Europe @ 2.4 km/h (7 page)

NORWAY and NORRLAND (CENTRAL SWEDEN)

Time spent: 19 days

Distance covered: 5063 km

Distance pushed: 53.1 km

Average speed: 2.118 km/h

Journey distance to date: 8165 km

On 6 June 793 the Vikings achieved their first military conquest outside the historical Norse homeland, putting to the torch Lindisfarne monastery, in what is now northern England. Like the Arabs’ a century and a half previously, this feat of arms was a landmark event that would change the world.
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Yet, unlike the Muslim expansion which reached as far as Andalusia in southern Spain, the Viking victory has faded from Western memory.

I have been wondering ever since reading of their conquest whether this date is even remembered by the Vikings’ descendants, the Norwegians of today who seem to direct all their sublimated aggression at whales.

Since I shall actually be in the country on 6 June, the 1214th anniversary of that ravaging success, it will be intriguing to see whether the citizens of this prosperous Nordic nation know their own history. Before reading up on the Vikings I believed they’d had scant influence on the development of European societies. The standard historical view is that Europe was built by generations standing on the shoulders of ancient Greece and Rome. The idea that the nation-builders came from the very north of the Continent — indeed the great seahorse-shaped peninsula shared today by Norway and Sweden — was new to me, and I resisted it at first as faddish and improbable. Had you asked me then what we owe to the Scandinavians, I would probably have replied, ‘The names of about half our days of the week, and that’s about it’.

But the more attention I paid to the countries along the path of my descent through the Continent, the wider my eyes grew: the Norman coast of France was so called because the Normans are the Northmen,
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and the city of San Sebastian in the Basque Country was founded by Norsemen early in the ninth century. Eric the Red was a Viking famous for exploring Greenland and settling the best farmland there (not a great amount of choice, one suspects). It is now established fact that his son, Leif Ericsson, landed on the coast of North America.

Eric was very modest, I think, not to christen Greenland Redland. And, in one of history’s great what-ifs, had he and not Sonny Ericsson kept going west it might have been the old man who ended up being remembered as the Viking who named America (as in I Am Eric, aaaargh!).

It is not as though there was any shortage of land to explore back home. Of all twelve countries I will pass through on this voyage, there is none in which I will do more travelling than Norway. By train, bus and boat I will go more than 4600 km, or 277 km a day, nearly three times the overall average. It is worth spending a few moments to examine why.

A map-gazer might imagine Norway to be bigger than it really is (one-and-a-third Victorias). Here it’s not size that matters so much as extent: those long hours between rest stops are due to the Arctic region’s remoteness from major population centres — it is nearly as far from north to south as from Melbourne to Brisbane — combined with the profusion of fjords necessitating long roundabout routes rather than direct ones.

It’s high time someone came to the defence of those of us who refuse to travel light, who are constantly being urged to go further and do more with less. A pox on the minimalists, I say. My luggage on this odyssey consists of one sportsbag, one suitcase and a large hessian bag full of clothes. Adding my backpack and its contents, that makes about 50 kg of accoutrements.

Some of this bulk is unavoidable. A certain amount of urological gear I must take with me. Some is an indulgence. A dozen books for the road fall into this category. And some of it is there for no better reason than that I am notoriously sloppy when it comes to packing. But, it occurs to me, there is one powerful argument for travelling heavy. If a robber has designs on your belongings, keeping them in a 20 kg bag acts as a powerful deterrent. He can’t just lift it and run off.

But how do I cross a continent with so much to weigh me down? The secret is that it’s never more than 200 metres between hotel and bus, or railway station locker and platform. That’s the theory, anyway. For the most part it works well enough — and when it doesn’t I put the sportsbag and suitcase in a locker, if one is available, and carry the rest on my lap. From where I sit, those who pack as little in the way of portable goods for two years abroad as they would for a weekend in the countryside are suffering the severest disability of them all — a lack of imagination. When all is said and done, you only pass this way once. Thus endeth my homily on the unbearable lightness of luggage.

137 km

Just after 10 am (having reset my watch two hours earlier than Moscow time) I arrive in Kirkenes — a neat ‘frontier town’ even if it is 45 km from the border — just in time to hear that the thrice-weekly ‘boat’ is about to leave for Mehamn.

North Cape is often touted as the northernmost point of Europe. But look closely and you’ll see it’s on an island. If you’re going to call the tip of an island the north of Europe, the honour should really go to some windswept cape in Franz Josef Land or Spitsbergen. Avoid the tourist hordes with their vain boasts. A quick map consultation reveals your destination as a far lonelier road, a promontory 100 km to the east of North Cape’s island. This balloon-shaped land called North Half Island (Nordkyn) is ‘tied’ to the rest of Europe by the narrowest of isthmuses — just 100 metres across — known as Hopseidet. Here, and nowhere else, you will find True North.

And the town of Mehamn, curled around a fjord at 71° 1' N, is only a few minutes of latitude south of North Cape. Sheer luck has given me half an hour to get to the dock after making a hasty booking with a Mehamn hotel.

‘How can I be sure you’re coming?’ the hotelier asks. ‘Because if you don’t hear back from me I’m on the boat,’ I reply.

The receptionist at the Kirkenes hotel where the bus from Russia dropped me has made her Internet service available, and the town’s website confirms that I am not the only person to have seen through the fraudulence of North Cape’s pretensions. ‘Kinnarodden, northernmost point of European mainland, 71° 8' 2",’ it proclaims, with reiteration, for good measure, in Norwegian,
europas nordligste
fastland spunkt
.’ And right near that point — on the road north of Europe’s northernmost town — awaits its northernmost village, Gamvik. That magic box is really rattling now.

138 km

Arrive at the dock after a 1 km taxi ride that cost the equivalent of A$16 (welcome to the world’s most expensive economy). There, towering above me, is no mere ‘boat’ but a towering Hurtigruten coastal steamer, the 16,000 tonne
Trollfjord
. Once on board, sinking into a button-backed leather armchair to starboard, I turn my head to the left for a view of black-and-white sailing photos from a more graceful age, then to the right for a sight of the fjord-cut fringe of land that constitutes the ‘brow of the seahorse’.

The sun’s lamp on low spreads subdued rays over the gentle swell of the Arctic Ocean, and I’m left alone to ponder the contrast between this morning’s rough-and-ready Russian bus ride and this afternoon’s life of ease aboard one of the world’s most luxurious cruise ships.

On the wall of
Trollfjord
‘s disabled toilet is an emergency phone. One of the buttons is marked ‘Wake-up call’. As the Americans say, go figure.

About 3 pm we cross 70° N on the placid surface of Varangerfjord.

At 10 pm — I would say ‘late at night’ but this eternity of daylight empties the phrase of its normal sense — we indulge in a bizarre and, frankly, childish ritual of waving towels in the direction of the passengers aboard the
Kong Harald
, another Hurtigruten steamer, who are waving towels at us as it proceeds on its ‘north-east passage’. Per the barman dispenses a free hot toddy which saves me a small fortune and which I down to the strains of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5 being performed by the ship’s piano accordionist.

The purser tells me with great amusement that he has had Japanese passengers come up to him in broad daylight — around 1 am — to complain they were misled. ‘But where is the
midnight
sun?’ they challenge him, apparently convinced this rare article is an additional orb visible only on cruises to the Arctic. Glorious as this one sun is, I can see they’ll be wanting their money back.

Back in Australia, as I envisaged that singularly tireless athlete the sun remaining above the horizon almost round the clock, I hadn’t been able to get to grips with how it would set in the west (I assumed it did that even up here) and rise again in the east. Would it nip under the horizon and dart back to its starting blocks? No, I now see, its trajectory describes an ellipse so that it sets south-west — and rises south-east — or, now we are in the period it doesn’t really set at all but rather skims along the horizon, it keeps circling the horizontal track, running victory laps around it all summer long.

140 km

Mehamn announces itself to the nose before the eyes. Ever after, you will associate it with two smells: fresh wood and rotting fish. In this, one of Europe’s most remote corners, it was a clash between the big fish and the little fish that — according to the municipal website — brought 1200 troops racing north to restore order, the only time in the history of ‘peaceful Norway’ when this had been necessary.

On 2 June 1909 — almost 98 years ago to the day — ‘non-local fishermen tore down the whaling factory which had been built by whaler and inventor Sven Foyn and which they blamed for the loss of their fishing income’. So there you have it: mayhem in Mehamn and an anti-whaling protest that Greenpeace would have been proud of. Note that the damage was done by ‘non-local fishermen’, it’s always the out-of-towners to blame. Foyn, in fact, would have earned a prize place on any Greenpeace list of hate figures, having invented the harpoon.

142-145 km

On my second ‘night’ in Mehamn I learn that there is a youth hostel here. Norway doesn’t really have what would be deemed budget accommodation elsewhere, but this place comes close. Except that anything less like a hostel it would be hard to visualise. Picture, rather, a cottage with a balcony jutting over the bank of a fjord. And there, a few hours later, I experience my second epiphany. It is 12.30 am, the sun has disappeared — wait, that isn’t supposed to happen at this time of year. What’s going on? I roll down the ramp and peer over to where the sun was last seen. And there, as the opening drumbeats of a rain shower hit the roof tiles, the sun has been replaced by a rainbow — or rather the golden shaft of one, bending like a bamboo shoot from heaven, and bathing in a phosphorescent glow the fish-salting-and-drying factory that now stands where the workers’ forebears attacked that whaling factory almost a century ago.

146 km

Oot Bjorn, 37, Europe’s northernmost postmaster, sorts through 20 kg of envelopes and small packets a day. Oot, who has seen a bit of the wider world, says, ‘I have tried to live in the city. I went to southern Sweden, to a place called Falkenberg, to Drummen — a town near Oslo — and then to Tromso for three months. But I got homesick. The grass was not greener on the other side.’ It would be callous to mention that in Mehamn there is no grass to speak of, regardless of colour.

What’s so great about life on North Half Island? ‘We have much more freedom out here. We have Nature, we have the hunting.’ And then — how could you have a conversation in Norway without mentioning fish? — ‘There are 800 fishing waters on North Half Island alone.’ He seems happy for all this true northerliness to be kept under wraps, saying, ‘We want more tourists but I don’t want us to be like North Cape’.

True North lies over the hills — ripe with strawberries for just a few days in August — in the village of Gamvik. The headland is pitted with German bunkers. This was a strategic coast for monitoring Allied ships bound for Archangelsk, and it remains strategic today: Nato has laid undersea cables to monitor the movement of Russian submarines. I found that Russians insisted they were a race apart from the Europeans, and now I find the Norwegians — who keep themselves apart from the European Union — are also keen to keep their eastern neighbour at a distance.

At noon on the last day of May, I sit above the wild Arctic surf that beats upon Europe’s (and almost certainly the world’s) northernmost lighthouse, still tended by its keeper, Ms Rita Bastholm, although these days no one lives inside the obelisk. My mind absorbs the elements’ immensity, and the fact that here at 71° 5' 33" N I have reached that part of populated Europe closest to the North Pole (about 2000 nautical miles over yonder as the gull flies).

147 km

Harald Hansen is the principal of Europe’s most northerly school. Most of its 21 students have just returned from Poland, which included a visit to Oswiecim, more infamous as Auschwitz. Athina, fifteen years young, was saddened by the barbarous treatment of the Jews there but added ‘at the same time I couldn’t understand it’. Out of the mouths of babes. And then she said the most surprising thing, ‘It could also happen in Norway’. Could such affluent people be barbarous too? I was about to find out.

At Gamvik School I posed my question about AD 793. One student asked whether it marked the introduction of Christianity. A history teacher was the only person I would find in this vast country who guessed the date’s significance, saying, ‘Was it something to do with a military victory?’