Tafjord

Tafjord is a place that I hope to visit again this Summer, if last Sunday wasn't actually all the Summer we're going to get.
I was thinking about the place today, so had a trawl through my pictures from last year.
First thing I stumbled on isn't actually a picture from Tafjord, it's from Eidsdal, but taken the same day. An absolute classic little shed.

Standing alone in the middle of a field, it stores the poles and wire which are set up to dry hay. The use of the shed isn't really important, the construction is. If you have a close look you'll see that there is no sawn wood, natural shaped bits of trees have been used, and it's all pegged together with wooden nails, (tree nails), (trenagle - Norwegian), (trenail or trenel - Shetland dialect).

Anyway, back to what I started to post about. Tafjord.
Sea access to Tafjord is from south of Ålesund, through Storfjorden, and Norddalsfjorden. Road access is from Sylte, which is on the tourist route between Geiranger and the Troll Road.
The village is not easy to get a picture of, although that's on the phot schedule for this year, but here's a shot looking up the river from the head of the fjord.

Tafjord has a rather sad place in history. In 1934 a landslide from one of the mountains created a Tsunami in the fjord which wiped out most of the houses along the shoreline and killed 47 people.
Currently in this area of Norway there are several places where the same thing could happen again, but thanks to careful monitoring of unstable chunks of rock, hopefully there will be a bit of warning.

Above Tafjord  is a Hydro Electric dam, Zakariasdammen (Zacharias Dam).

It's one of these dams which is just like a miniature version of the Hoover Dam, in as much as it is built naturally to fit into a gorge. Sadly the walkway over the dam was closed for maintenance so we got no pics from the top of the dam itself. That's another project for this year, but here's a view from below it.

Access to the dam, was perhaps the funniest part of the journey. Just imagine me with 2 women in the car, one of them being Trøttlin Trowie. Then imagine very small, narrow, twisting tunnels... Yup,,,pure fun. :)

On the way back, below the dam, is a beautiful lake called Onilsavatnet. Nothing special about mountain lakes here, until you look at the mountain on the other side of the lake.

It's a big, ugly, lump of rock. But near the left hand side there is a mark on the rock face which looks like an angry eye. Hence when I saved the above image, as a Star Wars fan, I named it 'Jabba The Hutt'.

As I said, this is a must visit destination for us during the holidays, so look out for a more detailed post. There are many interesting thing to explore in the area, such as an outdoor swimming pool heated by water from the power station, and a hydro electric museum. Maybe take the fishing tackle and try our luck in that lake as well.

Yun's aa fir enoo.