THERE’S NOWHERE LIKE NORWAY
If you really want to up the adventure stakes, you need to turn left from Calais, and head north into Scandinavia, a land of Vikings, fjords and trolls. It’s well worth the two-day ride from Calais up through Denmark to grab a ferry from Hirtshals to Kristiansand in southern Norway. Once you’re there, you’re immediately into some of the most incredible riding landscapes on Earth – and thousands of miles of dirt roads that are navigable on dual-purpose rubber even on the biggest adventure bikes. And the further you go northward up the coast, the better it gets. The E6 is probably the most astonishing road in Europe. There’s nothing to measure it against. The Alps are a mere garden rockery compared to the mind-bending scale of the fjords and, for the most part, Norwegian roads make Spanish tarmac look like a go-kart track. Even the weather can be good. Last time we headed from Oslo to Nordkapp we were baked by 23°C heat for days on end though mid-July.
Head north of Trondheim on the coast and as soon as the E6 shrinks to a single carriageway and starts to climb, you’ll be twisting and turning through mountains and pine forests, past rock-faces, rushing rivers and waterfalls, epic bridges and hopping on Ferries to cross to the next peninsula – and it’s like this for 2000 more miles – all the way to Nordkapp.