Europe @ 2.4 km/h (8 page)

At Gamvik Museum I find a condensed history of life on Nordkyn down the centuries. The pioneering Christians here thought this was
ultima Thule
, the End of the World. Their arrival was certainly the end of the world the inhabitants of this region, now called Finnmark, had known.

In 1621 Lisbet Nilesdatter was found guilty of drowning Abraham Nilsen. Nilesdatter hadn’t laid a hand on Abraham but she had cast a spell on him. The witch hunt was on. As the information board has it, ‘In brutality and intensity the witch hunt in Finnmark can only be compared to ones in Germany and Scotland. Between 100 and 150 were convicted of sorcery from 1620-1665’.

Lisbet’s punishment? To be thrown into the sea, seen as God’s holy christening water which would reject the sinful because — as everyone knows — witches don’t sink. Thirty witches were thrown in and all floated. But because they were witches they were dragged off to be burned. Suspects who drowned were innocent. Crime, one gathers, wasn’t a huge problem in 17th-century Finnmark. In the 21st, of course, the innocent still die, but now we have school trips to Poland, and students such as Athina smart enough to make the connection.

His flowing white beard reminiscent of the Gamvik surf, writer Marius Hage, 57, does a passable imitation of the Old Man of the Sea.

‘Why isn’t Norway in the European Union?’ I ask him.

‘Because,’ he replies without hesitation, ‘as you will see travelling through the country, living standards are so high here that if it joined it would be doing Europe a favour rather than the other way round. The people have spoken twice’ — in referendums, the first of them in 1972 — ‘and any political party that was pro-Europe would not want to jeopardise its support by raising this matter again.’

Pro-Europe? I think, How can anyone be anti-Europe? Russians have their soul, Norwegians their salmon. At this rate, I wonder, am I going to find that every European has his or her own reason for not ‘joining’ Europe?

Norwegians, said to have the highest living standard in the world, would appear to be first in the queue for Valhalla. So what have they to worry about? Another Marius — Marius Nilsen, owner of the general store, part-time air traffic controller and candidate for mayor — had to think about this for a few seconds. Mobility is a recent development in a place as remote as this. ‘Thirty years ago there would have been no one from here who had been as far as Tromsø,’ he tells me. Now that they can leave, many — especially the young — don’t come back.

As this is the Continent’s furthest outpost of democracy, I ask Marius, 43 — who is running against an entrenched ‘conservative’ — to let me know how his campaign fares. What are the issues, apart from emigration?

Immigration. Marius says the incumbent is proposing to ship in hundreds of Russians from across the border, for a sinister purpose. ‘He’ll sign them up to vote for him.’ Poles can get €2 an hour picking strawberries, he tells me; in Norway they earn six times that. ‘Norwegians didn’t want to pick the strawberries here — it’s only a few days a year, this work — so they imported strawberry pickers from Poland and Pakistan. Now they are bringing in Chinese.’

Mehamn is the seat of the local council but Gamvik municipality, which lays claim to being Europe’s northernmost local government, embraces it and the more northerly Gamvik community. Therefore, Marius will be the Mayor of True North if he wins September’s poll. His face lights up at the prospect.

After discussing local politics, we talk Australian. ‘Kevin’ is a Norwegian name so Marius, a Labour man, takes it as a promising sign that Australians may soon elect their first Norwegian prime minister. Ah yes, the fair hair! Marius breaks off our interview to guide a De Havilland in to land on the airstrip — ‘one of 28 short runways in Norway’, he informs me — opposite the fish factory.

152-153 km

Today is dreamlike. All day I ride a bus across the gabled roof of Norway, as the most stunning scenery revolves before my gaze. Mountains, streaked with late snow that will be gone by this time next month, rise majestically from the sea. Apart from a few fellow passengers and the occasional weekender on their cottage patio, I am alone beholding the beauty of the world. Make that almost alone: reindeer, solo or in herds, are pronking their way
⁵
right across Finnmark.

I arrive in the world’s northernmost city (Tromsø, 69º 40' N, 19º E) at the exact instant of my 53rd birthday, discounting time zone differences. Of course it feels great to be 23 — as it has done for the past 30 years — so by all means disregard the numerical slip in the previous sentence.

154 km

Hours later I toast the anniversary by raising a glass of akvavit to the one and only midnight sun — and tossing it down my gullet in the approved manner. Replicating the gesture is Odd Magne Johansen, a Norwegian journalist I met over breakfast at the Hotel Dvina in Archangelsk and who there and then invited me to stay at his ‘pad’ overlooking the fjord in Tromsø. I’m grateful for the company — drinking alone sounds far too Nordic for my liking — but also for the accommodation because, as it turns out, even Tromsø’s ‘cheaper’ hotels are full, booked out, they each claim, by members of the entourage (his own and the media’s) surrounding South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu, here to deliver a sermon at the Arctic Church on World Environment Day.

Worrying news from home, when I phone later on my birthday. Mum says that Dad, in his 88th year, was diagnosed with a weakened heart last week — an aortic aneurysm, to be precise — and surgeons had inserted a stent in the bloated artery. When I was nine or ten I recall asking our family doctor all about ‘aortic aneurysm’, an ailment I had just read of in a Sherlock Holmes story.

156 km

In the daily newspaper here I read that Frode Heggelund, eighteen, is the star of a new film,
A Normal Day in a Wheelchair
, directed by his sixteen-year-old brother, Andre, and now on general release. But the cinema in which it is being premiered — one of the oldest in Norway — has no wheelchair access. Ouch.

157 km

Memo. Don’t try to ‘do’ this country on a shoestring: a pair of them cost A$8. At a bar near the Tromsø docks I order a Mack beer for Odd and one for myself. The glasses are 33 cl each: these are not Bavarian jugs. Suddenly I develop a hearing difficulty when the barman says that will be 164 kroner. Quick mental calculation tells me that’s €11 (A$18) apiece, $36 the pair. At this price I should have confined myself to the Odd one. What’s worse, the Mack brewery is just 200 metres up the road. In all probability I could have cadged a free sample merely by dropping in.

159-161 km

From Tromsø I strike out for the Lofoten Islands. I’m in for 24 hours of what has been billed as one of the world’s most memorable voyages — and, for once, the advertising doesn’t lie.

The Hurtigruten steamer
Finnmark
is the last word in luxury — one of the latest additions to the fleet. Steaming through lozenge-shaped Trollfjord — a waterway 3 km long but only 100 metres wide — the theme from
Titanic
seems an inappropriate choice of music. But the well-heeled cruiseniks seated for’ard, sipping their gin-and-tonics as they gawp down at snow-sprinkled green banks and then up at the cliffs 1000 metres overhead, seem not to mind. They must be comforted by the thought that in a postmodern summer there are no icebergs at 68º N — so far as anyone yet knows.

What a strange language English can be when used by non-native speakers. When I point out to Andre, the duty receptionist, that there is no link between the computer system that recognises you’re back on board as you ‘swipe’ a shore pass in one section of the ship and the computer system in the purser’s office, he tries to voice reassurance by telling me, ‘Don’t worry, we won’t miss you’. Then, realising at once what he has said, he blushes. ‘What I mean to say is, “We won’t leave you behind.”’

Ship’s officers Ivar and Mareno regale me with memories from voyages past. At the restaurant’s second and final sitting one night, a crew member said to one of the diners, ‘I hope you will enjoy your last meal’.

The crew have been known to extract innocent amusement from guileless guests. Mareno says, ‘One time we saw a supply ship spouting ballast water into the sea and one passenger — an American — asked, “What’s that ship doing?” So my colleague told her. “They are refilling the ocean.”’

Later in the ‘evening’ I am called up to the bridge where Captain Sten Magne Engen — resplendent in his navy blue uniform with enough gold braid piping to have Ivan Baranov seething with envy — is ready to talk about his life spent sailing up and down the Norwegian coast. Remarking that many of those on board are past middle age, and all of them well behaved, I ask whether he has ever had to discipline unruly passengers. The multilingual Capt.

Engen, whose most cherished maritime memories include service as first mate on ships that called at Australian ports from Kwinana to Newcastle, admits the occasional buck’s party gets out of hand.

‘We have a cell downstairs — a brig, as we say — and the deckhands can be quite useful.’ When I inquire whether Capt. Engen has ever played host to any famous shipboard guests, he mentions the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, who went round ‘blessing the water, blessing the ship and blessing the passengers. I was wet all over’.