I woke up at ten that morning with my head inside the sleeping bag. I don't think I've ever awoken that early without the assistance of a rather noisy alarm clock before in my life. I'd been briefly awake a few times earlier, but now the sun had come out from behind the mountain and was making the inside of my sleeping-bag feel like a toaster. My back hurt from sleeping on the hard ground with nothing but a woollen blanket between my but and the rock, but aside from that I was fine. I had no headache. I didn't seem to have too many bug-bites. And all in all I felt pretty good.
It seems to me that however slightly I move in the mornings I always manage to wake Sunni. Luckily she is--unlike me--not the kind of person who dislikes being awoken and holds grudges for the rest of the day.
Rather foolishly we decided to go for an early morning swim. One word: Cold!!!
It was almost as cold as it had been the previous night, and we rather quickly realised our error and got up. The only food we had left were some hermetic corncobs, a couple of cheese-sandwiches and all the marshmallows we hadn't been able force ourselves to eat the night before.
Getting the fire burning again seemed nearly impossible; I thought we'd have to eat the corncobs raw, and I really have a problem with uncooked food. And I was once again on the verge of taking up mammoth-hunting when at last we managed to light the last of the toilet-paper. Now, eating marshmallows might not be the recommended way to start your day, but we were hungry and the corncobs just wouldn't be heated.
After breakfast if you'd call it breakfast we returned to the top of the dam where we'd left the sleeping-bags. And I made the merry decision to try to do a bit of reading whilst trying to tan my back. This would prove to be a very bad idea. Now; to my defence I'd like to say that I'm a night-person and me being awake before noon is a novelty in itself, and me being out of doors at such a time of day might never before have happened before. It should also be said that this is Norway, and Norway is very far to the north, and in the north the sun moves in mysterious way. And I want you to realise how the sun shines a hell of a lot brighter at noon than it does at two p.m., and how I had never thought of this before because I'd never been awake at that time of day before. I'd also like you to sympathise with the fact that I couldn't find my sunscreen right then. All this in combination with the cool wind coming in from the sea creating the illusion that it was a lot colder than it really was did rather make things a great deal more complicated than they ought to be.
We'd been spending days in the sun, and I'd pretty much reached the conclusion that I was immune to sunburn. However; lying on my stomach reading The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide for several hours, I learned that I was wrong. Very wrong.
Yes, I know; hahaha, very funny.
It wasn't until late afternoon that we both realised that we'd made some horrible miscalculations.
The rest of the night we both spent whining about who had the worst sunburn over a pizza that we had accidentally burned almost as badly as our backs.
Introduction