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Norsk tipping: Spill her! -- the Norwegian state gamblihng agency's slogan.Dateline: Tuesday 31.8.1999 8:47 Location: Eidsvoilsplass, Oslo
The comfort of the Swedish couchett was luxurious (wide enough to stretch! seats not of leather or plastic, but fabric! even a free drink of water!), the border checks considerably less so. On the Helsingør-Helsingborg ferry the ship was combed by cops with dogs; my nemeses, Swedish customs, passed me and the rest of the cabin with only a few questions, but Norwegian customs -- at 6 in the morning -- was the most thorough grilling I've endured since Israel. When I neglected to include my money belt as "luggage", it was systematically fondled by the cop. But evidently not visiting Amsterdam allowed me to avoid the full treatment...
I imagine that Oslo looks a lot like Helsinki to someone on a first visit: lots of parks and paved squares; the occasional cobbled pedestrian street; architectural styles mixed at random and most of it quite ugly; trams zooming around and boats in the harbor... both cities are even the same size (~500,000), have exactly one subway line and one seaside fortress guarding entry to the harbor.
I'm outa here.
Dateline: Tuesday 31.8.1999 18:39 Location: Geilo Vandrerhjem, Geilo
I've always found the Swedish-Norwegian-Danish word for "youth hostel", vandrerhjem (lit. "wanderer's home") to be quite poetic, albeit not quite as good as the Icelandic farfuglaheimili, (lit. "little home for migrating birds"). Unfortunately, the Geilo YH is not in the least poetic, it's a standard concrete block and even the shower is one of those hideous "push button for a 10-second blast of liquid ice" contraptions that I thought only the Danes enjoyed.
BTW, Geilo is correctly pronounced yay-lou, and be sure to pronounce that in your worst "HJE-llo I am HEL-ga från su-WEE-den" accent: two Mandarin tone 4's, yây-lôu, should do the trick. Eeet's the funniest name in the whole wide yerld!
Geilo lies halfway between the flatlands of Oslo and the fjord country of Bergen, which means it looks exactly like southern Finland with mountains added. As Finland does not, generally speaking, have mountains or even much in the way of the hills, to me the effect is quite bizarre. The hills and mountains are, as they are or rather would be in Finland, raw bedrock covered with pine trees, moss and lichen, not nearly as lush and inviting as the mountains of Slovenia or even Switzerland. I'm too tired to explore today, but tomorrow's route is already mapped out -- if the weather stays good.
Norway is ridiculously expensive. Even groceries cost twice the already inflated prices of Finland, a liter of orange "nectar" (10%) clocking in at 13 kr when I can get 100% in Finland for half that and in Hungary for a quarter, even though they'll all made from the same fruits trucked in halfway across the world from Florida. Only fish products are tolerably priced: I bought a big can of fish soup for tomorrow's birthday celebration and shrimp-flavored cheese (!) for lunch. The fiskebullar might make an interesting substitute for Japanese kamaboko though...
Warning: Serious tangents ahead.Dateline: Wednesday 1.9.1999 12:47 Location: Geilotoppen, Geilo
Mt. Geilo (1062m) has been conquered! The stats: time climbed 1.5 hrs, distance walked ~2.5 km, height climbed ~300 m -- not exactly the crowning achievement of my hiking career (that honor remains split between Fuji and Dewa Sanzan). To be frank, I was amazed by how tough the climb was; not the trail itself, it was just a stroll, but my physical condition: after the first few hundred meters my heart was beating like mad and I was having trouble catching my breath. Whah?!? A mere week ago I did a full-day trek on Salève and my sole complaint was that it was too damn hot. Still, as usual the beginning was worst and my condition rapidly normalized.
I feel like... an Eno album. The only ambient sounds are the inexplicably melancholy clangs of sheep bells, much like On Land, and the wind in the trees, mixed with a faint hum of traffic from the village below.
I came to Geilo (and this mountaintop) for solitude, and now I've certainly found it. A busy ski resort in the winter and far less busy hiking base in the summer, it's now September and the leaves are already turning yellow. With the departure of 4 people this morning -- including a poor shivering fellow from Brazil -- I'm now the only guest in the hostel, and on the way here the only two-legged creatures I saw were two retired locals on a walk. The ski lift and its café are shut down. The sky is overcast in an odd way, the sun visible through multiple layers of different grays. The temperature is bearable down in the village -- I climbed most of the way in a T-shirt -- but up top the more wind-exposed spots are downright nasty. The scenery consists of gnarled pines, ferns and moss, with the snow-topped Hallingskarvet (1875 m) as background on the other side.
Just for yucks I climbed the next two little peaks (1080 and 1071 m) and then stomped down, past the town to the misnamed Ustedalsfjordet (770 m), not a true fjord at all but just a mountain lake.
Odd. I'm neither hot nor cold, hungry nor full, tired nor energetic, happy nor sad... my only emotion is a sense of vague annoyance towards the large American touri group tromping past behind me, discussing "restructuring the enterprise" so loudly that I can hear it 50 meters away, as I sit here by the lakeside.
Sometimes I wish I was a poet, a painter, a musician, a calligrapher, able to use a tool less disconnected than text or a bit less blunt than pictures.
As I returned to the hostel the first tentative drops of rain started to fall. I snuggled in bed and devoured the rest of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (fortuitously discovered in the hostel's pathetically tiny library) in one go.
And then I just sat there, listening to the overpowering roar of silence (ever tried listening to it?) and thought. About en, the Japanese term for a connection between people. About how people are like pieces of clay that keep the impressions of those that touch them. About what happens when an en breaks. About the obligations of an en, even an involuntary one.
About how fucked up people, including myself, are.
I looked at the little figure of a monk holding a begging bowl attached to my daypack. Why do I identify so much with that figure? Why, exactly, is it that I travel? If somebody were to ask me point-blank -- hell, if you read my own insipid conclusion to BIE'96 -- I'd say seeing new places, meeting new people.
Bullshit. Places, maybe, but the sights I've seen that have truly stirred the soul are few and far between. People: well, yeah, I do meet dozens of people, but almost all of them on an entirely trivial level and the occasional exceptions disappear like the used public train tickets I accumulate, filed away in an unused address book. (One of those addresses came from a Japanese guy I met on the train to Oslo, who didn't even rate a mention in this log.)
A perverse imp asks: is this why I travel? To avoid accumulating those bonds of en with the people I already know, always the lone hermit in his hut in the remote mountains?
There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years. She had built a little hut for him and fed him while he was meditating. Finally she wondered just what progress he had made in all that time.As some of you may recall from the introduction to J2J, I'm a diplomat's kid, which means I spent most of my childhood shuttling about from school to school, country to country. I completed my primary schooling in, at quick count, seven different schools or programs. And I hated it, I hated it bitterly, when we moved and I had to break those bonds of en with acquaintances, teachers, friends, first loves, first girlfriends... and here I am, age 22, doing it again and planning on going to Japan for a year Voluntarily. Can I keep doing this forever? Must I keep doing this forever?To find out, she obtained the help of a girl rich in desire. 'Go and embrace him', she told her, 'and then ask him suddenly: "What now?" '
The girl called upon the monk and without much ado caressed him, asking him what he was going to do about it.
'An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter', replied the monk somewhat poetically. 'Nowhere is there any warmth.'
The girl returned and related what he had said. 'To think I fed that fellow for twenty years!' exclaimed the old woman in anger. 'He showed no consideration for your need, no disposition to explain your condition. He need not have responded to passion, but at least he should have evidenced some compassion.'
She at once went to the hut of the monk and burned it down.
-- Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (compiled by Paul Reps)
Ah well. Enough whining. I went downstairs of a meal of canned fish soup, which tasted like flash-frozen fish straight from the kitchen of a Russian prison when cold, but much to my surprise it became downright delicious when heated. I topped this off with an actual, hot, long sauna session and now, as I write this, I'm getting ready to go to bed early and sleep late. And I'm grinning: it was a pretty groovy birthday after all. (If not quite a match for the way I celebrated my 21st birthday.)
Fjord Lord-- a cruise ship in FlåmDateline: Thursday 2.9.1999 12:13 Location: Finse jernbanestasjon, Finse When on my way to my morning shower, I discovered that one of the shower stalls had a great, big, perfectly symmetrical and still steaming cone of turd smack dab in the middle. Evidently somebody was a bit drunk and thought he was in a toilet, despite some clues like a missing toilet bowl!
There were other stalls though, so the only harm was done to my olfactory receptors, and this may even have made getting down a few slices of geitost easier -- geitost being a very Norwegian type sweet brown goat cheese with a disturbing resemblance in color and texture, if not taste, to peanut butter. Unfortunately, this morning surprise seemed to set the tone for the rest of the day's trip as well. The train arrives 20 minutes late, puttered its was past the (amazing!) Harvangerjøkull glacier and then wheezed to a halt at Finse. It seems the train from Bergen to Oslo broke down and, since the track is only one rail, we're stuck until it's fixed. The last ferry from Flåm to Gudvanger leaves at 14:45, so this threatens to put a bit of a cramp in my plans. But no problem, I'll probably stay the night at Flåm and continue tomorrow. But for now I can just munch on my 20 kr waffle (complete with strawberry jam and sour cream) and a 20 kr bottle of... ump, ump! tsika tsika boom! URGE!
Oh no, now I'm truly in the boondocks: Finse is such a pathetic excuse for a village that it has only one cellular repeater, and it's for the wrong company -- I can't roam on it! AAIIGH! After working in Sidi Bou Saïd, Ozora, Bohinjska Bistrica, Wied iz-Zurrieq and countless other bizarre places (incl. Geilo) I am now finally incommunicado. The horror!
(And no, I will not use the station's payphone!)
Dateline: Thursday 2.9.1999 20:37 Location: Flåm Camping & Vandrerhjem, Flåm
Everything turned out all right in the end, even if it did take me 9 hours to get from Geilo to Flåm, including 5 hours stalled at Finse, a trip back past Geilo to Ål and a twisty (read: queasy) but scenic bus trip to Flåm, where I'd secured a bed at the nice hostel as soon as my phone started working again. 20 km from the arctic desolation of Finse/Myrdal, Flåm is lush, green and (relatively) warm. Being nestled in the cranny of a fjord, all around there are cliffs a kilometer high, making for neck-straining viewing.
On the minus side, Flåm is tiny and wholly dependent on tourism, meaning that everything shuts down at 7 PM and the cheapest restaurant meal I could find was meatballs & cabbage for 85 kr (!!!); I opted for a can of lapskaus (potato-meat stew) and a loaf of bread at a still extortionate 46 kr.
On the whole, this unscheduled stop may actually have improved my schedule: I got the Hurtigruten reservation pushed back to the next day, so I'll do the trip in a bigger (= nicer) ship and I'll spend slow Sunday in Åndalsnes, not (attempting to be) on the road. Unfortunately it does look like I'll have to crank up to a higher speed later on if I want to get back by the 10th... but no complaints.
Have a cup of tea.-- not a request, but an order.Dateline: Friday 3.9.1999 13:56 Location: Voss jernbanstasjon, Voss Sitting at a Norwegian train station, waiting, for a change. NSB is starting to make Italian railways look punctual...
Anyway, after an appropriately glacial shower at the hostel (5 min of warm water would've cost 10 kr!), I set off on the ferry through the Aurland-, Sogne- and Naerøyfjords. It was drizzling, so the views weren't all that they could have been, but they were still stupendous at times. I was kept company by the Minnesotans Isaac and Jamie, plus a bored cafeteria clerk who regaled us with stories of the minuscule hamlets we passed: that one bought by an American who fell in love with a local girl, that one inhabited by 3 old women and 3 ducks (who run Norway's smallest post office), there's the one where the son used his dead father's corpse as fox bait... everybody on board was a tourist and even the announcements were in Japanese. There were dozens if not hundreds of waterfalls cascading down from the 1000-meter cliffs we passed. All in all, quite a spectacle, and the bus ride up from Gudvangen to Voss wasn't much less of one. (At least compared to sitting here.)
Dateline: Friday 3.9.1999 22:10 Location: m/s Kong Harald (Hurtigruten), Bergen -> Ålesund
Bergen's dubious claim to fame as "the rainiest city in the world" was amply demonstrated during my short stay, during which it rained continuously. I headed straight for the public library to get my net fix -- as usual nothing had happened -- and, after determining that the computers were too cleverly jammed to allow dumping my digicam pictures, I got stuck reading a D. T. Suzuki book on Zen left out on a table. Several hours later I started to leave, but not without first sneaking a peek at the Helsingin Sanomat (Finland's biggest newspaper) in the Lobby. But somebody else had had the same idea:- Well well, looks like there's a new Finn in Bergen!
And that's how I met Kristiina, a young blonde girl from Finland who'd come to Norway to work as a nurse. Some two months into her yearlong contract, she seemed somewhat disappointed when I broke the news that actually, I'm only a tourist and I'm leaving tonight to boot. We went to look for a place to eat, pausing to pick up James & Isaac on the way, but after only locating a bunch of 200-kr-and-up places we ended up eating some traditional Norwegian food, namely some Kylling McPasta at, yup, McD's. But lo, Kristina had to trundle off to her night shift and soon it was my turn to start the soggy trek through the drizzle to the port. And another 3 thin strands of en were snapped.
So here I sit aboard the Hurtigruten, sharing the cruise ship with several hundred retired people. Lonely Planet advertised the boats' good facilities for deck-class scum like me, so when I asked about places to sleep the friendly stewardess directed me to .. under the stairs. As if I didn't feel like a stowaway already...
60,000 tons of dried codDateline: Saturday 4.9.1999 19:45 Location: Åndalsnes vandrerhjem, Åndalsnes After a poorly slept night and a wavy morning (numerous grannies unsuspectingly walked above my hideaway, complaining of seasickness... and everything else from high prices to hemorrhoids, for that matter), but yet more nice fjordy scenery, I disembarked at Ålesund. My ticket was checked for the first time on my way out of the ship, what would they have done if I hadn't had it...?
Ålesund is the cutest Norwegian town I've seen to date, but except for the "famed" Art Nouveau center it looked all too much like a coastal Finnish town. Not that this is all bad: the Finnish newspaper mentioned yesterday had a full-page story on Norwegian cuisine (fish, fish and more fish), ominously describing Ålesund in glowing terms as the "dried cod capital of the world" with 60,000 tons produced every year, over 80% of Norway's production. (If you've ever driven through northern Norway past the olfactory assault of the interminable cod racks that make up the remaining 20%, you'll know that this is no mean feat.) Much to my surprise, those 60,000 tons were entirely odorless, the only stink came from local politicians wooing voters. My dishonorable mention goes to the local Christian People's Party candidate, tooting about town with one of those miniature sightseeing trains, this one dubbed "Thomas Toget" to boot.
But I didn't come here for the towns. After sneaking a look from a little hill (prominently featuring a statue of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II) and deciding that I did not have the time to climb the 418 steps up Mt. Aksla, I hopped on the next bus to Åndalsnes.
The weather had been slowly clearing up, with partly sunny skies even in Ålesund, but by the time the bus arrived in Åndalsnes 2.5 hours later (I slept for most of the trip) there was no longer a single cloud in the sky, and the warm sun shone down on the yellow fields, green forests and dark mountains of this valley in the "Morndall Alps". Extolled by Lonely Planet and its own guestbook as "the best hostel in Norway", the hostel was rapidly approaching its winter hibernation (it closes 10.9.) and, with only 5 guests at the moment, the manager regretted to announce that it would not be serving its famous breakfasts. Not entirely a loss, as it turned out, since they would have cost 60 kr per day! But I (finally) washed my clothes, hung them outside to dry and, for the first time ever, managed to upload my digicam's contents through the hostel's ISDN (!) line. As for dinner, I decided to sod it... by eating a large can of sodd, which turned out to be meat-and-potato soup (not to be confused with the meat-and-potato stew lapskaus!).
¡Mt. Nesaksla es un rompe-calzon!Dateline: Sunday 5.9.1999 10:45 Location: Halfway up Mt. Nesaksla, Åndalsnes
Pheee-ew! I thought I'd climbed some pretty nasty slopes in my time, but this is in a category of its own. The peak is "only" 700m above sea level, but the trail (rated by LP as "rather steep") goes up at an almost constant 45 degrees -- imagine climbing 700 m of stairs! (Well, OK, I've done that too.) Aside from this most un-Finnish mountain, the trail could be straight out of, say, Nuuksio, all rocks, pine trees, moss and tufts of hardy grass. Then again, this shouldn't be much of a surprise as Åndalsnes is just a bit to the north of Helsinki... and yes, that means ExtrRAIL! has now gone not only south, west and east of its starting point, but north as well. Whee!
After an endless slog, the top of the mountain is now in sight -- another 100 m should do it. Onward!
Blueberries! And cranberries too! Now why did I bring a packed lunch?
Dateline: Sunday 5.9.1999 12:30 Location: Atop Mt. Nesaksla (715 m), Åndalsnes
Seeing the summit gave me such a burst of energy that the last stretch was almost painless and even those "pull yourself up with the chain" parts just added some excitement. They were so exciting, in fact, that I tore my pants, which now have a sexy slash from crotch to butt. Well, I was planning to throw them away after the climb anyway...
The views are indeed spectacular, but due to that previously mentioned comment in the Lonely Planet guide, I wasn't exactly the first one here: the summit hut's guestbook is filled with names from foreign lands, often to the tune of 10-20 a day! As I arrived the summit had been conquered by a Kyotoite busily holding an animated conversation with himself, even pointing out places of interest. I steered clear. Up next was a Norwegian family, including a daughter of 12, who barely stopped on their way to the next summit in the chain.
Dateline: Sunday 5.9.1999 19:17 Location: Åndalsnes vandrerhjem, Åndalsnes Well well, when I got back that long-awaited message from E. (and "1 missed call" indicator) were sitting in my cell phone. As I'd expected, her old account had been cancelled and she'd forgotten to mail me the new one, my first message to reach her was the postcard from Geneva, which took 10 days to cross the Channel!
With that problem sorted out, another one presented itself. I'd be counting on staying the last night of my trip at my grandmother's in Tampere, but N COM/Telenor refuse to connect me. On the plus side, this does allow me the luxury of spending a night on the Swedish side of the border, above the Arctic Circle (prob. at Gälliväre). Time, time, why is there never enough of you?
Time for some Dombås jokesDateline: Monday 6.9.1999 19:45 Location: Dombås jernbanestasjon, Dombås
Good God. After Hell, this place has to be the most unfortunately named in Norway, and it deserves it: one of those tiny farming villages without even a kiosk in sight, where the only thing that catches your attention is the drifting smell of manure. I can just imagine the jokes...Oi wanker! Were you born stupid, or did you get off the train at Dombås? Haw haw!And yeah, I know that "å" is pronounced "o" -- but the "o" in Dombås is pronounced "u"!Anyway, I'm stuck here for 1.5 hours while I wait for the train to Trondheim -- I'll be spending most of the day on variation of this. I have 64 kr left and I dearly hope Pizzakjelleren in Trondheim still has its 54 kr buffet!
But the beginning of the trip here was a jaw-dropper, the train winding its way through a truly nasty-åss valley with mountains of sheer rock on both sides, including Europe's highest vertical rock face and hence the ultimate challenge of Norwegian mountain climbers, Trollveggen.
Back here in the flatlands I already miss Åndalsnes, which (despite all my Finland comparisons) really didn't look one bit like any place I've ever seen before with its mountains, valleys, forests, fjords and plains all rolled into one striking silhouette. Beautiful...
Dateline: Monday 6.9.1999 12:38 Location: Train 41, Dombås -> Trondheim
Just when I'd been starting to get bored with the neverending pine forest rushing past, something went snap! and all of a sudden I was in Lapland, tundra plains of those alien-looking lichens in shades of red, purple and white with only the occasional scraggly tree here and there (and even those will disappear a bit further up north). And moments later, an actual live wild elk galumphed* through those same plains, scared by the train -- I've never seen one in the wild before! Wow, free train safari.* "galumph" is the only correct verb to describe the movement of an animal that looks, and acts, like the cross of a horse with a yak.
I suspect that NSB is the only state-owned railway in the world whose refreshment trolleys sell porno mags. (At least in Japan porn is hidden under the more respectable label of manga comic books.)
In Swedish "hello" and "no" are respectively hej and nej, but Norwegian changes these to haj and naj. Or at least that's how they're pronounced: given the Norwegian penchant for phonetic spelling, I suspect that they're written more like gøyj and nøyj. At first I thought everybody was greeting me with an informal American English "Hi!"...
Dateline: Monday 6.9.1999 15:22 Location: Nidaros Domkirke, Trondheim Trondheim! Ancient capital of Norway and the Deep North, home of the Vikings and black metal, a city at 63 degrees North that... swelters in the summer heat? The tundra ended long before arrival and most of this leafy city could be straight out of Germany.
The Nidaros Domkirke is a massive cathedral (partly) dating from 1070, heavy stone in massive Gothic formations. Evil-sounding organ noise straight off a horror movie soundtrack emanated from inside as a PA company prepares for the evening's concert, quite appropriate given the cathedral's setting in the middle of a graveyard. Very much a Scandinavian feature, that, elsewhere the tombs are usually shunted off to the side somewhere.
What I wanted to do was go to a black metal concert, moshing amongst the black-wearing pagan and/or satanist freaks with names like Count Grishnackh, former lead singer of the band Burzum, who is now sitting in jail for the arson of several churches and the murder of a fellow black metalist known as Euronymous -- a side of Norway peculiarly omitted from most touristy brochures. But no, I have only 1.5 hours here, and I doubt there's all that much action on a Monday night anyway.
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