Welcome to Vilnius

Photos: Ragnar Scheen

You can look, but while you might find seasons in the politics you won’t find politics in the seasons.

Autumn: the tracks appeared to trace a stream below, or several but as the train meandered along hillsides direction was difficult to contemplate.  The morning was reluctant and the wooded valleys were almost drained of colour.  In the yellow of the last leaves and the low grasses was a sense of farewell to the year; and while the white of the birch trunks had momentarily gained prominence and the first snow must’ve fallen by then, winter’s renovation remained awaited.  Primarily it was a landscape descending into brown, into the darkness of pine and wooden Belarusian villages.  It was the story of a border lost somewhere too in the season.

It was rather in the speed of the train, in the slowing, the pausing and the chugging along a little further that the border was at first suggested, as though there might be a schedule to the crossing.  Only when it seemed that the wood and the hillside might stretch beyond the autumn did other evidence appear.  It came in the unlikely form of low concrete posts, set among the trees in pairs, like statues of a long ago out-of-love couple meeting in the forest for old time’s sake, or perhaps to collect wood for the fire of their old age.  In each pair the nearer was painted red and green, for Belarus, while its mate was white with the feature of stripes in yellow, green and red: the stripes of Lithuania.  That old couple came near and withdrew: like the train the border held no steady course.

And it is possible to try to protect the blessings of the past from the uncertainties of the future.  And it is possible to try to safeguard the future from the ravages of the past.

In a pause in the forest the Belarusian guards boarded, to see that the passenger had all he papers they could wish for, including hotel receipts to account for every night in the country.  Beyond the post-couple the Lithuanians boarded, but for them the passport checking felt more as an afterthought, a ‘suppose we should know who is coming into the country.’  Perhaps their preference might more naturally have been to sleep longer, under the blanket away from autumn.

But a passport with a kangaroo on its cover was as the yellow leaves in the woods, it brought a slight energy with it, surprised as they were to see it.  Enquiries were made, assurances came that no visa was required.  Somebody official must’ve checked a nationality list.

The Vilnius station, not an hour from the border, sits upon a hill with the centre of the old town in the cobblestone capital in a small valley below.  There are about 500,000 people in Vilnius, 3 million in Lithuania.

I trailed the other passengers moving down into damp streets.  While for many, they must’ve been coming home; while for others, they must’ve been there a thousand times before: I was busy not knowing where I was going, taking in the charms of history as recorded in the buildings as I followed a random road.  Church spires multiplied as the valley city took over.

Too, I was busy contemplating the need for a scientist, how to, in a new place, locate a pathologist in a diagnostic centre.  It’s not that I’d befallen any illness, fortunately.  I required no tests and indeed it wasn’t just any pathologist that would do.  I needed one called Rita.

Lithuania has a long history.  They say its language is of the Baltic branch and related to Latvian, and that it’s the most conservative language in Europe, the one that’s evolved the least from the Sanskrit roots of the Indo-European language family.  They say there’s a village in Lithuania’s north called Indija, where local linguistic peculiarities have some commonality with languages still spoken in Pakistan’s Baltistan.

Once, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe, with territory stretching to the Black Sea.  And in 1991 the country made its mark on history again, as the first Soviet republic to declare independence, a move that cost the lives of 14 Lithuanians when the Soviet Army attacked the Vilnius TV Tower.  But the movement had history’s blessing.  The Soviet break-up started in Lithuania.

In a way it was that transition that paved the way for my need of a pathologist.  When the borders opened, a Norwegian friend of mine Ragnar was sent to the country on business.  As that business over the years developed so did his passion for Lithuania.  He took the country into his heart or maybe it captured him.  But beyond business he contributed in various ways, to promote modernity and development.  He’d taken an apartment in Vilnius and although he wasn’t arriving until the following day I was lucky, because a pathologist called Rita held for me the keys.

I kept in mind my general luck too in finding new addresses in unknown cities.  I kept my eyes on the works of art that were the buildings of the old town.  I took in the signs of each snaking alleyway just as the signs of autumn had taken in me.  There were Northern European style shops playing American background music.  I saw proper supermarkets with metal poles outside to tie your pet dog to.  There were large bookstores, music stores and cafés. 

Although I missed Ukraine already, where I’d been living that year; although I enjoyed Belarus, memories stirred.  It was as though in Vilnius I’d arrived back into a happy Northern European past.  All the same, should a chimney sweep have passed by on the street it wouldn’t have seemed altogether out of place.

There may have been queries with people on the street but I found the alleyway I needed.  Soon I was sitting opposite Rita-in-a-white-lab-coat and drinking a cup of coffee.  There was a book open on the desk between us with multicoloured microscope pictures on its pages.  I wondered how to diagnose my being there: I doubt there are multicoloured microscope pictures that can do that.  Perhaps it was simply the autumn that had taken me in that direction.  Rita picked up the phone and dialled Norway.

When she was able to, she whisked me across the city by car, to Ragnar’s apartment: open-plan, modern and with that wooden, pine-type smell that can easily remind one of Oslo.  It had a peaked wooden roof with no ceiling and on the table was a note, in Norwegian, to me.  ‘Welcome to Vilnius,’ it read, ‘Try the beer in the fridge.  Lithuanian beer is good.’  In retrospect I’d say it was probably the most modern accommodation I’d had for the best part of a year.

The apartment was an art gallery: a fish swimming from a rafter, wooden angels over there and of course, candles everywhere.  I surveyed the room and found again that smile that had been with me since I’d left Belarus, the re-finding of a different Northern European dimension to life.

Ragnar arrived from Oslo the next day.  It was the first time we’d met in five and a half years.  We spoke English, then Norwegian once again, and the hardest part was the ‘yes’, the rediscovering an automatic Norwegian ‘ja, ja, ja’ to replace the Russian ‘da, da, da’ I’d picked up in East Ukraine, although I was never skilled at Russian.

We found a restaurant some floors below street level, in a ‘mind your head’ type of cellar.  They served sausages by the half-metre and beer in tall glasses, by the metre.  We walked around the castle and up the hill to the historic three white crosses that were destroyed in the Soviet era but were rebuilt when the politics turned.

And in the evening we walked to the end of the street to find a forest overlooking a river.  It was a landscape descending into brown, at that time of the year.

------------------------------------------------

“Look! From the glowing west, forceful and angry winds

Are eastward moving with ferocious, headlong haste,

And bringing biting frosts to our Lithuania dear.

My friends, let’s to the house and build a glowing blaze.”[1]

-         From the poem Metai, or The Seasons, by Kristijonas Donelaitis.  This epic poem from about 1765 is considered the first classical piece of fiction written in the Lithuanian language.  From the third part of the poem, ‘Autumn Boon’.

Stay Happily Baltic, with Latvia or Estonia!

Retire eastwards back to Belarus.

Or go for the tropics in Trinidad!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Welcome to Vilnius

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[1] English translation of the poem is here: http://members.efn.org/~valdas/autumn.html

Zero Point

Sunrise over the Nitelva

Continued from here…

Besides, just as the heart might be found unexpectedly inhabiting some distant delta, the cogs of the brain might turn their first in a snowy land. 

In the free hours in those initial weeks in Norway, at the zero point, I’d taken to exploring and found that up the street from the Rælingen house suburban Oslo gave way to open country which at the time of year was decked white.  There were deep pockets in the landscape of fields and in one I found an impressive oak tree.  Against the grey skies of the Eastland the stem patterns seemed to mimic the shades and arcs of light in the house and the flicker of the candles.

There was a small pine forest and having grown up in a land of eucalypts I was excited to clamber through it, up the icy slopes with a leg occasionally falling deep into a random hole of snow.  I had all the wonder that Bangladeshis do when they say they’d one day like to see snow, and touch it.

Lillestrøm Town Centre

I was wrong about Gunborg and Olav.  Theirs was not a bingo existence; the Rælingen house was no retirement village.  Perhaps I appreciated that best in the summer, because although I was staying in the Westland by then I continued to visit whenever I had the chance to reach Oslo again.  To my astonishment, that summer Olav sprang about the lawn in his sports outfit.  He leapt and stretched as we played the badminton he’d proposed.  It was tiring.

They were members of a swimming club so we’d swum; they liked to walk so we went to see the wild birds in the river flats a little to the south of Lillestrøm town.  They were members of a pensioner’s ski club and one day we all went cross country skiing.  I was part of a team with an octogenarian leader and all other participants over seventy.  There must’ve been at least some arthritis for them to contend with, but the pace was altogether suitable for an Australian skiing novice.  Maybe it was really me who was seventy.

Meanwhile the oak tree had been busily changing its dress, not into a sports outfit but donning a light green hairdo for spring, a mature deep green summer crown and a short-lived autumn cloak of yellow and brown.  It wasn’t only Gunborg and Olav I came to visit in every season, but the equally active oak tree.

But I get ahead of myself.  In the initial days Gunborg and Olav, ironically, spent some amount of energy concerned that I was bored, despite my saying I wasn’t.  They proposed the museum trips and the National Theatre for a play.   They organised for me to spend one weekend with their eldest son Torgrim and his family; but unfortunately, because of the language difficulties, I hadn’t understood that plan.  Just as we were leaving there was a sudden fussing because I hadn’t packed any clothes.  I had no idea I needed to.

When it became apparent I wasn’t going back with them on the same day, I was quite upset about it, though I said nothing.  I thought I must’ve done something wrong.  I was sure they were bored with me.  And I don’t know what their son thought because I was sullen and consumed in thoughts about what bad and probably Australian thing I might’ve unthinkingly done.  It was only when we went down to their tennis court on the next day that it properly dawned on me, that they thought I would enjoy the change.  Their son’s wife Frøydis asked, ‘Didn’t you bring your tennis shoes?  Didn’t they tell you we’d be playing tennis?’  So I played tennis, embarrassed, in bare feet.

Eventually I challenged the Nitelv.  With courage built I followed footprints through the snow covering the ice of the river, thinking I could turn back if the tracks suddenly stopped by a hole; yet without incident I reached the far side.  My Australian parents would’ve been more than a little concerned; but Gunborg had watched calmly from her kitchen window.  She knew the exact temperature from the thermometer affixed outside the glass pane and from past days she knew the ice was thick.

Walking on ice was a skill to learn, not only on the Nitelv but on the footpaths too; and it came in handy, later, in Hatiya, when fearlessly negotiating the muddy back roads of the monsoon.  There’s something similar about the stepping lightly and placing your body weight with care.

There was one morning they managed to tell me to be sure to take warm clothes as it was six degrees.  I thought I must’ve misunderstood.  Six degrees was hardly that cold: a winter’s night in Sydney might be as low.  I asked several times and surely they were saying ‘six’.  Pleased, I thought I might escape the full horse of clothes and sneak away to class in just a jumper; but I didn’t make it three steps.  In winter Norwegians don’t always vocalise the minus in the temperatures, I learnt. 

Of all meals in Rælingen breakfast was my favourite.  We ate slices of brown bread with paté and gherkins, herring in tomato sauce, Gunborg’s homemade apple jam, cold meats and cheeses: there was Jarlsberg with the holes, ‘key’ cheese with the little crunchy brown pieces in it, goat’s cheese and the soft caramel tasting brown cheese for which Norway is famous.  We’d swallow a teaspoon of cod liver oil washed down with milk, orange juice or filter coffee. 

The evenings shared were often given to pointing at things, with me repeating the Norwegian name; not unlike what would later occur in the tea shops of Hatiya as the villagers taught Bangla.  Sometimes we used dictionaries and Gunborg made sure there was a pad by the kitchen table to supplement with doodles the communication struggle.  I practiced the basic phrases from class and learnt new vocabulary.  They also asked things: Olav once enquired if when one had had enough to eat it was possible to say, ‘no thanks, I’m fed up.’  It was the dictionary that divulged why Gunborg’s food was as it was: she’d spent her working life as a home economics teacher.

And it was truly remarkable to have these new, varied and detailed Norwegian memories.  I’d even seen Ingrid from their optometrist business, a tradition their younger sons had continued, appear on a love match TV game show and I hoped she’d find someone nice.  It was strange that I cared about anything so specific occurring at the far end of the world.

I used to wonder about the simplest differences: the thoughts behind the habits and the décor of Rælingen.  Why was the Norwegian concept of how a room should be altogether different?  How had light taken its Norwegian meaning?  What of more complex ideas? 

It is the caveman drawings of my thoughts I write of, the zero point.  Thoughts are culture shaped and predictable most of the time; they’re barely ours.  But in Norway there were thoughts in the curtains, in the spreading of butter upon bread and in the lacing up of boots by the door: new thoughts to be had, everywhere.  And those first days in Rælingen were for my thinking as the fabled first primeval steps of prehistoric animals, from the swamp onto the land.

Sometimes I consider that although my body had been born in Sydney eighteen years earlier, my thoughts are creatures of the icicles that crunched underfoot and dangled from the lampposts at old Fornebu Airport, in Oslo, on that first evening when I met Olav. 

As it happened, like the Brahmaputra's, my journey started with ice.

** Photos from later visit in Autumn 2006.



And speaking of the Clauses, there's no forgetting the brave fisherman, the mother bear from Goldilocks or the riders from the north.




This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Zero Point

Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway

To Stockholm, Express

Goteborg (Gothenburg) Central Station, photo:wikipedia

To the north, to the north! There could be no delay if we wished to fulfil our plans and make it on time for the Stockholm-bound train.  It was simple: from Horsens in Denmark we’d only have to transverse Jutland, navigate the Kattegat, arrive in Sweden and hey presto! 

More specifically, we’d catch a train north to Aarhus, do a little sightseeing, take a second train north to Frederikshavn, change for a bus to Skagen, see that, take the bus back to Frederikshavn and be in time for the ship to cross the Kattegat to Göteborg in Sweden.  Once there it’d only be a matter of making our way from the port to the train station for the night service to the Swedish capital.  It was all timetabled.  It was the plan.  What were we thinking?

Perhaps the focus was on the train at the end.  Perhaps I was imagining sleeping cars with polished brass handles, with cheery blue-capped conductors to welcome us in Swedish, with fluffy pillows and starched creaseless white sheets on the berth, with complimentary snacks on the small table in the carriage, all just waiting for our arrival.  With a mere six changes of transport along the way, what could possibly prevent us from waking up, well-rested, to the beauty of Stockholm on the following morning?

My school friend Lachlan and I were eighteen, we had the energy, so what did it matter if our travel plans were ambitious?  Besides, the point of counting on the night train was that it doubled as accommodation which suited our budget of almost zero. 

With an eye on the clock, we knew that hesitation would mean failure.

To the north, to the north! The first train stopped a little too often but it did take us the first forty kilometres to Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus.   The city features the world’s oldest open air museum, called the Old Town, which is a collection of more than seventy buildings built between 1550 and the late nineteenth century and moved there from various locations across Denmark.  We walked in haste, took photographs and visited each of the exhibits, from clocks to silverware; and we thought of Hans Christian Anderson, quickly.  Set in a pleasant garden it would’ve been nice to stay a while: but apart from on the clocks there was no time.

Aarhus Old Town.  Photo: wikipedia

The second train, 143 kilometres to Frederikshavn became in actuality the second and third trains as we had to change in Aalborg.  We checked the ferry times for Sweden and raced to get the bus for the thirty-two kilometres to Skagen.

To the north, to the north!  In Denmark, there’s no further north one can go than Skagen.  The very tip of the Jutland Peninsula, Skagen is said to be where two seas, the Skagerrak and Kattegat, meet.  Both parts of the entrance to the Baltic Sea from the North Sea, across the former is Norway while across the latter is Sweden; and where they actually meet is a long sand spit with water on both sides.  The spit is called Grenen, meaning ‘the branch’ and it’s the very end of Denmark.  There, waves from the one crash against the waves of the other, as if Norway and Sweden were having a perpetual water fight with Denmark the international observer.  The problem was the sand spit was 4.5 kilometres from Skagen bus stop; but we had energy so we half-jogged there and back, sweating, sweating, with just a few minutes to take photographs and catch our breath at the junction of the seas.  It would’ve been nice to stay a while, but enough looking already: we’ll miss the boat, we’ll miss the boat!

To the east, this time, for the north!  We were just in time for the day’s last ferry to Göteborg.  The vessel was large and modern, and wasn’t it fun to be leaving one country to arrive in another just ninety kilometres away?

We’d done well, I remarked, having made the first five planned transport connections, with just one remaining.  These were words spoken in haste.

It wasn’t only Denmark we’d left behind but also the sun which had fallen unceremoniously into one or other of the seas.  Sweden was dark.  Still, all was not lost.  The train left at a late hour.  There was time to find the station; and fortunately the train was waiting when we arrived.  Surely it was not as nice as I’d imagined it but surely it looked every bit as nice after the hectic day.  In any case it didn’t matter.

The train was sold out. 

Suddenly stranded, we asked at a few hotels but the room rates seemed astronomical, so we wondered if we couldn’t just wait at the station until morning.  The night was more than half done by then.  What’s more there seemed to be other stranded passengers reclining on the benches, preparing for sleep, inside the glass-enclosed terminal area.  The problem: by the time we returned the glass enclosed area was locked.  It must’ve been for passenger safety; and would’ve been ideal had we been inside.

What to do? What to do?  As it happened, Göteborg railway station was undergoing some renovations and just around the corner from the glassed-in area were a few other benches in what was really part of the construction site.  It hadn’t looked appealing initially.  It was a bit dark that side; but as our eyelids grew heavier we first sat, then lay, and finally dozed off, a bit away from the rest of Sweden. 

As it happened I awoke to the sound of a dog barking and footsteps and a torch being shone about, here and there.  It was scary.  Fortunately it was just the security guard and he didn’t seem bothered that we were borrowing the benches for a bit.  Fortunately his German shepherd was on a leash.

The worst was yet to come.

It can’t have been much beyond first light when I woke, stretched and looked about.  Everything seemed a bit shivery, a bit achy, but otherwise fine; until my gaze fell upon the adjacent bench where Lachlan had been sleeping.  The bench was empty!  I told myself not to panic.  It didn’t work.  My mind was racing.  I pictured explaining to his parents, describing exactly how it was that their son had vanished!  It was probably only for several minutes but it felt as hours, until….

There he was!  Sound asleep on another bench inside the enclosed glass area.  I tried the door and found it open: I think it’d actually been open the whole time.  Breathing heavily with relief, I thought not to wake him and found another bench inside, where thankfully there was heating, for although it was summer the night had been chilly, and went back to sleep.

I got my revenge.  When he woke again a little later he went to the bench where I’d been sleeping to find it empty!  His turn to picture a little awkward conversation with my parents!  ‘I last saw him on a bench in the construction site area at the train station in Göteborg…..’

I’d thought not to wake you, Lachlan explained, as we sat consumed by the Swedish countryside, exhausted, on the day train bound for Stockholm.  The train engine sounded: to the north, to the north, to the north.  And we fell asleep….

Lesson one: when in Denmark and Sweden take the time to enjoy it.  Lesson two: a train station is not suitable accommodation.  And I promised myself I’d never sleep at a train station again.  And I never did, unless of course you count that one time in Bucharest.

The End of Denmark at Skagen.  Photo: wikipedia

Of course 'fast' is not the only way to travel.  There is also rugged, over-the-mountains travel and moderately-long-ship-journey travel and back-and-forth-sort-of-time travel.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: To Stockholm, Express

Ice and Warm

‘I have lost my origin
And I don't want to find it again
Whether sailing into nature's laws
And be held by ocean's paws

Wanderlust! relentlessly craving
Wanderlust! peel off the layers
Until we get to the core’

                                                                                   

                                                                        - by Björk, from ‘Wanderlust’

Hurtigruten in Port

The sea was ink, black enough not to need night, which befit because there was none.  The boat had seemed altogether larger when things had been calm; but now it listed painfully, one side then the other; charting the seismic turmoil of the sea and my stomach.  It was cold: a few minutes in that icy water and death would find me.  Nobody could survive that.  I hoped the biting air would refocus attention, stave off the actual vomiting.  Being the only fool to be outside in that turbulence I sang loudly songs invented in Sydney with a friend when we were kids; not least about feeling warm.  The howling wind was my only audience.  Feeling warm: it was summer after all, but this was the Arctic Ocean. I hoped to make it through to the Vardø port.

I was eighteen then and living as an exchange student in Norway; six months into the year.  It was summer holidays and my Norwegian father had some business to attend to in Tromsø, in the country’s far north.  I could go if I wished, he’d said, to see more of Norway; he’d shout the plane fare but I’d have to look after myself when we got there because his schedule was hideous.  We’d jetted into Tromsø, 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and found the midrange hotel he’d booked.  Norway is expensive: it’s not something I could have afforded.

Winter nights and summer days are long in all of Norway but in Tromsø for approximately two months in deep winter the sun never finds the ambition to rise and for two months in high summer it never bothers to set.  Surely these are symptoms of depression?  Like a vagabond the summer sun restlessly travels the sky, dipping nearly to the horizon in the west before reconsidering, itching, scratching and reaching upwards again, only to, twelve hours later, similarly dip towards the east.  The summer sun is indecisive and insincere.

Tromsø is sprinkled about the sides of its fjord like chocolate decorations on a cake.  There’s a modest arched bridge spanning the water and the angular, layered Arctic Cathedral in white, sitting by the fjord’s edge like an iceberg.  But it’s that matter of light that brings the tourists, in winter to experience the sheets of the aurora borealis in the long night and in summer to see the midnight sun.

There was a cluster of tourists assembled on that minor mountaintop, still snow-dusted, to the north of Tromsø city.  Like the others I’d found a place to sit and gaze out towards the sun, now and then checking the small alarm clock I’d brought.  I’ve rarely been one for watches.  There were two elderly ladies nearby, Norwegian pensioners.  It was more than eleven thirty p.m. and as we waited for midnight we chatted. 

I remember those ladies because after a good while of Norwegian chitchat and under precisely what circumstances I do not recall I had to point out to them that I wasn’t Norwegian.  I needed to say it!  One of the ladies was quite shocked, explaining that from my speech she had no inkling I wasn’t a national.  The other said she’d thought there might’ve been a slight accent.  It was the first time I’d accidentally pulled off a good slab of the language without my foreign-ness being detected.  And with that, enough minutes had passed.  Just above the horizon, it was: the midnight sun.

Sami Lady

In the old days the small towns and fishing villages of the Norwegian Arctic were isolated; they still are.  In yesteryears there was a greater reliance on ships to bridge the distances and connect those communities to the wider world.  The Hurtigruten or ‘Express Route’ started in 1893 as a postal and cargo ship that sailed northwards from Norway’s second city Bergen, for more than two thousand kilometres and six days to reach the remote town of Kirkenes, by Norway’s short border with Russia. 

The Hurtigruten fleet still runs, though these days it caters as well to tourists.  With the popularity of the trip the size of the ships has grown and most of the fleet are more akin to luxury liners than to their smaller wooden ancestors.  With my Norwegian father occupied in Tromsø I’d decided to take the Hurtigruten across Norway’s Arctic scalp to Kirkenes, in itself a few days’ journey.

Skjervøy, Øksfjord, Havøysund, Honningsvåg: some of the scattered towns and villages where the ship would dock to unload and reload, with minutes or hours to walk around onshore.  In Hammerfest is the headquarters of the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society; on Magerøya is the North Cape with its distinctive metallic globe statue, a place celebrated as the northernmost point of continental Europe.  This part of Scandinavia is home to the indigenous Sami people, traditional reindeer herders with colourful national dress and quite moving drum-and-throat style songs.

In Norway’s north the tree line, the height above which trees cannot grow, usually associated with mountain tops, is reduced by the latitude to zero metres.  The cold makes the tree’s sap freeze; the permafrost prevents roots from growing.  In Norway’s north the tallest plant life consists of the rock-clinging mosses the reindeer eat.  But in Vardø the townspeople have tried to grow a handful of trees: in winter they are boarded up and heated, occasionally they have blossomed in the short summer season, sometimes despite the human care the trees perished regardless.

Reindeer

While I thought the Arctic Ocean was rough the day I reached Vardø on the way to Kirkenes, on the following day, when I waited by the wharf for the following Hurtigruten ship, I knew I had been lucky.  The passengers from this second ship, as they stepped off in Vardø looked shaken and stunned.  I asked what the matter was: the sea had been so rough people had been thrown out of their cabin beds.

On finally reaching Kirkenes I was exhausted.  Norway is expensive so I’d not been able to buy a cabin on the ship, just a ticket with nowhere to properly sleep before Vardø; and I’d economised on food.  Those were ‘packet of chips and glass of water for dinner’ days: what was of greater importance, money or seeing things?  In Kirkenes I found a hotel for the night which was a bit expensive for me, but I took in because it included breakfast the next morning, between seven and nine a.m. and I looked forward to that.  By early evening I was asleep.

On waking I felt utterly refreshed.  I knew it had been many hours.  Searching around in my bag I found the alarm clock, and to my horror it was already eleven.  I had missed the breakfast hour!  There was nothing to do about it so I packed up and headed out into the street, hoping to see a bit of the town before my flight back to Tromsø to meet my Norwegian father. 

I was quite a way down the main street, still disappointed that I’d missed breakfast, when I noticed something odd.  The main street of Kirkenes was almost deserted and all the shops were closed.  Surely they should have been open by eleven.  And then it dawned on me: twenty-four hours of daylight!  It was only eleven p.m.  Laughing at myself I returned to the hotel, went back to bed and got up, this time in time for breakfast.

I must have stayed at many hundreds of hotels over the years, houses, tents; slept on buses, trains, planes and boats.  The accommodation on my return to Tromsø was unique.  I’d gone back as planned to the nice hotel where my Norwegian father was staying, and reception gave me a note from him.  ‘I had to leave early,’ it read, ‘but I know the hotel manager and he is organising a free night for you.’  The hotel staff took me down a corridor to the janitor’s cupboard: a very small room where they’d rearranged a few things to fit in a tiny bed.  It was there among the mops and brooms, the spare sheets and pillow cases, towels and toiletry supplies that I stayed on the last midnight sun day-night.

Sami camp, for the tourists...

This far north and have you met the Clauses? Or maybe time to hop down south or head for heat if the Arctic's too cold.  Wanderlust!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Ice and Warm





Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway