Island-hopping in the Oslofjord

You might remember that I already took the ferry - the one line that's currently running - for a round-trip in the Oslofjord this month. However, you might also remember that it was the coldest week of my time in Oslo, and we did not get off the ferry. (Yes, there might have been a bit of a causal relationship.)

So, today, we used the good weather, i.e. around 0° Celsius and no snow storm or anything the like, for a small excursion in the Oslofjord. Since I didn't include a map in the ferry-cruising post, I'm gonna make up for that now:

I even added the names of the islands which are so tiny that Google Maps refuses to show their names. :P

I already mentioned it in the last ferry post, but the route of the B1 ferry line looks like this:
Aker Brygge > Hovedøya > Bleikøya > Gressholmen > Lindøya øst > Lindøya vest > Nak(k)holmen (both spellings are fine) > Hovedøya > Aker Brygge

Fun fact: the name of the B1 ferry line is "Øyene", which literally and accurately means: "the islands"!

Hi seagull! :D

So we got on the ferry just to get off again at the first possible instance: Hovedøya!

Hovedøya

We felt Hovedøya was one of the bigger islands in the Oslofjord; however, when I googled it for this article, I found out its total area is just 0.4 square kilometres. There might be a reason why some of the islands in the Oslofjord end with "holmen", which is Norwegian for "the small island".

The reason for going to the islands in the first place was that somebody had seen a fox there. (One of my fellow students had even gotten close enough to take a photo of/with it.) Well, we saw traces on several occasions - although I definitely suck too much in biology to tell with  certainty they were fox traces...

The other pieces of evidence, however, were more concrete. Like this sign...

... or the mentioning of the fox in the Wikipedia article about Hovedøya. :P

Anyway, although we spent an hour on the island (the ferry only leaves once an hour, remember?), we didn't see anything fox-like. But still, the island is definitely worth a visit not only in spring/summer, but also in winter.

"bathing beach" - a bit of a hint to return in summer?

A hint that people are barbecuing too much in summer? :D

The ruins of Hovedøya Abbey, a Cistercian monastery.

After an hour, we got on the ferry (as in: the very same ferry, including the very same staff) again and made our way to our next destination: Lindøya!

Lindøya

From the map of the Oslofjord as well as the fact that the ferry stops there twice (øst and vest), we concluded that Lindøya was big enough to spend an hour there. Which turned out to be a bit too true...

Anyway, so we skipped two islands in between and got off at Lindøya øst. Lindøya is one of the islands that basically consists of cabins. If I got it right, kind of all Norwegians have a weekend/vacation cabin somewhere in the nature of Norway. ESN once tried to explain the Norwegians' obsession with cabins to us by means of this video:

So I assume all the wealthy Oslo people have a cabin somewhere in the Oslofjord:

I mean, I can totally understand why you would want a cabin on Lindøya. It's really nice there.

There was just problem: on the way back to the ferry, we got lost a bit. But seriously, if you're standing amidst dozens of colourful cabins, basically everything looks the same! That's why we just missed the ferry (it also left one or two minutes early, I dare say!) and therefore got to spend two hours on Lindøya in total...

One of the highlights of the day, as you might imagine, was the next ferry approaching the island an hour later:

Survival!

Fun fact: it was the same ferry again. I think it just makes the Øyene round trip all day long at this time of the year. The ferry personnel probably knew us by that time...

After this adventure, we didn't get off at any other islands (the others didn't seem too big, and we were kind of frozen, too), but just finished the round trip and returned to civilization. :D