I thought I’d do something new again this year for my autumn hike. (I’ve gone to Jämtland several times, and hiked the Kinnekulle trail last year.) The coastal trail in Bohuslän (Kuststigen) is supposed to be nice, so I’m trying out the first few stages of it.

Day 1: through Uddevalla to the start of stage 1, then stage 1 and most of stage 2. 15.5 km.

The first bit was pure transportation, getting from my hotel to roughly the starting point of the trail. Though I cheated a little bit and skipped a few hundred metres of asphalted road through an industrial/commercial zone, and cut straight to the point where the trail meets the Bäveån river.

Through Uddevalla the coastal trail wasn’t marked at all as far as I could see, because it overlapped with a “riverside walk”. I’m sure there was actual information about this somewhere, but I was left to just deduce it from the lack of other signs.

I was expecting a riverside walk to be sedate and civilized, but in places it took me up and down quite steep, rocky slopes and was overall more demanding than I had expected. It took me a while to see that at some point the path had split into two, and I had ended up on the one marked “difficult” in tiny, white letters. The people marking this trail sure expect their visitors to read the small print carefully! Still I rather enjoyed these sections and later chose the difficult option intentionally.

The path followed the river all the way from one side of Uddevalla to the other – past waterfalls, through the city centre, and then through a harbour. Along the way I read interesting information plaques, as the tourist I was, about how the river was used to power sawmills and power plants, about the funeral procession of Karl XII passing through Uddevalla, and about the fire that devastated the city in 1806.

Towards the edge of the city, I could see the industrial harbour on the other side of the river, and far off in the distance the Uddevalla bridge.

The path was getting a bit scruffy at this point and I expected it to peter out into a muddy gravel path at any moment. And then all of a sudden, just as I got out of the city for real, it turned into a beautiful boardwalk that hugged the rocky coast and had perfect views in all directions.


I kept following the coast all day. Sometimes the view opened up forward, towards the west and the Uddevalla bridge again. Other times the coast curved back and I had views back toward the harbour again. I passed through the old seaside resort at Gustafsberg, which was rather picturesque, but also newly built suburbia, which was rather less so.

I made camp in a small patch of woods just before the bridge that I had been walking towards all day. It felt appropriate and symbolic, somehow. It also seemed to be the last bit of free ground, according to my maps, before the trail would take me back into more inhabited areas.