When the Almön Bridge – the third of three consecutive bridges linking the Swedish mainland to the country's sixth largest island of Tjörn – was opened in 1960 with a span of 278 metres, it was the longest arched bridge in the world. At 1.29 a.m. on Friday 18 January 1980, the Norwegian-owned bulk carrier MS Star Clipper struck the arch of the bridge. The roadway it was supporting collapsed, in its entirety, onto the ship below. Although no members of the crew were killed, the damage caused to the vessel knocked out radio communications. It was a foggy night and before traffic could be stopped, seven vehicles had driven into the empty void and eight people had been killed.
'Goodness,' I mumbled.
I never expected to discover such shocking news as I was pootling by bicycle along the picturesque coast. The authorities had wisely gone for a suspension-style bridge second time around, with no arches into which lost ships could crash. Moments earlier, I had crossed the Tjörnbron, which had taken just 22 months to design and construct.
I was now in Bohuslän, Sweden's westernmost province and an archipelago of some 3,000 islands that stretched from Gothenburg in the south to the Norwegian border in the north. Information boards next to the new bridge were keeping me well informed:
Bohuslän is synonymous with ocean, sunshine and swimming.
Naked swimming, according to my guidebook. But on that score there was good news. The boards again:
The Skagerrak is an extension of the Gulf Stream whose tempering waters give rise to one of Sweden's most unique maritime environments.
And you won't freeze your bits off when skinny-dipping. I continued to read and be enlightened:
A string of communities lie scattered along the coast with histories formed by fishing, shipping, the stone industry and the bathing era.
The 'bathing era'? We never studied that in history. The Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Middle Ages, the Age of Steam, yes. But the Bathing Age? Ah, there was another board.
Tourists discovered Bohuslän in the 1800s. In the beginning they were upper-class folk who followed in the footsteps of King Oscar II. Today, Bohuslän is a holiday paradise for everyone.
From what I could see, it certainly was, with the banks of the fjords busy with hotels, summer houses and, fortunately for me, campsites. That said, I wasn't particularly tempted to dive into the water as Oscar had done all those years ago. It was still rather too chilly for that. Perhaps Swedish kings of old had been made of stronger stuff than me. Instead, I pitched the tent near a small jetty and settled in for the evening with the two towers of the suspension bridge popping up over a hill to my right. Sitting in my chair, I closed my eyes, emptied my mind and relaxed…
'Hallo! Hallo? Deutsche?'
I reopened my eyes and lifted my hand so I could block the sun and see who was speaking. It was a man in his sixties, sporting a distinctive white beard.
'Err… Nein. Englisch,' I replied.
Realising that perhaps my German was minimal, he switched language.
'To where are you travelling?' he enquired.
'To Nordkapp, in Norway.'
'That won't be very interesting. The scenery will never change.'
I guessed that the man in front of me hadn't just retired from working as a motivational speaker. I steered the conversation away from the controversial topic of how mundane my life over the next few weeks was to become. He was called Helmut – from Baden-Baden in southern Germany – and was cycling north in the direction of Oslo at which point he planned to head south again along the Norwegian coast. He was a retired engineer in the semiconductor business.
'But I hadn't worked since the factory was shut down in 2007.'
I could sense that something outside of Helmut's control was to blame.
'I blame the oil price,' he explained.
Yes, just as I had thought.
Packing up the tent in the morning, I waved and smiled to nearby Helmut but refrained from conversation so as to minimise the chances of me throwing myself off the end of the jetty and ending it there and then.
Good news was around the corner in the small town of Myggenäs, though. Not only was the place not infested by midges (Helmut, unsurprisingly, had pointed out the etymology of the name the previous evening), but the local supermarket provided me with an excellent breakfast of chocolate muffins and good coffee.
As I queued to pay for yet another pair of replacement reading glasses, I glanced down at the screaming headline on the Aftonbladet newspaper:
HÅLL UT! DÅ KOMMER VӒRMEN
Beside the headline was a graphic consisting of the sun, an orange-coloured Sweden and a thermometer with its mercury at maximum level. 'Kommer värmen'? It's going to get hot!
As of 11 a.m., the heatwave had yet to kick in. The sky was overcast and it remained quite cold but I had great hopes of splashing on the factor 50 by the end of the week. In the meantime, I had a few islands over which to hop. The red line of the cykelspåret on OpenStreetMap adopted a zigzag approach to crossing the archipelago. I was aiming to cycle as far as Fiskebäckskil, a town that, from the photographs I had seen, seemed to encapsulate everything that was coastal Sweden. To get there I needed first to cross the islands of Tjörn, Orust, Malö and Flatön, before returning briefly to the mainland and then over the water again to Skaftö.
The weaving road linking the small settlements that were strewn across the rocky yet green landscape was a joy. The cycling was Goldilocks in nature: not too easy, not too difficult, just right. The traffic was light, the views were picture-perfect and my mood was high. If this was the price to be paid for travelling between two points only 30 km from each other on the map but nearly 70 km along the road, so be it.
Small ferries that resembled toy aircraft carriers plied their trade linking Orust with Malö and then Flatön with the mainland. As I queued for the first of these, a fellow cyclist pulled up behind me. I turned around in nervous anticipation of seeing Helmut and having my good mood smashed to smithereens but was delighted instead to see a woman. Her name was Klara and she explained that she was cycling from Gothenburg, where she worked at the university as a professor of 'environmental impact', to meet up with her partner further north to do some kayaking.
'Do you know how much the ferry costs?' I asked, as I hadn't been able to see a sign.
'It's free,' she explained. 'They are considered part of the road network so we don't pay.'
Could this day get any better?
Upon arrival on Malö, we cycled together and chatted. For some time, one question had been on my mind and this chance meeting with an environmental professor might provide the perfect opportunity to get it answered.
'Klara, what makes a fjord a fjord?'
'That's a very good question,' she replied, smiling. 'A fjord needs to have been created by a glacier but the glacier should have left a deposit of moraine at the mouth of the fjord, giving it a much shallower inlet channel than the fjord itself.'
I wondered if Slartibartfast* had been aware of this when he had designed them.
—
There wasn't a great deal to do in Fiskebäckskil apart from wander around the narrow cobbled lanes, admire the pretty wooden buildings and gaze across the fjord (or was it?) to similarly picturesque Östersidan. But this was precisely the delight in being there: wandering, admiring, gazing. I was an expert in all three. The buildings had been scattered across the shallow incline of a hill in an organic fashion and painted yellow, blue or green in a random order, which only added to the harmonious coming together of civilisation and nature.
After indulging in an ice cream, I caught the ten-minute ferry to Lysekil, where I found a deserted campsite, pitched the tent and sat back in my chair. I closed my eyes, emptied my mind and relaxed…
'Hallo! Hallo? Andrew?' Helmut seemed pleased to see me.
I tried to keep conversation with my new German friend away from anything that might give him cause to express a negative opinion but it wasn't easy. In the morning, I repeated my goodbyes from
the previous day but within a couple of hours I was with him again at a café on the main road north, nodding out of politeness rather than agreement.
'Norway is too hilly, the roads are bad and the weather is awful…' he moaned before getting his teeth into the Swedes: 'They are poor cyclists. Their bikes only have three gears and you will never find a bike shop to repair your bike properly.'
What had I done to have this man inflicted upon me? His oratory then took a surreal twist: 'Cycle touring only became possible after 1990 when the technology allowed for proper gears to be used.'
'Did you say 1990? One, nine, nine, zero?' I questioned, checking he hadn't confused his numbers.
'Yes, 1990. Eins, neun, neun, null.' I sensed he was annoyed by me questioning his facts.
I was tempted to cite the case of an American, Maximilian J. St George, who, in the years following World War One embarked upon a 26,000 km bicycle tour of Europe. He ventured to most parts of the Continent and upon his return to the US wrote a book entitled Traveling Light or Cycling Europe on Fifty Cents a Day. I had tried but failed to find a copy, but mentioned Maximilian, his adventure and his book on my website shortly before setting off to cycle from Greece to Portugal in 2013. Then, on the day I left my job as a teacher in Henley-on-Thames, my colleagues presented me with a package wrapped in tissue paper. Carefully unfolding the wrapping, I found a copy of the book. It was a touching moment.
With Norway now just a day away and with a wallet of unused Swedish notes, I decided to treat myself to a slap-up lunch. A nice plate of fish perhaps? At Hjalmars restaurant on the quayside in Hamburgsund I ordered a herring salad followed by grilled cod on a base of new potatoes and shrimp. The bill? A not-so-hefty 127SK, or around £10. Yet again, the cost of life on the road in Scandinavia was proving to be far from expensive. With the midsummer weekend now several days ago, the campsites were charging no more than £15 per night. A bottle of notoriously pricey sun protection spray had cost me a mere £8 and even the alcohol, when purchased from the supermarket, was only what I was used to paying back in Britain.
Just wait until you get to Norway chuckled the voice in my head with an accent reminiscent of Helmut's, but I remained hopeful.
My day ended with a short, sharp climb from the coast at Grebbestad to a campsite close to the Tanum UNESCO World Heritage Site, famous for its Bronze Age rock carvings. Opposite the quiet campsite was a deserted reconstructed mud hut village. I wandered around, making comparisons between the simple life of the Bronze Age folk and my own life on the road. I concluded that although they might not have had the option of booking a decent hotel online when needed, their camp beds of straw were somewhat more appealing than my laminated camping mat. I was tempted to stay in the abandoned barn overnight but then figured that by doing so, I may well have had to share my bed with the local rodent population. Better off in the tent.
Back across the road, I sat in my chair, closed my eyes, emptied my mind and relaxed… Silence. Helmut was elsewhere.
Post-Gothenburg, the days had developed into a routine of packup, breakfast in a local supermarket, a good day of cycling, new campsite and relax. My final day in Sweden was to be no different but I wasn't quite expecting the first encounter of the day to be along these lines: 'Are you Andrew Sykes?'
Gulp. Had that European arrest warrant been issued already? Minor traffic offences flashed through my mind as I turned to see a young cyclist.
'You're Andrew Sykes, aren't you?' he asked, in an accent from the English Midlands.
'Err… yes,' I confirmed, a touch confused. Was I that famous?
No.
'It's Nick. I stayed with Steve in Trondheim. You've exchanged messages with him.'
So I had. I would hopefully meet up with Steve in Norway and, yes, he had mentioned someone called Nick who was heading in the opposite direction.
'Hi. I'm Saskia from the Netherlands,' interjected Saskia, from the Netherlands.
This was rapidly turning into a conference. Three touring cyclists all descending upon the local supermarket for their breakfast. We sat down together to eat and exchange stories.
We all had a different approach to cycling. Nick's asset was his willingness to go with the flow. He had started his ride in Bergen with the intention of cycling to Nordkapp but the weather hadn't been great so, after Trondheim, he'd headed south over the mountains to Oslo and now Sweden. He was wild camping – he'd just spent the night in the local recreation ground – and was using an inexpensive mountain bike.
Saskia's forte was her speed. She too was cycling from Tarifa to Nordkapp – the first person I had met who was doing so (Javier, the Argentinian cyclist, had started in Madrid) – but on a more easterly route that had included Switzerland. What's more, she was an osteopath and every few weeks she was stopping, flying back to see her patients and then, a week or so later, returning to the point where she had paused before continuing. She was covering considerable distances every day and had a bike that would allow her to do just that.
Route details were exchanged, locations of campsites noted and anecdotes swapped. Helmut, I reflected, wouldn't have felt comfortable in the little bubble of cycling positivity that we had created.
I excused myself for a few moments to use the facilities inside the building, before returning to the table to say my goodbyes. During my short absence, our conference had welcomed a new delegate: 'Cycling along the coast towards Norway today will be suicide with all the Swedish people driving to their holiday homes. Suicide!'
Helmut. I shrugged my shoulders. We all said farewell, Nick set off south towards Gothenburg, Saskia and I – at different speeds – headed north towards our impending deaths at the hands of holidaying Swedes, and Helmut… who knows? I never saw him again.
* * *
* Slartibartfast, designer of planets, who won (according to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) an award for his design of the Norwegian coastline. (BACK)
PART 5
NORWAY
THE TWENTY-FOURTH DEGREE
59°–60° NORTH
26–29 June
Thanks to European integration and, more specifically, the Schengen Agreement, border posts across the Continent have been abandoned for the benefit of free movement of goods and people. The free movement of people from Norway into Sweden had been evident for all to see at the large Nordby supermarket a few kilometres south of the border. Almost every car in the car park sported a Norwegian plate. The free movement of goods was evident in their trolleys, stacked high with food and drink. I stopped there myself, with the intention of stocking up on things that I imagined might be excessively expensive in the land of the fjords. Examining the shopping trolleys of my fellow shoppers, that appeared to be everything.
There was, however, good news ahead. Although the posts had indeed been abandoned long ago, geography was still able to make this final border crossing a memorable one. Sweden met Norway not on land but on water. More precisely, in the middle of the Svinesund, a dog-leg sound near the Norwegian town of Halden. A bridge, 80 m above the sound and almost as empty as the deserted customs buildings on either bank, carried Reggie and me out of the European Union and into Norway. I paused in the middle of the bridge. On the carriageway to my left a thick white line had been painted and, in large capitals, the word Sverige painted on one side and Norge on the other. Now, that's how you do borders.
Among the nicest things about arriving in a new country are the changes that accompany it. Here in Norway, the roads signs were yellow, reminiscent of Germany, the cycling signs brown and the middle of the road was marked with a continuous yellow line. On this side of the Svinesund, the trees seemed a little taller, the forests a tad deeper and the buildings slightly more run-down than those in Sweden and Denmark. If I were to squint, my new surroundings could have doubled for a distant outpost in the northern United States where camouflaged men sit defending their Second Amendment rights whilst growing their beards and narrowing their minds. It was ever so
slightly discombobulating.
The cycling signs told me that I was following route 1, the coastal route. That was OK for the time being, although it wouldn't take me as far as Oslo. For that I would need route 7, the pilgrims' route. I could see from OpenStreetMap that the latter branched off where route 1 turned west to follow the coast in the direction of Kristiansand. I would need to look out for this junction the following morning.
The American-themed introduction to Norway was to continue an hour or so across the border at Høysand Camping. The reception building was a white-painted wooden lodge in an architectural style not dissimilar to that of Southfork Ranch in Dallas. I opened the door, went inside, and the two people in the room turned and stared. On the right, sitting on a bench, was a young woman in her late teens. On the left, behind a desk, was a man of similar age, wearing a white suit complete with white waistcoat and white tie, clearly under the impression that he was managing Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas rather than a three-star campsite in southern Norway.
Spain to Norway on a Bike Called Reggie Page 20