Category Archives: norway

Svalbard 2015: Dogsledding

After I wrote yesterday’s blog, I ate lots of bread and cheese because it had been a long day with very little food (breakfast at 6.30am and then nothing until I arrived in Longyearbyen at nearly 3pm) and when I was all full, I knew I really had to go back out into the cold and have a look at the town (the city? The village).

I know from photos and Google maps and the like that it’s a small town situated in quite a narrow valley between the mountains. I can see the mountains – white snow glows even in the dark. I assume either it’s reflecting the light pollution from Longyearbyen (it generates a surprising amount of light pollution for such a small place but as it spends nearly four months in total darkness, of course it should be allowed as many lights as it wants) – either that or astronomical twilight is slightly lighter than I thought.

No, it isn’t as dark as I expected. Well, it is but – it’s hard to explain. You can’t deny the great black sky overhead and yet it’s lighter than I anticipated. Town lighting, reflective snow, the fact that you could probably see a hint of pink or orange or baby blue in the sky at noon if it wasn’t cloudy, I don’t know. I know it’s not as oppressively, miserably dark as it’s made out to be, not in town.

It appears to be laid out with all the tourist stuff straight down the middle, with a mostly-pedestrianised street. My hotel, evidently the newest in town, is at the top of the “high street”, there are a few pubs and bars, a couple more hotels and an astonishing amount of shops. Perhaps understandably, it has an extremely high ratio of outdoors shops, higher even than Kendal. I suppose people come unprepared. At the moment I feel like I’m ok for warm stuff but I haven’t been out of the shelter of town yet so we’ll see.

I’ve also found the supermarket (it’s not a supermarket! It’s a department store/junk shop/warehouse with a supermarket attached), the post office, the pharmacy and the bookshop. I saw a large white furry animal which turned out to be a largish dog but it seems my reaction to spotting ursus maritimus is to go “… is that a polar bear? It can’t be” rather than “RUN IT’S A POLAR BEAR! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!”

Having more or less reached the end of the high street, I slithered down the hill towards the next set of shops and the “sports centre” which didn’t look so much like a sports centre as a gun shop. There’s something quite American about this place – gun shops, requirements to carry and use rifles, shops declaring they sell ammo and all the other shops with big signs on the doors that say NO GUNS IN HERE. I’ve never been anywhere where I’ve had to worry about whether there are rifles being carried around the supermarket.

That next set of shops is on the vehicle road, more or less parallel to the high street and at this time of year, it’s impossible to tell where the road ends and the pavement starts, so I tend to leap back into the thicker snow when I see a car coming, just to make sure I’m out of its way. And on the subject of how dark or not it is here, I saw one car that hadn’t noticed it didn’t have its lights on. Other cars noticed and enlightened it but that’s what it’s like here. You don’t actually need your lights on to be able to drive around.

I spotted a car park and a path that would lead me back to the high street so I attempted it, slipped on the ice and fell in the most awkward and ridiculous way. I knew it was going to happen but first I had no control whatsoever over mad flailing. Gravity was going to have me in the end but first it was going to play with me for a bit.

When I got back, armed with apple & mango juice, chocolate and a carton of chocolate milk (the windowsill makes a good fridge or if you open the window, a good freezer), I thought I would have a bath. Because it’s there. The trouble is that the light in the bathroom doesn’t have a switch, it has a motion sensor and if you fall asleep in the bath, the light goes out.

The only problem I have so far with the perpetual darkness is not having a clue what the time is. I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced it was morning and discovered it wasn’t yet 3am. The trouble is that 3am doesn’t look any different to real morning. Other than that, I’m still enjoying the novelty of the dark and the teeny-tiny nuances of darkness, like the slight sheen of lighter blue in the sky at noon.

This afternoon was the dogsledding. I’ve never done it before and I really liked the idea of it. We were taken to the lower kennels, about 12km from Longyearbyen, sent into the changing rooms to put on some specially padded boots and a huge overall (so huge because it has to go over your clothes, which are already huge. I was already wearing four layers, the outer two of which are enormous and then this tent-thing over the top) and then we were introduced to the sled, told all about the brake – everything is about the brake – and then we could either stand and wait or we could help Jakob harness the dogs. Guess which option I chose?

The dogs were all very excited, all yapping and howling and playfighting and all desperate to get out and since we were beginners and all a little nervous, he chose the quietest dogs, showed me how to fold the harness (I just couldn’t get the hang of this) and then how to put it over the dog’s head and put its legs through the straps. He supervised dog one, I managed dog two more or less on my own and dog three clearly knew exactly how this worked and lifted her own paws before I even tried to put her legs through the straps.

Gaia had specially requested to ride with the guide, so that left me with Sarah and apparently I was marginally less nervous about driving first than Sarah was. There are two problems with driving first. 1) The dogs are very excited and they go extra-fast at first and 2) there’s a big patch of very rocky ground where the brake won’t do anything. It was terrifying! I knew which bit of the sled I had to hold onto but it was awkward trying to hold it, keep one foot on the sled and the other on the brake and eventually I just wrapped my arms around the entire back of the sled with both feet on the brake. It didn’t make any noticeable difference. Also, you have an anchor and that was on the right side of the sled. But I wanted my left foot on the sled and my right foot on the brake and that meant I couldn’t reach it.

We ran a little and then we paused, after only about thirty seconds for Jakob to distribute headtorches, which he’d forgotten to do before we left. For some reason, we put the anchor down but I couldn’t get it up and stowed before we took off again, so there it was trailing along behind us. Sarah, afraid of getting her hands cut off by the sled, managed to pull it up by the rope and hang it safely on its hook and for a second, we celebrated having weighed anchor while running. But then we hit the rocks.

The sled got caught. The dogs were pulling and pulling and it just wasn’t moving so Sarah hopped off to try and free it. You see where this is going. We didn’t. The second it was free, the dogs took off, leaving her behind and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop them. We rattled and bumped over the rocks, I was nearly jolted off and I was screaming and shrieking like a mad person – the dogs were out of control, the ground was terrible and I’d lost my passenger! Fortunately, Jakob stopped eventually and my dogs knew that meant it was time for them to stop and poor Sarah came trudging along in the snow.

Once we were past the rocks it got better. Not comfortable, exactly, never comfortable. It was never entirely flat and smooth and I was certain I was going to fall off, I was making scared noises and swearing occasionally and Sarah was making terrified noises. At one point we crossed some large footprints – maybe a human in big padded boots like ours, maybe on snowshoes… maybe a bear. But there wasn’t time to think about the possibility of meeting a polar bear, I was too busy hanging on for dear life. Forget steering, there was no steering. No need to steer, our dogs just followed Jakob’s dogs, although I think they would have liked to overtake.

Gradually, as I got used to it, I let the brake out a little. Or at least, I put one foot back on the sled and controlled the brake with the other. It was a bit like driving a car except that there wasn’t necessarily much response from our canine engine if I put the brake down. I don’t say I got any more comfortable with it – it was still stressful and scary and my hat was sliding down over my eyes and for a lot of it, I couldn’t see any further ahead than Sarah’s feet, and my headtorch kept slipping down to illuminate nothing more than the top of Sarah’s head. It would have been nice to see where we were going but it wasn’t really necessary because I wasn’t guiding or controlling the dogs at all.

Finally Gaia begged to turn back. Sarah and I didn’t mind in the least. We’d already been muttering for five or ten minutes “how much further are we going? When are we going back?” and were most relieved, especially when we learnt that Jakob had planned to take us another three miles.

We swapped places. It was a lot more comfortable on the sled but Sarah had had the entire journey to realise that driving was a bit scary and she knew the rocks were coming and was a bit terrified of that – so much so that Jakob offered to call a colleague with a snow scooter to come and drive for us. I think if it had got that far, I’d have taken the wheel again but it didn’t. Sarah got on fine – the swearing came out when we hit the rocks but actually, the rocky patch is much shorter than we’d realised at first. Because the sled sometimes leans when it gets uneven, I leaned in the other direction – it didn’t tell the dogs to turn, it just stopped us overturning (it probably didn’t. We probably weren’t in any danger of that) and then the lights of home were upon us.

I held the lead dogs while Jakob put his dogs away and then we took it in turns to stand on the brake while the others took photos and of course, I also played with the dogs. I put the fiendish lead dog away (we had one beautiful blue-eyed sweetheart and one little fiend who was forever pulling and biting the chain and trying to jump on me) and then we opted to stay out while Jakob put the sleds away and I got to play with Fenris, the hugest fluffiest dog there, who likes to much on arms and things when he’s upright but fortunately rolls over onto his back for tummy rubs the moment anyone touches him. Jakob said he can be bitey – of course he can! His name’s Fenris. (If you don’t know your Norse myths, Fenrir or the Fenris-wolf was one of Loki’s monstrous children, an enormous wolf who was prophesied to kill Odin at Ragnarok. The other gods, seeing that Fenrir would be trouble, tried to contain him and in the end, he bit off the right hand of Tyr, god of war. This dog is named after the original hand-biting-off hellhound.) But he was a lovely fluffy soppy dog and I did enjoy playing with him while the sled was put away.

The next stop was at the upper kennels. We were done with sledding and now we were to meet some of the puppies. There are around twenty-five of them. Most of them now are big enough to put on a chain – this was new to them today and they cried and howled but they’ll get used to it and then they’ll go in with the bigger puppies and get used to that and when they’re around six months old, they’ll go to the main kennels and learn to run with the more experienced dogs.

But there were two small litters up there – a family of black and white Greenlandic dogs in their cage, who climbed up the wire and looked at us and a family of pure white baby polar bear puppies who were loose. They’re allowed out during the day to play and then put away in the evening and play they did. They jump over your legs and if you sit down to play with them, they all pile onto you and then they scrap with each other and roll around in the snow and I could quite happily have stolen the lot.

We went into the Russian cabin, which is a traditionally built log cabin full of interesting bits and pieces, to have hot chocolate. I was already toasty – my warm layers on their own were warm enough, I had a huge overall over it, I’d been out sledding and now there were puppies! – but I dran my hot chocolate and Jakob talked.

He’s from the Czech Republic, he’s lived all over the world, he learnt mushing at the Snow Hotel in Kirkenes (on the Norway-Russia border) and at the moment he’s in Svalbard because he likes the ice and snow and the dark. In fact, no one at Greendogs is Norwegian. Even at the Polar Institute back in Longyearbyen, 60% of the staff are not Norwegian and everything’s taught in English. No, he’s never actually seen a polar bear. They don’t come to this valley – except the one that raided another set of kennels two years ago, ate all their dogfood and had to airlifted to the other end of the archipelago because he wouldn’t take the hint that they didn’t want a polar bear there. This is apparently the way to deal with troublesome bears – there are planes and helicopters coming in all the time to deliver tourists and supplies and they keep an eye out for bears. Any that get too close to Longyearbyen get darted and then removed to another part of the island, which is good because I thought they just shot any marauding bears.

When we’d finished and said goodbye to the puppies, we came back down to the lower kennels and Jakob fed the dogs (and cuddled some particular favourites) while we got out of our enormous overalls and boots and then we were delivered back to town. I think a bath is in order.

Svalbard 2015: Oslo to Longyearbyen

I got the bus back to Oslo airport without catastrophe, attempted to check in out of habit, having completely forgotten I already possessed both boarding card and bag label until the machine tried to charge me for a second bag – quite reasonably, since I was indeed trying to add a bag because it hadn’t yet dawned on me that the system knew I already had a bag, went through security (got caught this time; I didn’t take the Kindle out because it didn’t occur to me that I needed to) and then settled down to kill the best part of two hours in the domestic wing of Oslo Gardermoen. I watched the Stavanger plane get emptied, restocked, refuelled, loaded etc (was a bit horrified to see the food delivery man deliver a snack directly to the pilots by means of a stick through their window – the pilots’ windows aren’t all sealed! One of them just lifts out!) and then went looking for my own gate. I’d suspected we were stopping somewhere on the way to Longyearbyen and I was right – Tromsø. In fact, to all intents and purposes, this was the Oslo to Tromsø service and when we arrived (very beautiful place, all snowy mountain rising out of blue fjord; looks like CGI) we had to get off the plane, go into the terminal, walk through a passport-protected gate and then get back on because although Svalbard belongs to Norway, apparently it doesn’t in some way and it’s not part of the Schengen agreement.

The plane had been full on the way up from Oslo but now it was quieter, funnily enough. I spent most of the flight entertaining myself by watching the sun disappear behind the horizon, making a spectacular band of orange and yellow above the cloud. I saw stars! There were a couple of twinkling little silver stars visible above the sunset at quarter past one in the afternoon. I’ve never seen actual stars at lunchtime before.

As we came in over Longyearbyen, I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t going to be as dark as I’d expected. Today it is, yes, because it’s cloudy but above the cloud is a relatively bright sky and the mountains are very clearly visible above the town.

We touched down at Svalbard Lufthavn Longyear at around 2pm. The sun had long since set – more than twenty-two days ago, in fact, and it’s not going to rise again until February 16th next year. The plane didn’t stop nose-in as they usually do – it approached the terminal and then swung round sideways so we could scurry across the ice to the door and before we were even off the plane, they were already deicing the wings.

I did have a small catastrophe before I’d even set food on Svalbard soil. I’d succeeded in getting to and from my hotel, I’d caught two flights, I hadn’t got lost in Tromsø, it was all going suspiciously well. I left my camera on the plane. I was still on the steps when I realised I didn’t remember putting it anywhere after taking photos out the window and once I’d hastily searched my bag, I approached the first official-looking person I could see. A small thing like a camera on a plane isn’t a big deal in Longyearbyen. She radioed a colleague to have a look for it when she brought the two small kids she was escorting and the camera was delivered (through security, which is in the same hall as baggage reclaim) long before the luggage arrived. That’s excellent service, and she even told me there has been Northern Lights activity for the last few days, so I’ll probably see them (cloud permitting, of course).

I’d been a little worried about the last step of the adventure – getting from the airport to the hotel but that was fine. There was a bus waiting outside and everyone dumped their luggage in the hold and boarded, so I copied everyone else and sure enough, when we were all on, the driver came down with his ticket machine to collect money. We drove the four miles along the seafront, into the town and he called out the important stops as we went so I knew exactly where to jump off. However, I do notice that buildings around here seem to try to hide the main door – that was hidden around the side.

I have a nice big room, with a huge window, wood panelling, a massive picture over my bed of a mountain and the remains of a hut (when I say massive, I mean it’s a wall feature, rather than a picture on the wall) and most importantly, I have a bath! It all seems very pleasant and cosy.

Last of all, in case anyone doesn’t know where I actually am, here’s a handy map:

 

Svalbard 2015: to Oslo

Act 1, Scene 1 – London Heathrow Airport, Terminal Two Departures, Section D

A ridiculous creature in ridiculous boots two and a half sizes too big approaches a check-in machine, enters her booking reference, scans her passport and is given in return a sticker for the big red tarpaulin bag at her feet.

Act 1,Scene 2 – London Heathrow Airport, SAS Tagged Bag Drop

CHECK-IN MAN: I’m sorry, you’ll have to pick up your bags in Oslo

The ridiculous creature is pleased by this.

Act 1, Scene 3 – London Heathrow Airport, Terminal Two Security

The ridiculous creature puts her watch into her coat pocket, takes out her laptop and places it in a tray with her documentation and coat, then takes the ridiculous boots off and puts them in the tray. She approaches the security gate with some trepidation, certain she’s not wearing anything metallic but expecting the detector to beep anyway. It doesn’t.

The trays containing her luggage go through the scanner. She waits for them to be shunted off to the side, to be inspected separately but they come straight down to her with no problem. She puts the laptop and documentation away, dons coat and boots and walks away, surprised.

Act 1, Scene 4  – London Heathrow Airport, Terminal Two departure area

The ridiculous creature sits with her laptop open and writes a screenplay about this memorable day.

END

Our flight was delayed by the late arrival of the incoming plane and it was 7.58pm by the time we took off. The wifi was free for SAS Plus passengers but not for us lowly SAS Go passenger but luckily, it didn’t actually work so I wasn’t missing anything. I was, of course, in the window seat and there was someone supposed to be in my aisle seat but he soon noticed there was no one in the entire row of seats opposite and shifted himself to the opposite window, giving us an entire row each, which was nice.

There was snow in the ground as we came into Oslo. I wasn’t expecting that. Hadn’t given a single thought to the idea that mainland Norway in November might be snowy. We disembarked from the back door of the plane, discovered that the area around the wing is very slippery and icy, presumably because it’s wet there from the wings being deiced and then had to climb a flight of stairs next to the front door to get into the airport. SAS, by the way, give all their planes Viking names and mine was Saga Viking. I’d like to start a collection but my SAS collection would take a lot longer than my Icelandair collection because Icelandair only have a dozen or so planes and SAS have… lots. I might count them in the back of the magazine on tomorrow’s plane.

I knew I had to pick up my luggage but it turns out, I would have had to anyway – something to do with coming in from an international flight and transferring onto a domestic. I had to when I flew to Trondheim as well, although I didn’t when I flew Narvik-Oslo-London. Presumably it’s a different story if it’s domestic to international.

Anyway. We landed at 10.37 and by 11.10, I was on a moving bus, heading for my hotel – which I reached with no problems whatsoever. My first ever successful arrival at a Thon hotel. The room is huge, the TV is enormous and the underfloor heating in the bathroom is so hot that you don’t need a sauna, just sit on the bathroom floor for a few minutes. Basic breakfast starts at 4.30, proper breakfast about 6.30 and my next job of the night is to see what bus I need to get so I can find out what time I need to be up.

Lapland 2014: Narvik

Another point to Sweden: the lovely light fresh bread I bought at lunchtime yesterday was still lovely and light and fresh at lunchtime today, which is more than I can say for the slice of bread I ended up borrowing from breakfast. I have double windows here, the inner one opens, the outer doesn’t. It’s a fridge for my cheese! And very nice the cheese was with my assorted breads.

Two more points in Sweden’s favour: 1) The town of Gällivare, the last big town before Kiruna, is pronounced Jellyvahray 2) Kiruna is covered in powdery or crunchy snow. Narvik is slightly warmer, so it’s partly melted,leaving a glassy coating of very slippery ice everywhere.

I woke up this morning to blue sky, sunshine and white mountains out of every window. I took the tablet to breakfast so I could update this blog while eating and enjoying the view and then flew straight across the road to the gondola.

I suspected I’d probably want to go up the mountain but I hadn’t realised it was right across the road. The tickets are actually sold at the ski school just up the hill rather than at the station but I could manage that. The gondolas come in trios and I was advised to go in the last one for the best view.

Yes, the view. Narvik sits on the edge of a fjord ringed with white mountains. Dark blue fjord, blue sky, white mountains – definitely up in the Arctic Circle, so much prettier than Kiruna, although to be fair, maybe it’s prettier in the sun too.

I took about a thousand photos of the view. I thought it wasn’t very popular for skiing because Narvik itself is a bit of a utilitarian industrial city rather than a picture-perfect village. It turns out I’d simply got up there half an hour before most of the skiers started to turn up. It still wasn’t Mayrhofen-busy but there were definitely quite a few people up there and a surprising number on foot, just enjoying the view.

After a while I got cold and they’d opened the restaurant so I went in for a cookie and a cup of hot chocolate – getting warm and enjoying the view from massive windows both at the same time!

After two and a half hours of enjoying the view, I decided it was time to descend. I was freezing and I’d seen the view from every angle possible and besides, I planned to come up later to see if the Northern Lights would come out to play over this amazing setting. The only ugly bit of the view was the port – owned and run by LKAB, the Swedish company that owns and runs the mine in Kiruna. That’s no mere coincidence. Narvik is nice and close to Kiruna and provides an ice-free port to export the iron ore. I came here because it’s quickly and easily (in theory) linked to Kiruna which is becuase of the railway bringing the ore to the port.

I spent most of the afternoon eating and sleeping – well, by the time I’d arrived and calmed down and got to bed last night, it was a bit late and I planned to be out in the evening. I sat in reception, using the wifi (it’s a fairly major flaw, as far as I’m concerned, having an entire corridor out of wifi reach), watching the sun set and turn the mountain pink. I’ve never yet managed to get a good photo of a sunsetty snowy mountain.

I happen to be here during the Narvik Winter Festival and according to the website – and the lady at reception agrees – the gondola should be open until 11pm. I don’t plan to stay up there that late, not least for fear of being trapped up there overnight but maybe go up at 9 and see if any lights come out.

There were no lights. My gondola got stuck just outside the top station, so the operator had to force open the doors and let me out onto the snowdrift leading up to the station. It was bitterly cold and there was a breeze round the side of the station. I stuck to the platform out the back, took long-exposure photos of the view and the full moon (I think most of them are very blurry), got utterly frozen and fairly quickly came back down, whereupon it took an.extremely hot shower for me to stop feeling like a human icicle.

Lapland 2014: The E10

Last night, I summarised Saturday in a short Facebook post from the hotel reception. The wifi doesn’t reach as far as my room – I watch endless cycles of connected – obtaining IP address – disabled.

Let’s start from the beginning. I already knew there wasn’t much to see or do in Kiruna. Town’s built on a mine, not tourism. With a train in the afternoon, there wasn’t going to be time for dogsledding or snowmobiling or meeting reindeer, even if those things were available on such short notice. Armed with luggage, I knew it’d be more than.enough simply to get on the train.

I checked out as late as possible, dragged my suitcase through fresh, fluffy snow to the supermarket for bread and cheese and juice and chocolate, stopped at the TIC for a while and then decided to start the epic trek down to the bus station. Even with a detour to an ice sculpture, it took about fifteen minutes. I was an hour early for the shuttlebus and didn’t realise that the vänthall was open, if you just used all your strength on pulling the door.

I got an earlier bus, reasoning that the station at least would have a slightly different view. It did but most of it was behind stuff. I waited for the Luleå train, which was delayed half an hour. My very limited Swedish seemed tp suggest my train was replaced by a bus. This turned out to be true.

A packed bus. I sat wedged in a corner, my bag on my lap, unable to move, hoping it didn’t get too hot because that coat was staying on. There were two young kids opposite me and their bag was wedged against my legs and not going anywhere, no matter how hard I pushed it.

Mercifully, at Abisko, two-thirds of the passengers got off. I moved to the horseshoe of seats around a table at the back, enjoying the freedom. For about five minutes.

Five minutes down the road, we met the tail end of a traffic jam and a glimpse of a neon ! sign in the distance. We detoured up to the station in the village next to it (no one on or off, what a waste) and came back to the jam. It was a little longer by now.

We sat there for two and a half hours. I ate bread and cheese and counted the minutes and got bored. Started to wonder at what point we’d give up and go back to Kiruna or Abisko. I managed to steal a tiny bit of very unreliable wifi to complain on both Facebook and Twitter and look up and translate the news. The train was cancelled because some containers fell off a train at 6.30am and had caused quite a lot of damage to the track between Kiruna and Abisko. Quite why we couldn’t get the train onwards from Abisko, I don’t know. The road was closed because of a storm. I couldn’t see a storm. Yes, it was misty, borderline foggy and there was light snow but no storm. After two hours, I saw traffic coming the other way but still we didn’t move. The driver started the engine and everyone applauded. I muttered impatiently about “Yes, but where are we *going*?!” It turns out my lack of Swedish had led me to miss a whole other drama. The bus had broken down and the company had been phoned for a replacement before the driver managed to get it going. Even better, this bus had refused to start in the morning! Train cancelled, road closed for imaginary storm and unreliable bus! What a brilliant day!

It seemed the road was open one direction at a time. We travelled in convoy, at a crawl, along a snowy (but no.snowier than the Kiruna-Abisko stretch) road for an hour, detoured at the first town to the station where I honestly thought we were either going to hit a lorry or roll down the hill. More crawling. Half an hour standstill at the Norwegian border (at this point, I pulled my hat down over my face and cried a little bit. I’d left Kiruna at 2.45. It was now 8.15 and we’d been stationary longer than we’d been moving. The convoy had taken us 26km and taken an hour and twenty minutes. And now we weren’t moving – again!

We crawled along the Norwegian part of the E10 and then turned onto the E6 and it was like someone had taken the brakes off. We still weren’t moving quickly but it felt like being out of first gear for the first time in three hours.

The final straw was arrival. We were dumped at tge station at 9.25pm. It was dark. It was cold. There were weird people in gowns or strange hats with instruments and candles making weird music around a steam loco. Any other time, I’d have stayed longer and taken photos.

There were no buses. A taxi that drove past me three times without stopping. I had no idea where I was going. I dragged my suitcase up to a petrol station, half-crying, and asked for directions. I was given a map with my route marked on it and off I went.

This was not the best half hour of my life. I panted, dragging this suitcase up the hill, a hill covered in lethally slippery ice, off-balance because of pulling the suitcase, occasionally swearing but mostly crying out loud. It was a horrible day, much too long and now here I was trying to drag a suitcase up a very slippery hill, on my own, in the dark, in a strange place.

And then to find the wifi didn’t work in my room so I couldn’t even tell everyone about it!

405km Kiruna to Narvik took six and three quarter hours. That’s averaging about 26kph. With no internet right now, I can’t convert it to mph.

Sweden is held up as a paragon of ability to deal with snow. Hahaha. No it can’t. Fifty mile standstill on a major road for a minor flurry. I was there, I saw it. This is a myth and a lie.

Sweden’s showers don’t go hot enough. The one here in Norway is wonderfully powerful and will go hot enough to take my skin off if I want. It’s by far the best thing that’s happened to me all day.

Sweden’s fruit juice is watery and almost tasteless.

Kiruna’s website is so unusable, you have no idea what activities it actually has to offer until you get to the TIC. And then it’s too late, usually.

Nothing is pronounced how I think. Kiruna is almost closer to Keerna (sort of half say the u) and Abisko seems somewhere near AAHbshko. I’m still not sure how to pronounce Sámi.

On the positive side, the Swedish word for lift is “hiss” and that’s just beautiful, and I particularly enjoyed the fact that Emilio transported our snowshoes to the cabin in an Ikea bag.

I wish I’d gone to Iceland again instead.

Norway 2011: Flying home

I got up early and had breakfast and finished packing.

I went down to the town centre to get the Flybussen. It wasn’t due for another half hour, so I went down to the harbour for a bit before coming back to the bus stop to find it populated by men who’d been fishing and sounded like they were from Somerset.

I got to the airport, checked in with the machine, scanned my own passport and took my bag over to be handed in. The man behind the desk decided I was Norwegian and gibbered at me until he scanned my luggage tag at which point he suddenly realised why I’d been looking so blankly at him.

That left me with three hours until my flight went. I went outside and down by the waterfront to take photos of the spectacular view. It did mean crossing a road where there were no crossings but I survived, in both directions.

I sat and read Sherlock Holmes until my gate was announced, got through security without being searched and then sat and read some more until I could get on the plane.

Nice view, nice flight, arrived in Oslo a couple of hours later. I navigated my way to International where I had my passport checked, bought something to drink with my last few Norwegian coins and got on the plane. Only they’d changed my seat at the last minute. You might think, if you were an airline, that someone who’d checked in online twenty-four hours in advance and chosen a seat right at the back next to a window might have done so because they wanted to see out. Therefore, why not move them so they’re in a middle seat right over the wing? That seems like a perfect choice!

And then no sooner were we in the air than the unpleasant lady sitting on my right decided to close the blinds for the entire flight. I have never hated a flight more, or an airline. I did ask why I’d been moved and the hostess just said “Oh, I don’t know if we’ve even got 25 rows”. I do not enjoy flying blind.

At Heathrow, I collected my luggage which had managed to change planes and not get lost somewhere in Scandinavia and walked the three thousand miles from T3 to Central Bus Station where there was no food and I had to sit and wait for over an hour.

The coach was too hot, the heating was broken, there was a small mutiny up the front which involved yelling at the driver who yelled back. And I do not like the blue LEDs that lit up the entire coach. We all had the overhead fans on but it didn’t really do a lot. At Ringwood, the driver got up and did something inside the overhead locker at the front which may house the heater controls – useless if you can’t get at them while driving – and I think he must have switched the heating off altogether because without the heat, the overhead fans soon began to feel very very cold.

And then I got home.

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Norway 2011: Midnight Sun at the Arctic Cathedral

I sat with the bus timetable for quite a long time, debating what time to go up the mountain.

I eventually settled on the 22.22 and went down to the main square to wait for it. Despite everthing I’d been told, the bus driver does not sell cable car tickets. We had a quick five minute hop over the bridge, then a quick trip around the houses on the other side and the driver stopped at the cable car and I jumped off.

The first problem was figuring out how to get in. I went to where there were people standing around (discussing how trees are made of aspirin) but there didn’t seem to be anywhere that sold tickets. I asked them. They said they had no idea because they’d been up there for dinner as part of a tour and hadn’t had to buy tickets. They also seemed surprised that someone should want to go up the mountain so late at night.

I went round the other side of the building and found the ticket man. He sold me a ticket and two minutes later, I was in a cable car.

Unsurprisingly, it was freezing at the top. It’s almost as far north as the European mainland goes, it’s nearly eleven at night, on a wet and windy night and I’m up a mountain. The view was great, right over Tromso Island, there’s the airport, there’s the arctic mountains in the background, there’s a faint glow where the sun would be if it wasn’t so cloudy.

I did not stay up there for an hour and a half. I took the next cable car back down where I discovered it’s surprisingly warm back on the ground. The next bus wasn’t for nearly half an hour, so I decided to do the ten minute walk back to the Arctic Cathedral and decide from there.

When I reached the Arctic Cathedral, I discovered that the clouds were thinning out. There were patches of blue sky. I decided to wait the forty minutes until midnight there and see the sun. The Hurtigrute boat was coming in and so I got to see it coming under the bridge.

The blue sky gradually appeared nearer and nearer the sun. I took regular photos. At midnight, it was unfortunately hidden by clouds a bit but I did see a lovely Midnight Light in the Sky. And I got a magnificent photo of the Ten To Midnight Sun.

There are summer concerts in the cathedral so at midnight on the dot, it emptied out and I was suddenly surrounded by people also taking photos of the glowing sky. Then a bus turned up containing lots of people for an unadvertised midnight concert. There were dozens of people walking across the bridge, under the bright light. The idea of walking back at midnight is a lot less scary at midnight than it is when you think about it during the day.

I waited, hoping the sun would reemerge and I could get a Ten Past Midnight Sun photo but it didn’t, so I headed back. Odd how that bridge seemed so scary on Sunday and it’s now very normal to walk across it. It’s 1,036 metres long and I’ve walked across it in various directions five times now. That’s 3.2 miles I’ve walked over that bridge in the last two days. I got back at about 00:45 and went to bed.

Norway 2011: Tromsø

Today I had my breakfast in the restaurant next door (because that’s where this hotel serves its breakfasts), came back up to my bed for another hour or two and then went out into Tromso. It was very damp and quite cold. Last night I saw a Eurospar supermarket just down the road so today I went in there. They have cheddar cheese! Cathedral City cheddar cheese!

I went down to the TIC where I was told that the last bus from the cable car definitely leaves at 00:15.

I prowled the town until I found the souvenir shop which I’d seen yesterday but temporarily lost and I bought a Norway flag badge for my blanket and a Viking ring.

Then I went up the back of the town in the hope of emerging into something that wasn’t city. No luck. But I did find the Polaria centre, just as the rain really started bucketing down. I may or may not have bought another duck. Just the one.

I went back to the hotel to eat my bread and cheese and stayed there for a long time. It was pouring with rain and while the setting is spectacular, Tromso is not hugely exciting in itself.

When I heard a honking down in the fjord, I went to visit the Hurtigrute boat – the Polarlys, which I saw sailing out of Trondheim on Saturday. Then I wandered down to the left of town and found myself walking over the bridge again. Because it’s very exposed up there, it felt far windier and rainy than it did on solid ground. I was very glad I’d practised walking over it in nice weather yesterday because it would have been terrifying doing it for the first time in that weather.

I sheltered under the pyramids of the Arctic Cathedral and then got my photo taken there to compare and contrast with yesterday’s sunny photo.

Then I had to walk back over. It was so wet! I stopped briefly in the bookshop, as I always do, in the hope of finding Mrs Pepperpot in Norwegian and then retreated to the hotel. I’ve had two cups of “chocolate milk” from the machine downstairs, which both turned out to be very hot chocolate. I thought I pressed the wrong button the first time, but no. I have watched Echo Beach, Top Gear (the one where they pretend to be 17-year-olds) and now Live at the Apollo – Jason Manford hosting and Michael McIntyre on next, so it’s time to switch the TV off. My arms itch like crazy. They’ve been soaked in cool water but it hasn’t helped.

I am going up this mountain tonight and departing the moment I’ve taken my photo of the sun. I am more or less packed and ready to go. Perhaps I will go as early as possible so as to be able to look at the mountains on the other side of this island.

Norway 2011: Midnight Sun in Tromsø

Last night I didn’t go to the cable car. I didn’t go to the Arctic Cathedral either. At 11.35, I dragged myself down to the harbour to see the Midnight Sun so I could go to bed.

The southbound Hurtigrute boat was in (the fourth in my collection) and its name…. Midnatsol.

The sun wasn’t visible from the harbour. I kept walking and discovered that it’s not really visible from town at all. I had to get somewhere reasonably high. The bridge. I headed out of town, got to the bridge at 11.56 and then ran up the bridge so as to be able to see the glow behind the mountains at midnight and take a photo of my watch. I did run up the wrong side of the bridge so all the photos are off the glow behind all the railings but never mind. Today I will go and visit the TIC and find out if there’s some kind of special deal. Otherwise, I think I’ve concluded that it’s not especially scary walking over that bridge at night.

Norway 2011: Trondheim to Tromsø

Today I set my alarm for 7am, with the intention of finishing packing the little bits and having breakfast before being on the bus at 8.15. I packed. I read my book for a while. At 7.30 on the dot I went downstairs only to find the breakfast room locked. I looked at the signs and discovered that on Sunday, breakfast doesn’t start until 8am. I can’t eat, get my stuff and be outside on the bus in the space of fifteen minutes. No breakfast for me today 😦

I got the bus up to the airport. Checked in at the automatic machine. Well, I actually checked in yesterday so all I really achieved was printing out a label for my bag. I took it to the bag drop and the lady there asked if I would like to fly on my fingerprint instead of a boarding card. Obviously! I put my finger on the scanner and then went off through security, since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do on that side of the aiport. Two flights without being searched at security! I am doing well!

I sat for over an hour in the airport. I could have had breakfast and got a later bus. I also discovered that Norway has stolen all my money and I had to use one of the money machines. The first one offered me sterling, Euros or Swedish kroner, which was a surprise. The next machine offered Euros, dollars or Danish whatever-they-spends. The third machine was the only one that had the currency of the country it was actually in!

At the gate, I scanned my fingerprint again. It recognised it! It said “Welcome. Please enter turnstile” and then it printed out a receipt with my name and seat number on it. I don’t think there was anyone else on that plane who was still staring at their finger by the time they were sitting down.

Off we went, out into the fjord. I could see Munkholme and Trondheim just up the fjord as we ascended, then everything vanished in the cloud. Less than an hour later, we were descending again. Turns out my plane thought it was a bus. It stopped off at Bødø where three-quarters of the passengers got off and maybe three new ones got on. It was the most spectacular landing I’ve ever seen. Chunks of rock sticking up out of the fjord, rocky islands everywhere, blue-green water, snow-covered mountains everywhere… I don’t care what Bødø is like, I’d fly there again just to see the view as we come in to land.

Then we were off again, over more mountains. Mountains with a proper knife-sharp ridge on the top and snow all over one face, lakes, rivers, cliffs, narrow winds winding along the edge of the land. And as we got further north, I could see mountains everywhere, all poking up out an ocean that went on forever and it looked like I’d flown right to the edge of the world. It was amazing.

I got out of the airport without seeing anyone official. Not a soul has seen my passport today. I got the bus, got my ticket and we drove off. Within five minutes we were in a tunnel. Not just a tunnel – a tunnel with junctions! I have never seen a roundabout underground and this one had two! I got off when the driver shouted “Thon Hotels!”. Found myself lost. I wandered around, asked people where the hotel was and eventually was pointed in the right direction. My room is much bigger here. I have a double room with a proper ceiling and a massive bathroom and two lots of towels and BBC Worldwide on the TV and you have to put the door card in a slot inside the room to use any of the lights (that one got me at first. Great room, pity it’s so dark).

Then I went out. I’d already realised it was too warm here to need my coat and I put my big shirt in my bag. I very quickly discovered that I’d got off the bus in precisely the right place but it just happens to be just around the corner where I couldn’t see the hotel. All of fifty yards away and I’d really taken the long route to get to it. I also very quickly discovered how hot it was. I went back to the hotel, abandoned all my warm layers except a t-shirt and put on the sandals that I thought I’d been far too optimistic bringing.

Tromsø is lovely. It’s surrounded by great white mountains and arctic blue sky. I wandered, I took photos and then the Arctic Cathedral on the other side of the fjord caught my eye. It’s one of Tromsø’s very few tourist attractions and I intended to visit it. It was only about 2.30 in the afternoon so I went for it. It’s on the other side of Tromsø’s harbour bridge. It’s massive. The map seems to think it’s over a kilometre long and it takes twenty minutes to walk. It’s very very high and it’s quite wobbly and it’s quite breezy up there. Looking at it, I couldn’t understand why it needs to be so high but I have now seen photos and I get it. They didn’t bother with lifting bridges or swinging bridges or anything like that here. They just made their bridge high enough that even the biggest cruise ship can just go underneath it. Apparently, at its highest, it’s 38m (125 feet). The side panels have gaps about four inches high so when you creep close to the sides to take photos through the wire, you can see right down to the water below. A Hurtigrute boat was coming in and that made for some lovely photos against the snowy mountains.

So I saw the Arctic Cathedral. It’s made of eleven triangles, each slightly bigger than the last, just overlapping. Inside, the gaps are filled with clear glass so it’s very light and airy and the east end is a big triangular stained glass window. It’s not actually cathedral, it’s just a local church but it’s still quite spectacular. It was quiet when I arrived but five minutes later, so did a coach party and then it was packed.

The clouds were coming over, so I decided to get back over the bridge before it started raining or got really windy. Back in the city centre, I took my time coming back. I came past the Hurtigrute boat – the Nordnorge. The very same one I saw in Trondheim on Friday morning. Which means that the one I saw yesterday morning as I was about to leave Munkholmen – the Polarlys – should be arriving tomorrow afternoon. On the way back, there was a fire engine busily at work on the junction just around where the bus dropped me off. But the cafe joining the back of the building was still open and packed out and people were still stopping at the traffic lights next to it, despite the water pouring down. And there didn’t seem to be any smoke or any fire damage. In fact, the more I stared, the more it struck me that the water jet looked very straight and narrow, like a pressure washer and that there was a lot of moss on the pavement. I’ll be going back later on or maybe tomorrow to be sure but it did look a lot like the fire brigade and their cranes and hoses were being used to give the roof a good scrub.

I stopped at the Spar – still surprised so many food shops are open on Sunday. I got some mini hamburger rolls – the seeds are messy – some Norwegian Jarlsberg cheese slices – tastes sort of like cheese but there’s something sort of… foreign about them – some chocolate milk and some cheese noodles which seem to be thin nobbly Wotsits. I picked up a map and a bus timetable in the TIC and took them to reception here. I told the nice man that I wanted to go up the cable car to see the Midnight Sun. He checked what time it closes – 1am. No problem. (I already knew that). What about the buses? I’d already figured out which bus I needed to get but the timetable was no use as I had no idea which stop is which. The nice man marked on a town map where I get the bus from and then on the timetable what time the buses leave. Then he turned the timetable over to find out what time the buses come back and found that the last one is quarter past midnight. Which is no good. I can either ask if there is a later bus or I can walk back. It’s about 45 minutes and it won’t be dark. I’ve already done half an hour of that walk today. The cablecar station is only 15 minutes walk from the Arctic Cathedral. And I’ve walked over the scary bridge. And it won’t be dark. But it’ll still be the middle of the night. What to do, what to do?