I arrived at Oslo airport the afternoon before Kay flew in the next morning, so I stayed at an airport hotel where I had to deal with a serious crisis. The host of our Airbnb in Oslo had stopped communicating with me which meant I had no instructions about how to get in, or if the place was actually available. I ended up talking with a very caring Airbnb customer service person who spoke rather quickly, and was not keen on cancelling the contract without giving the host a 12 hour chance to reply. I needed them to cancel it so I could get back all the money I had paid. That meant when I greeted Kay in Arrivals I had no idea where we would be that night, or what we could do with our bags for the day. Back in the airport hotel I finally got to talk with another caring Airbnb person who happily cancelled the deal and promised a full refund. The replacement hotel cost was nearly three times the refund, but at least we had somewhere to head for. When invited to review the non-stay I was rather critical. The response from the suddenly literate owner was that her life had been ruined by Airbnb and she was suing them.
We did a walking tour the next morning and the guide was not a Norwegian, as was also the case in the other two we did in the country. He was of Indian and Portuguese parents and boy, could he talk. But very interestingly, especially about the collective psyche of Norwegians. As he pointed out they are not big on what we would regard as social communication. If you look for eye contact they almost flinch, and I have enjoyed proving that correct. There is a fair degree of uniformity in appearance, but the odd Goth is seen. Young men usually have a hair style that is floppy in the front with a centre divide, like the Romantic poets such as Keats, so in moments of anguish or excitement they they can push their hair back in an expression of their emotions. But we haven’t found any problems in dealing with locals, who are seemingly interested that we have come from so far away, and if they haven’t been to NZ they want to.
It is a pity that you can easily work out what Norwegian money is in $NZ, by dividing by six. It took me eight days to stop being horrified at the cost of everything, after that time I was able to tell myself that it didn’t matter, and stopped telling Kay how much things really cost. Having been forewarned by plenty of you who had been there, my preparation was to buy a big bottle of gin on the way in and not buy wine for post daily exploring recuperation. Unfortunately, my limited experience of pouring and drinking spiritous liquor meant I was a bit heavy-handed for a few days, and the level of available gin diminished quite quickly. Adjustments were made and it lasted twelve days. I don’t know if that is good or bad, but I must admit that g&t is quite nice.
Oslo is a nice civilised city. I like trams, and it has plenty. We had one of those city cards that included local transport, so did a few random circuits and ended up with a degree of competence in getting about. In order to get our money’s worth from the cards we went to lots of museums and my favourites were about the Kon Tiki and a cold place exploration ship called the Fram. I knew a bit about both and it’s nice learning more. The Norwegians are quite polite about Scott, of the nearly South Pole, and when you see how Amundsen planned and executed his successful attempt they have plenty to feel smug about. A professional versus an amateur.
The plan on leaving Oslo was a train to the place starting with M where you change to the Flam railway and curl your way down to sea level, then a bus to Bergen. The night before leaving, advice was received that the bus couldn’t go all the way because of road works, and that last part would be by a later train. The train from Oslo got progressively late but we were reassured the Flam one would wait for us, and it did. It’s a great little train ride with big, big country, steep sides, waterfalls, great engineering, and ends up in a tourist trap. So we were keen to get the bus after a couple of hours. Obviously the roadworks were causing a bit of chaos because twice we put our bags into the luggage hold of a bus with the right number and destination, only to be told we were on the next one. We were not alone, and a collective angst was perceptible, even a little anger. When we finally got on the replacement train to Bergen there was a big enough crowd to overflow the available seats and I could see this would happen so we were purposeful and got seated. This train had several delays, each explained, the last being because there was a fire ahead. That announcement was at least more interesting than the others.
We did the obligatory fjord cruise from Bergen. I thought it was fine but not sensational. If Norwegians were not so phlegmatic those in this city might protest about the number of tourists, because it looked like a smaller version of Barcelona to me. On our first night after the late arrival the nearest eating place we found was called Angry Bite, a falafel joint where other hungry tourists included a Nvidia and a Tesla employee. It was fun asking questions of them, the Tesla lady being quite skeptical about some of her boss’s ideas.
Kay has been in charge of city activities and she has an interesting predilection for medical museums, so we had to go to the Leprosy Museum. It was an old wooden building, specially built in the 1800s, and seemed to me more like a jail than a hospital which is probably not a coincidence. This city has a household rubbish collection system I have never seen before. There are neighborhood places where you use your provided token to open the lid of a cylinder and put in rubbish that can be incinerated, and it is then sucked away via an underground pipe system to the city incinerator. Doing it appeared complicated for non-Norwegian people, and not wanting to break anything, we slid our rubbish into normal rubbish bins.
Bergen has a nice tram line out to its airport, although they call it light rail. From there we had the first of three short flights northwards to Trondheim, Tromsø, and Hammerfest where we had two nights in each. Trondheim accommodation was an Airbnb with a very small bedroom, Tromsø a hotel called Smarthotel (a chain to be avoided) which had the smallest room we have ever stayed in, and Hammerfest was a nice hotel with, incomprehensively, the smallest bathroom ever, when there was plenty of space for something larger. To sit on the toilet in a normal straight forward position you had to slide under the basin. I adopted an angled approach.
Although each flight wasn’t all in clear skies I really enjoyed looking at such interesting country from above. Norway appears to be one big rock that has been severely glaciated then partly flooded. Every view had sea, lakes, precipitous drops, and naked or snow covered rocks. Add in fringes of scrubby bush and a little agricultural land, plus the odd settlement, and that got repeated as we went north. Each of these cities was smaller than the one before and a bit colder. Trondheim had a lot of students and the male students all had the same hair do. A waitress in a fancy Tromsø restaurant was delighted to meet someone from NZ, and showed us her pounamu pendant from Greymouth. The main street has been turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare with heating under the paving to stop people skidding over when it’s icy. Hammerfest is rather small and the Hurtigruten cruise ship only stays there a couple of hours. It turned up while we were out walking to a local UNESCO site and we just got in and out before a bus load of passengers turned up to spoil things. There are reindeer wandering about as can be seen by evidence on the footpaths, and it was nice to wake up and see a couple on the grass outside our room. We went to the Reconstruction Museum which mainly dealt with the WW2 destruction that the Germans inflicted on northern Norway when they retreated. Basically they burnt and destroyed every town and Hammerfest was literally burnt to the ground. In the postwar years Norway was a poor country so rebuilding was not a straightforward operation. Now 70-80 years on they are trying to strike a balance between keeping the architecture of those days and dealing with buildings that are approaching the end of their useful life. But the best thing is we have now stayed above the Arctic Line in the northern most town in the world. And it was mostly sunny.
Norway is presently one of the richest countries due to the oil bonanza that started in the 60s. They have been very practical knowing that the wealth has to be conserved, as when the oil is gone, going back to fishing and a little agriculture won’t work very well. At present their two national funds are in total worth close to $US400,000 for each person, and if you want to see how many zeroes that is in total, multiply by 5.6 million, the country’s population. The country can afford to be generous to its citizens, and is, but tax levels are not low. One of its policies is to be the greenest country in the world and electric cars are subsidised, with a permanent ban on combustion engines in 10 years, I think, and a similar deal on cruise ships visiting. All financed by oil – interesting combination isn’t it.
Financially I have had to move with the times, and after a few small problems with my Wise card and strange card terminals, I now flash my phone about and magic happens as money flows away in this cashless society. I also have slowly gained some confidence about not always having a paper copy of tickets. But I do wonder what sort of a disaster it would be to go completely paperless and then lose your phone. (I don’t travel with any other device.) In Tromsø Airport we were faced with even more daunting progress. There was no one to check us in or deal with our bags. We had to navigate two systems, which Kay did with aplomb, and then watch our lonely bags automatically disappear along the conveyor belt. They reappeared in the little Hammerfest airport, which was an eight minute taxi ride away from our hotel. NZ$50.
Our last stop in Norway was east and then south in a bus, four hours, to Karasjok. This was the only bus ride I could not book in advance, and given there were only five people on it when we left my very small concerns were certainly misplaced. The main indigenous people in Norway are the Sami, who are across the north of Scandinavia and into Russia. In Norway they got a tough time after Norway’s independence in 1905, language suppressed and all the usual colonial nasty behaviour. But the culture remained strong, attitudes changed, and now they have their own parliament in Karasjok and basically have cultural independence. They used to be reindeer herders but not much of that happens now. You can buy lots of socks and gloves with Sami patterns on them, but I did cynically wonder if they weren’t made somewhere east of Sami country. We made a visit to the parliament which apparently has 25,000 registered voters and 39 MPs, and a very smart building to meet in. Essentially it is an advisory only institution, but more interestingly, they are very aware of the Maori political situation in NZ. The man from the parliament that showed us around said they had close relationships with them, and a Sami lady in the local arts centre said she really wanted to complete her studies in "Aotearoa". She reckoned she could usually pick a Sami person from a Norwegian but to the untrained tourist there is no obvious physical difference.
Next stop is in Finland. To finish with I am told to tell you Kay’s most useful travelling tip – when a door in your accommodation squeaks and wakes up your partner in the early hours, apply the provided shampoo to the noisy hinge or catch. It seems as effective as CRC.
Adjo.
Dennis.
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Hamilton 3210
New Zealand
johnscons
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