Before hiking, we made a quick stop at a souvenir shop to buy patches for our overalls—small reminders of our journey. That’s when Thijs and I drifted into a conversation about souvenirs from our own countries.
From the Dutch side, Thijs mentioned classics like wooden clogs, stroopwafels, and Delft blue ceramics, things that everyone seems to bring home from the Netherlands. From my side, coming from the Nice region, I told him about lavender sachets, olive-wood kitchenware, and the bright, lemon-yellow products from Menton. We laughed about how Dutch souvenirs are often cute and quirky, while souvenirs from the Côte d’Azur usually smell like sunshine and herbs. But both of us agreed that our cultures love small things that carry stories, whether sweet syrup waffles or little bags of lavender.
With new patches in our bags and new vocabulary in our heads, Thijs learned the French word cigalons (the little ceramic cicadas you hang on walls), and I learned the Dutch word gezellig, we headed up to Grotlesanden.
The hike took about three hours and gave us a completely different landscape from the fjords and mountains of the previous days. The mountain rose steeply straight out of the turquoise sea, something neither of us had ever seen in the Netherlands or in the south of France. We both struggled with how steep it was (flat Holland and Mediterranean hills had not prepared us for this), but the view from the top was more than worth the effort. The water below looked almost tropical, glowing in shades of blue and green.
After a long break at the summit, we descended again and made our way back to the beach, ready for a swim. As a joke, we realized that the Norwegian Sea was basically connecting our two worlds: the cold, wide, sandy beaches of the Netherlands on one side and the turquoise, postcard-perfect waters of the Côte d’Azur on the other. And honestly, the beach did look like a mix of both—almost Dutch white sand, almost French blue water… just significantly colder.
We jumped in anyway. It was freezing, definitely “wake-you-up-and-steal-your-breath” cold—but totally worth it and very funny. We ran straight to the car afterward to warm up again.
It ended up being one of the absolute highlights of our trip: a day full of adventure, laughter, cultural discoveries, and a surprising number of new words learned along the way. Unfortunately, we had to drive back to Bergen that very evening to catch our flights home. But as we left the coast behind us, we already knew we had created a memory that would stay with us for a very long time.
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