis! We had tried several times before to look out for it as there had been some intensive geomagnetic storms, but the sky was always clouded. It was one of our dreams to see the aurora - Antoine claims it’d been 400 years he was waiting for this moment.

The photos here are 15 seconds exposure (but without any further enhancements). Without the camera, the aurora was initially barely visible (we almost took it for a cloud). With time, its shape has changed and it become more intense - we could see a faint green color. It moves slowly, too slow to directly see the motion, but too fast to appear static.

The place where we slept that night was close to a historical site of ancient drawings. The drawings represent various local animals in their real-life size (e.g. a 7 m picture of a killer whale) and are 9000 years old, but not much is known about their authors. To reach them, we had to walk on the ice-covered rock slope - took us some effort not to break a leg.

After seeing the drawings, we went southward. We followed the E6 again, although it took us some time to reach the town of Fauske, where we left it before Lofoten.

We passed the Polar Circle and the Northern - Souther Norway border, two weeks only after we passed it the other way, but this time it was covered by snow. We stopped there for the night and continued on our way to Trondheim.

We reached Trondheim in a heavy snowfall, and continued down through southern Norway towards the great national parks.