The wildly beautiful drive was nearly done. Traffic and noise and roadside buildings gathered on the final approach to Bodø. But one more surprise lay in wait: Saltstraumen, the largest tidal maelstrom on the planet. Looking for all the world like a horizontal waterfall, the 3km-long, 150m-wide Saltstraumen Strait churns with 400 million cubic metres of water every six hours. At its strongest, it resembles a series of giant whirlpools that threatens to suck everything down into unseen depths below the surface of the Earth. This being Norway, there is a bridge over it, and looking down on the surging waters from above, it was hard not to feel a sense of vertigo.
