Rock Concerts & Car Crashes

We got quite a late start catching the ferry from Moskenes to Bodø. After dinnering to Bodø we planned to stay at a camping and guesthouse place in the middle of nowhere, called Lusøy I think. Upon arriving there, though, we discovered a goddamn week long music festival taking place right exactly where we had planned to sleep. It was fairly late at this point and we couldn't keep going because we had to catch a ferry that didn't operate again until the next morning. We therefore had little choice but to join in the party. We couldn't enter the concert grounds because entry was something stupid like 600 crowns (~$A 120), but there turned out to be plenty going on outside. Specifically, most of the locals were getting so drunk that they couldn't even move, and we were getting offered beer and moonshine from all directions. I slept in the car at about 3:30, but Mike just stayed up all night. As a consequence, I had to do most of the driving the next day on our way to Trondheim.

When we finally arrived in Trondheim, we didn't have the address of our hostel, which was called the "Trondheim InterRail Center". We presumed it would be near the central train station, so we began trying to find that. The traffic conditions in the city were pretty bad. In particular, often there was only one traffic light visible when nearing an intersection and often that was in the opposite corner to where your car is. So at one point I'm rounding a corner, doing maybe 40, when the sun jumps into my eyes. I squinted and spotted a red traffic light at the end of the corner, just as Mike simultaneously yelled "Dude! Red!". I hit the brakes and we pulled up pretty sharply (but nowhere near locking them up) and ended up a foot or two over the line. Mike had time to turn to me and say something like "Be more careful, that wasn't cool", before there was an almighty squeal behind us and a car drove into the back of us doing maybe 30, 35 kph.

The car was pretty undamaged. The lower back panel would need replacing, but that's plastic anyway, and the underlying metal was bent a little. The car was definitely 100% driveable. We pulled around the corner and got the guy's details. Even though I'd driven a bit unsafely, it was of course pretty clear that it was his fault, what with us being stationary at a red light at the time of the crash. He also mentioned that this was his "third accident this year". To be fair, that doesn't necessarily reflect badly on him given the stunning driving we saw in the rest of our time in Trondheim. One time, we were travelling down a main road, when another guy moving in the same direction as us stops, slams it in reverse, and starts reversing down the road at us. Another time, Mike was approaching a red light at which several cars are stopped, when suddenly one just hallucinates that the light has turned green or something, and hits the gas and heads through the red. But my favourite is complicated enough that it requires an mspaint diagram:



We had tried to turn left out of the side road when we noticed the obstacle blocking our path. Mike tried to swing around in a U-turn as shown by the arrow. However, the car in front of us was blocking the turn - but they had space to move forward, which would enable us to make the turn. Mike hooted the horn and the driver of the other car turned around and acknowledged us with a nod. Then, she.... slammed it into reverse and started reversing towards the front of our car. Mike and I both just gaped at this for a second or two, after which Mike had the presence of mind to throw the car into reverse and move backwards. He later admitted that had there been a car behind us, he might well have hit it, because he didn't have time to check. Had he not moved when he did, I think there's a very good chance we'd have been hit, maybe 75 or 80 percent.

When we eventually made it to our hostel, we found it located in the local university student building, which was absolutely massive. The dorms were massive and kind of dirty and the bathrooms very limited and also dirty, but we didn't mind because it was a really cool place. The bar there was great. We hung out in a local guy's apartment, listening to his extensive music collection, then later I slept and Mike headed out on the town. When he finally got back at like 3:30, the door to the hostel was locked. Mike therefore decided to climb in an open window and found himself in a locked private bar, so he just helped himself to the party supplies in there and used the internet until someone came and let him out in the morning. Trondheim was a great town, maybe my favourite in Scandinavia.

After two nights in Trondheim we continued towards Stockholm, stopping for a quiet night in a nice hostel in Sundsvall. We hit Stockholm on the 8th, setting up camp in a very centrally located budget hotel.

Pining For The Fjords

The day after finishing the hike it was Lauren's 30th birthday. She wanted to go see a fjord, so we headed across the Norwegian border to Narvik, where we stopped for a spot of lunch and to acquire a cable. The Aygo's stereo is pretty basic, but one feature it does have is an auxilliary socket, enabling us to play music off our iPods while driving. Then we headed south into a nearby fjord, where we spent the day roaming around stunning scenery in awesome weather. That night we went to a restaurant in Narvik which had been recommended to Lauren. I had reindeer - it was excellent. Reindeer is a common meat up here, cheaper than stuff like beef and lamb which mostly has to be shipped in. Right at the end of the day, Mike somehow managed to put a nasty gash in his leg while climbing over one of those metal road-edge barrier things. This gave me my first ever opportunity to drive on the right hand side of the road, something Mike has been doing for months. The difficulty of piloting a manual left hand drive car on the right side of the road was exacerbated by the unfamiliarity of the car and the fact that I hadn't driven at all for two months, and I was off to a shaky start. The first right turn I attempted, instinct took over and I wound up on the left side of the road. Also, I kept hitting the windscreen wipers when trying to use the indicator, because they're on opposite sides of the wheel to normal. We did make it back to the hostel in Abisko, however, and I've gotten used to the road rules now. I don't like the car much. It's geared strangely, with first gear responsible for everything up to around 30kph, then second taking you up to 50kph and third all the way to 75kph or so. I have no idea what fifth gear is even for, since the car seems to top out at like 130. That brings me to the lack of power. The thing feels like it's powered by a hairdryer motor, and what power it does have is delivered only at a rev count of at least 3000 and preferably 3500. So if you change up and the revs drop to 2000, flooring it results only in the car emitting a low moan, like a cow in pain. At least it's fuel efficient, which is important when driving in a country where petrol costs about three times what it does in Australia.

The next day the girls caught the train back to Stockholm and Mike and I began our Norske trip. First stop was Tromsø, a northern university town built mostly on a big island, sort of like a kiddy version of Manhattan. (If you're wondering how to pronounce that o letter, it's sort of like the "u" in "gun", with a bit more length in it. Also, you roll the r's. So sort of like "Trrromsuuh".) It was here that we went to our first Norwegian bar. I've already alluded to the high prices in Norway; it's one of the most expensive countries in the world, much worse than the already expensive Sweden. Apparently it's because of the oil reserves - since they can basically dig money out of the ground, there's a big inflationary effect. A (metric) pint in a bar here will cost you somewhere in the neighbourhood of $A 13. Even for seasoned money wasters like myself, some of the prices are pretty jaw dropping.

In Tromsø we hiked up a mountain close to the town and got some pretty nice views. The rest of the time we spent planning the remainder of our trip. We decided to head to Lofoten for like 4 nights, then south to Trondheim and then across back to Stockholm to return the car. From Tromsø we headed south down a stunning scenic route recommended by a tourist guide. We stopped for some mini-hikes and suchlike and so, despite an early start, didn't make Lofoten in a day. We therefore booked a room at a guesthouse in Sortland, which was just the home of an old couple. The room was an incredibly cheap 250 NKR (~$A 50) and slept both of us, and the breakfast (65 NKR, ~$A 12) was completely insane. It covered a full large size table. There were rolls, bread, scrambled eggs, different types of cold meats, herring, some other unidentifiable fish thing, yoghurt, fruit, strawberries from their own garden, coffee, tea, orange juice, etc etc etc etc. Everything you can possibly imagine. After eating well there, we continued to Lofoten. I'm writing this on our last night here at a very cozy hostel in Stamsund. We've lazed around a lot, but also managed a hike to the tallest mountain on this island (about 730 vertical metres hiked) and a brief, embarrassingly incompetent stint in one of the free rowboats the hostel hires. Tomorrow we head south towards Trondheim, but will probably have to stop for a night again, most likely somewhere in Mosjøen.

Land Of The Midnight Sun

Other than prepare for our upcoming hiking trip, we didn't achieve much in Stockholm. Mike mostly spent the time sleeping and I didn't have the enthusiasm for anything except putting in a token appearance at the bar across the road from the hostel. I did manage to smash my head quite badly against one of the bunks, but stemmed the bleeding pretty fast. We also managed to see Transformers, a movie I had heard a lot of good reports of, apparently from people who saw a different movie than we did. Come the Saturday evening, we boarded our 18 hour train for Abisko in Swedish Lappland. Alana (Mike's ex-girlfriend) and her friend Lauren were to join the train in Uppsala, not far north of Stockholm. It was a long trip, but I had ensured sleep by acquiring a Valium from a Mexican prescription-drug fiend in our hostel room. It certainly did the job, but I felt pretty awful after waking the next day and probably won't try that strategy again. We didn't arrive in Abisko until the afternoon, so we crashed at the hostel there overnight in preparation for beginning our hikes the next day.

We awoke late on the Monday morning and then Mike spent some time mercilessly repacking the girls' ludicrously overpacked bags. I packed very light, anticipating good facilities at the huts along the way. We eventually got underway at something like 2pm, but the late start wasn't a problem since there's daylight 24 hours a day. To ensure good morale, Mike had acquired a team uniform for us in New York City:




I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but my camera took a knock in Ireland and doesn't work. More accurately, the shutter button doesn't work. The rest of the camera works great, but having no shutter button makes taking photos a bit tricky. I'm therefore reliant on Mike at the moment for my photos.

We walked through relatively flat terrain the first day. The path was very well defined, and through boggy areas makeshift boardwalks had generally been constructed. A German guy later told us that Norwegians referred derisively to Swedish walking trails as "motorways". We walked a long way, though - around 35km, all the way to Alesjaure, the second "hut" along the Kungsleden, or King's Trail. They call them huts, but really they're hostels, complete with bunk beds, pillows, blankets, cooking facilities, a shop and so forth. Weather was excellent throughout the day, bright and sunny, right up until we reached Alesjaure at past midnight.

The next day Lauren felt a little ill, so we decided to have a rest day. Alana, Mike and I took advantage of the sauna.The idea was that after sweating for a while, you ran out and down a hill and jumped in the river. The problem was that the hill was too treacherous to run down, and the river was shallow and carpeted with very slippery stones at the point where you were supposed to jump in, so it wasn't really possible.

Next day we left the Kungsleden to head towards our next hut, Vistasvagge. It was an 18km walk through a valley lined with imposing mountains and even a small glacier or two. There were some patches of bad weather, but it wasn't too bad overall. The lowlight of the day was Mike leading us down the wrong path and us having to traipse across a swamp to correct our course, whereupon Lauren and I were both stung by some insect. I think it might be some sort of deer fly. It materialises out of the swamp, lands on your lower leg, bites you, and flies off. The whole process takes about half a second. Then the surrounding area goes red and stings like crazy for a few minutes. Justice was inflicted about half an hour later when Mike got stung twice after we got back on the path. After we reached Vistasvagge, Alana spent the night getting taught magic tricks by some 11 year old kid, while the rest of us just relaxed.

The third day hike started off with miserable weather, but things cleared up a bit after a while. We had to get up at 6am because the plan was to hike 20km and catch a boat a further 12km down to Nikkolotka at 12:30. The hike was unfortunately through some pretty boring territory. Towards the end the weather closed in again and the boat ride was incredibly cold, as it was like being blasted with 40kph winds while saturated and cold. Things didn't improve when we got to Nikkolotka and discovered that we had the time of our bus to Kiruna wrong and it had already left. We had a hire car to pick up, so we all hitchhiked into Kiruna and reconvened at the hire place. After discovering we'd hired a manual Toyota Aygo, we headed back to Abisko armed with pizza and wine and spent the night in a hostel there.

I'll write about Norway later, but for now it's just important to mention that I have started suffering from travel fatigue. I think visiting more new places just because I can would be a waste now, so after we return the car in Stockholm, I plan to go to Helsinki to hang out with some locals Mike knows, and then call it a day and fly back to Adelaide from there.

England

This one's easy. Apart from catch up with Emma and Waitey, and Bonnie from Planet, (and lose a bunch of money playing poker) I did absolutely nothing. It was great.

I'm now in Stockholm (first impressions: great) with Mike, and we're about to go sort out car hiring and some other stuff.

Also, as always, my Ireland pics have been put up on my Picasa page. The shutter button on my camera is broken, so I might be relying on Wes for pics from now on.

Ireland

What do I say about Ireland? I liked it a lot - the people are friendly and there's an air of jovial optimism throughout, even in the once-troubled North. I could give a blow by blow description of the tour I went on, but that would miss the point, I think. The tour was more of an immersion in the existing pub culture of Ireland and the ties the country and its people retain to their often turbulent history. I had a good group and it was probably my favourite tour that I've been on so far.

A couple of highlights, though - the magical Aran islands, where I enjoyed the hell out of biking up and down the island. I might have to get hold of a bike when I get home. Being in Derry on July 12th and having the infamous Orange Lodge parade march right past us was pretty crazy - ten (or even five) years ago, going anywhere near the thing would have been suicidal. This year, the riot police were out, but looking bored, and the worst we saw was some young teenagers throwing stones at a couple of buildings. Having spent a bit of time in the region, my personal opinion is that, similarly to Palestine, the Republicans had a just cause, but destroyed my sympathy for then by randomly setting off bombs everywhere.

I'd like to return to Ireland in the future and maybe spend some time in Dublin, but I wasn't sorry when the tour was over - it's hard to keep up that pace for long.

Italy

I hope I don't offend anyone with this, but this would have to be my least favourite country in Europe, so far anyway. The beer sucks. The food, at standard price points, sucks. Almost everything is broken and/or dirty. The people are rude, to each other and also to customers in restaurants and bars. It sort of combines the rudeness and poor service of some of Eastern Europe with the high prices and rampant tourism of the West. I know a lot of people love it, but I'm not sure why.

Still, I'm having a fine time, thanks to the hostels I've stayed at, which have been good enough that it doesn't matter what city they're located in. I've been three nights in Rome already and except for sightseeing and eating I haven't ventured outside the hostel at all.

Backing up a sec though, Florence was OK, but after I got over the great view of the campsite I was at (up by Piazzale Michelangelo, which is a must visit if you go to Florence) there wasn't a lot to do. It was hard to work up the enthusiasm to go out to bars in town when the hostel was a nice place to socialise with other backpackers. One day, however, I did daytrip to Cinque Terre, a World Heritage listed series of 5 little fishing towns along the western coast of Italy. I hiked the two and a half hour or so distance between them and it was really nice there. A highlight was taking a dip in the Mediterranean at the northernmost village, which is the prettiest.

By the way, I uploaded all my photos from the trip so far here, including the Intrepid photos and the ones from Cinque Terre etc. No time to comment on them really, but I recommend taking a look at the Bled and Cinque Terre photos.

After Florence I headed south to Rome and have been here for three nights. St Peter's Basilica managed to be simultaneously impressive and dull. All religious art looks the same and I'm incredibly sick of it. If I see one more painting of Mary holding the infant Jesus I may set it on fire. The Colosseum was better, although due to the unbelievable inefficiency of, well, everything in Italy, the line took about 5 years to get through and I felt going inside actually somehow made the structure LESS impressive. The imposing outer wall is the best angle on it, I think.

Anyway, being in Italy was bad enough, and writing huge blog posts about it is definitely not how I intend to spend my time. It's American Independence Day today so no doubt the Americans here will be in the mood to party. I'm flying to Ireland tomorrow, next dispatch will probably not be till after the 8 day tour I'm doing, which ends on the 14th.

Bohemia And Beyond

I stayed up all night dinking in Krakow the night before my early morning flight to Prague. I'll go off on a quick tangent here about something I love and something I hate about Europe.

Something I love: not only can you, as in the United States, buy liquor virtually anywhere, but you can consume said liquor anywhere you like. Walking along the street, in parks, on public transport, whatever. As with pot in Amsterdam, seeing this policy in operation makes me wonder why people expend so much effort preventing other people doing it. I suppose at worst it might lead to some broken glass in the streets (although this wasn't in evidence), to which the European response appears to be "Wear shoes, then".

Something I hate: charging money to use toilets. Public toilets are bad enough - there's nothing worse than fumbling with change in an unfamiliar currency when you're busting for a piss. On my last night in Krakow, however, I encountered my first pub which actually charged to use the pub toilets. The attitude seems to be that they can charge me for their beer both entering and leaving my body.

OK, end of tangent. After my flight to Prague I was pretty wrecked. I had a hostel bed booked so I headed directly there. When I booked my flights to Europe, my travel agent repeatedly inquired whether I was going to Prague. "You must," she insisted "stay in Czech Inn in Prague". I dutifully booked it, even though hostelworld.com had several other higher rated hostels. This is the last time I trust a random travel agent over hostelworld. It's not that it was a bad hostel. It was very slick and newly furnished, but this concealed some fundamental problems, the most glaring of which was the location. The normal tradeoff for an out of the way location is a quiet hostel. Czech Inn accomplished the difficult feat of being nowhere near anything useful, yet still located smack on a main road. My room was on the corner of the hostel facing the road. Given the hot weather, closing the windows was unthinkable, so they were wide open. The effect was as if there was a highway through the middle of the room. The traffic noise was thunderous and made sleeping tricky. Nevertheless, after my flight from Krakow, I slept fitfully until about 3:30pm, effectively writing off my first day.

The next day I daytripped out to Kutna Hora, a little town an hour or so out of Prague. The attraction there is the Kostnice Ossuary, a church decorated by an artist with bones dug up from around 20,000 people earlier buried in the church grounds. There's a chandelier built of bones and a huge Hungarian coat of arms made from bones.

The following day was the 16th, the first day of my Intrepid tour. After wasting a bunch of time doing laundry at a very inefficient laundromat, I checked in at the joining point. I knew already there were going to be 9 people on the tour. "Ah," said the lady from the accommodation agency "you must be Christopher". I was about to ask how the hell she knew that, when the most likely.explanation popped into my mind, and I lead forward and scanned the list of people on my tour. Yep. All females other than me. But it turned out that they weren't all "girls". There's no age limit for Intrepid trips, but it still surprised me a bit to learn that we had three women in their 60s on the trip. The other five girls were all normal backpacker age. But given the loose structure of the trip, my contact with the older ones was minimal, which was lucky since one of them was a total pain in the ass. There was also a trip leader (a Hungarian girl) and a trainee trip leader (an English guy, so actually I wasn't the only guy around). All the five younger girls were cool. Three of them (Ruth, Alison, Julie) were quietish, one of them (Julia) was a party girl and the other (Annie) was sort of in between.

There's no way I'm writing a blow by blow description of the whole tour, so here's some random stuff in point form. Pics will have to wait till I have time to upload them:

- Prague was nice, but I didn't have that killer a time there. I think that was probably just because I didn't know the good spots to go; Julia, from the tour, said she had an amazing time there.

- Cesky Krumlov was pretty, but there wasn't a whole lot to do.

- Vienna was good fun - we went to some nice bars there - and the architecture is incredibly grandiose. I found it a little amusing - it feels like they still think they're head of some immense empire, instead of basically being Germany's sidekick.

- Budapest was great. I can see where it gets its nickname "The Paris of Eastern Europe". It's kind of a cafe society, and capital of a country with a strong identity. The "House of Terror" museum here, featuring the crimes of the Nazis and (mostly) the Communists, is really good. It cost 10 million to build. We went to a great bar that was a converted auto mechanic shop. It was very atmospheric. It's a shame a place like that in Australia would be shut down by some stupid health and safety law. We also got caught in the most insane storm in Budapest. It was a nice, sunny day, if a little humid. Then - wham! Out of the sky comes a huge, tropical-type storm. Hail got whipped into us by ferocious winds. Then the rain came, and it was like running along the bottom of a lake. We got completely saturated.

- Bled was amazing. The scenery and atmosphere in the town itself was brilliant, but the main thing was the full day adventure tour we went on. When I say full day, I mean it - 8am to 7:30pm. It's called the "Emerald Mountain Adventure" and involves getting driven around to different places in the Julian Alps. At some we hiked a little up mountains, at one place we went to see the spring source of a river, we went whitewater rafting, we swam under a waterfall, we jumped off a 12 metre high bridge into a river.... all for only 88 euro, so pretty good value. The Julian Alps are brilliant countryside and the Slovenians we met (admittedly in a tourist town) were the nicest people I've met in Eastern Europe. I was strongly considering quitting the tour in Bled and staying for two extra nights, but nobody would stay there with me, so I instead resolved to return later and have a good look round Slovenia, including the capital Ljubljana and the cave systems and so forth.

- Venice was pretty much exactly what I expected - a town thoroughly whored out to busloads full of middle-aged sightseers. The portion of the streets not occupied by slack-jawed Americans was covered with stalls hawking all manner of useless souvenir rubbish, plus immigrants thrusting roses into the hands of passing girls and demanding payment from their boyfriends. The Piazza San Marco and Grand Canal are worth seeing, though, so I think it's worth calling in to the place, but you definitely don't want to stay longer than a night.

I'm in Verona at the moment, having spent last night in a hotel here with Julie and Annie from the tour. Today I'm headed to Florence. My trip plan from there is: 27th-30th Florence (including a daytrip to Pisa/Cinque Terre, and maybe one to Sienna), 1st-4th Rome, then I'm flying to Dublin on the 5th and joining an 8-day Shamrocker tour around Ireland starting on the 7th. That finishes on Saturday the 14th, just in time for me to fly to London and go to a house party at Emma and Waitey's. Then I'm staying in London until the 19th, when I'm meeting Doecke and we're flying to Stockholm, where a day or two later we meet up with Alana and her friend Lauren and go hiking in the north of Sweden.