Svolvær; Wednesday, 06 May, 2026

I had a nice long sleep, possibly helped by the more than 25,000 steps I’d done the previous day and woke up refreshed and ready to go. I headed down to breakfast and filled up there knowing that lunch was probably not going to be an option with the timing of my journey.

After checking out of the hotel I headed over to the bus stop in the centre of town to pick up the 300 (again) this time on it’s final leg of the journey from Svolvær to Narvik.

For this leg there are only two buses a day – the one I was going for at 09:40 and the one that I’d come in to Svolvær on from Å, which wouldn’t get to Narvik until nearly 8pm so I’d gone for the morning bus.

I don’t know if it was standard, or just something that was happening today, but there appeared to be some confusion when a not in service bus pulled up onto stand a couple of minutes before out bus was due and the driver hopped out announcing Narvik.

It turned out that they were doing a bus swap in Svolvær, so I was able to be on the bus and having grabbed a good seat before the people who had boarded the bus somewhere between Å, Leknes and Svolvær finally arrived and had to swap vehicles, remembering to collect their luggage from the hold.

The whole swap over took a few minutes so we ended up departing about 5 minutes late, but as I’d discovered many times before the buses round here have quite relaxed timetables, and within 45 minutes we were back on time.

The first major sight of the day was the Raftsundetbro, or Raftsundet Bridge, which crossed the Raftsund. This is a major picture stop on the Hurtigruten boat route as the ship makes a tight 90 degree turn into the narrow channel, and from the bridge above it was difficult to see how even a small cruise ship fits through the space.

It also marked a key point in the journey as the bridge marks the boundary between the Lofoten islands to the south and west of it from the Vesterålen Islands to the North and East of the sound, meaning after travelling just over 180Km from Å I was now at the end of my time on the Lofotens.

The next leg of the journey ended up taking quite a lot longer than it should have done as there are lots of roadworks taking place. At the moment the E10 road winds its way around the coast, down inlets and back up the other side, but it was clear that major works are underway to build a much more direct route via tunnels and bridges straight through the centre of Hinnøya island that we were travelling round. However, until that work is complete there are regular roadworks as the junctions onto and off of the new road are constructed, so by the time we reached the final part of the journey across the islands we were running over 15 minutes late as we approached and crossed the stunning Tjeldsundbrua, spanning the gap between the Vesterålen Islands and the Norwegian mainland.