Oslo Drains
August 2011
Oslo wasn’t cold in August, but it sure as hell was expensive. Our bus tickets from Rygge Airport to Oslo cost almost as much as our flights, and groceries we’d normally pay £20 for cost us over £40. Tired from a night of running T-Bane, we decided that to sleep, we’d be best off in the park, so we climbed a rocky hill and bedded down on our airbeds having built a fire.
Hiring a car would see us gifted greater opportunities to get out of town to culverts and derps, but by the time we awoke and got over to the east of the town, the Avis office was closed. We ended up going to the supermarket and buying lime cider, before returning to the ‘busstasjon’ to chill out and eat £6 hotdogs. We scoped out the cranes at Fjordcity, confident that returning in the dark would see a great opportunity to climb them. We tried to get on top of the 38 floor Radisson building, but a locked door at the top thwarted us.
We trudged back to the park, where a culvert tipped out next to some big twirly water slide. We’d noticed the infall while walking between Volvat and Valkyrie Plass the previous night, and found the outfall in the dark. Without wellies, we had to return later.
Gary ‘doesn’t do’ culverts, drains or sewers, so he sat on the bank while John and I made our way up the pretty fast flowing pipe. Siologen and Curly had both reported it as flowing with a 4ft flow when they’d each been there, but for us it was no worse than knee high. The concrete soon made way to a blasted tunnel, which made it feel like I was walking through a cave. A CSO joined at one point.
John stopped when the water threatened to breach, but I pushed on up to the grilled infall alone. There wasn’t a great deal else to see other than the stunning rock blasted tunnels, so I returned. We named this Blå gli slipp after the blue slide that it tips out by. (Google Translate helped here!)
