It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  Hi, we have space for you, two spare rooms and we're having pizza tonight. This is our address, see you soon.

  Amazing, this was perfect. Then another text followed soon after:

  By the way, we are a same-sex couple and we're ordering a Hawaiian, we hope that is OK?

  This was a bit awkward and not really that OK with one of our party: Leigh doesn't like pineapple and we didn't want to offend before we even arrived.

  We arrived at Lars and Kian's very Scandinavian home soon after and, sure enough, found it was pizza night – which was made all the more awesome when we discovered that a ham pizza in Denmark has as much ham on it as cheese. Leigh picked out the pineapple and retired to the bathroom with some clippers to try to straighten out his hair.

  We spent a delightful day in Copenhagen, and Lars and Kian were kind enough to give us a tour of the sights: the royal palace, the Guinness Book of Records Museum (it was closed, but we still posed for a picture outside) and the famous statue of the Little Mermaid sat on a mini island poking up out of the sea, which Leigh imitated for the camera. However, soon we had to be back on the road.

  Shivering violently, having just scraped a thick layer of snow from the cab, I climbed in to find it was actually colder inside it than outside. Enough was enough; we were going to fix the heating.

  The 1992 LTI FX4 has a very unique heating and cooling system. It is supposed to pump water around the engine to cool it and then the engine-heated water travels through a system of pipes to heat the car. At some point when we rebuilt the car, these pipes were removed, but never replaced: the area where the heat exchanger should go was where we had built a wooden storage compartment that had been christened 'The Bar' due to the 15 bottles of French wine we had filled it with to be used as bribes for police and gifts for Couchsurfing hosts.

  After three hours in the car park of a DIY store, hacksawing, swearing and lying under the car in the snow trying not to get covered in antifreeze, we finished our haphazard fix. Two metal pipes protruded from the centre of the dashboard, around the handbrake and into the blower, which had been attached to the top of The Bar's lid, and wired into the electrics to successfully blow blissfully hot air into the face of the passenger in the back.

  We could now go onwards to Sweden without freezing to death.

  CHAPTER 6

  HERBS AND HIPPIES

  You could tell immediately that Anders was in a band. It wasn't the recording studio or the guitar slung around his neck that gave it away, it was just the way he oozed cool. The long blonde hair, velvet shirt and gold medallion somehow combined to suit him perfectly.

  Our new host welcomed us into the toasty studio and immediately presented a carton of red wine.

  'And what do you play?' I asked to break the silence.

  'I play the bass most of the time in the band, but my real love is the sitar.'

  I should have guessed.

  The rest of the band was similarly hip and undoubtedly would have had no problems getting into filthy rave clubs. One of them brought out a small pouch full of what looked suspiciously like rabbit droppings.

  'This is Swedish snus, you have to try it.'

  Against our better judgement we each placed a little brown pouch between our lips and gums as instructed, and waited for the tingling nicotine hit, which is apparently equivalent to smoking three cigarettes.

  After a short jam we left the rest of the band to finish up their recording and drove out to the farm that Anders and his friends called home.

  We pulled up to a small wooden cottage in the middle of a forest, around 45 minutes outside of Gothenburg.

  In the kitchen stood a late 1960s John Lennon incarnate, his train driver's hat at a jaunty angle over his purple haze circular glasses, hands deep in a pile of dough.

  'I fucking love making bread when I'm stoned,' he announced by way of introduction.

  A previous batch of buns hot from the oven was presented to us with freshly churned butter and we dug in.

  Anders walked in from the car, his shirt open to his navel, the medallion dangling amongst his long loose blonde locks and his fl ares dragging against the ground. It dawned on me that this man actually might be a cartoon character, and I was stuck in some sort of real-life Roger Rabbit mash-up where he conversed with John Lennon, the baker.

  'Hey man, this herb bread will fuck you up,' said Lennon, staring at us from over his 'Imagine' glasses.

  Herb bread. That would explain why everything suddenly felt very surreal.

  Anders took us through to the living room where we were introduced to a group of girls dressed in odd spun-wool outfi ts – who turned out to be a travelling Lithuanian folk band – and the rest of Anders' crew of Summer of Love enthusiasts. The walls had fabric and tapestries of sorts hanging from them, as well as about ten guitars, and in the corner sat an old record player. We made ourselves comfortable on the deep sofas covered with throws.

  'Tonight, we will only be listening to The Doors,' he announced to the audience of guests, nudging the needle over to start Jim Morrison's soulful warbling. We'd inadvertently walked into a time warp.

  Jim's record spun out and gave way to a guitar, then a mandolin. I found a guitar in my hands and started to jam along. Someone else started hitting a bongo, and Lennon produced a fl ute from somewhere and proceeded to prove that he didn't know how to play it. The Lithuanians added a strange guttural drone with their singing, but Lennon was evidently bored and started to roll a joint. Once lit, he passed it over to me.

  'I'm good mate, that "herb bread" was enough for me.' I was feeling rather spaced out.

  'You liked my rosemary bread? It fucks you up, man, you just can't stop eating it, man, and it's so tasty. But do you want to get high?'

  Ah.

  Having learned my lesson in Amsterdam I respectfully declined and stuck to my carton of wine and watched the people at the party with a pseudo-scientifi c anthropological eye.

  A smoky haze filled the entire house and now almost everyone was playing an instrument, including Leigh, and he doesn't know how to play anything for the life of him. The Lithuanians were sat on the floor chanting, cross-legged with closed eyes. After ten minutes they stopped their song and painstakingly explained the lyrics in English for our benefit. The overriding themes seemed to about virgin fairies riding bareback on horses through mystical lands.

  Anders sat seemingly transfixed, listening intently to a strikingly pretty girl with long braided hair. He caught me looking over at the unlikely exchange and fired me a sly wink. It took all of my effort not to crack up at the entire situation but the tension was broken by one of the housemates.

  'Come on guys!' he shouted, jumping up and surveying the room. 'Get your jackets on; it's time for the creepy midnight forest walk.'

  Anders excused himself and his new lady-friend from the outing, and the rest of us tried our best to remain upright as we were taken out into the pitch-black pine forest along a frozenover stream.

  In the silent, freezing air we were told stories of the trolls that come over the border from Norway, who hate the electric lights of the city and hoard their mounds of gold up in the mountains or under bridges, ready to spirit away any beautiful maidens who pass by.

  We made it to bed sometime in the early hours, the sounds of rock 'n' roll still reverberating from the nearby barn.

  Stepping out of the warm, dark house and into the silent bright snow the next morning was almost like being in a dream. We were back on the road before most of the revellers had surfaced, heading to Stockholm, our next destination, on the long road north to the Arctic Circle.

  As we followed the satnav back towards the main road, I got a new message. It was from Jasper:

  Hi guys, just to let you know that Cat came back today and she had a big smile on her face.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE HIPSTER ELVES

  Arriving in Stockholm, we entered the address we had been given into the satnav:

  Lönnvägen, Stockholm.
Apparently, Lönnvägen means Maple Road, and it's a very common street name in Sweden – with four Lönnvägens in central Stockholm alone. After an old lady told us we had the wrong address (and that we had woken her up – or so we guessed from her nightgown and angry Swedish tones), we deduced that this address was not the right one. We headed off to the next Lönnvägen, on the other side of the city, to find this, too, was the wrong street.

  On we trudged to Lönnvägen number three, faithfully following our satnav up a very steep hill. It was late February and over the past few days we had travelled far enough north through Europe to reach snow. It was about three feet deep over the whole city, but Hannah managed to make it up the hill, only to discover at the top that it was a dead end. We would have to go back down the snow-covered slope.

  The Red Cross had promised to put us through an off-road driving skills course before we left, but it had turned out their instructor was in Sudan at the time, saving lives (and probably driving off-road in a skilful manner). Untutored, I turned the cab around and used my rudimentary knowledge of off-road driving, from the 20-second lesson Leigh taught me at the top of the hill, to work out how to get the two-tonne car without ABS braking, snow chains or spiked tyres down a 1-in-3 snow-covered incline. Cars were parked on both sides and at the bottom there was a T-junction. A wooden house stood at the foot of the hill, perfectly lined up to stop any out-of-control taxis careering down the slope. Through the window I could just make out a family about to start their evening meal as I edged the cab to the start of the drop, put it in first gear and took both feet off the pedals to allow the engine to slow it and prevent any skidding.

  The engine started to idle high as we picked up speed, slowing us just enough. But at that moment, the gearbox made a huge THUNK and kicked itself out of gear into neutral. Unable to touch the brakes for fear of a collision into one of the Volvos on either side of the road, the cab started to bear down on the family's dinner at full speed. Leigh began repeating the same words faster and louder: 'Paul; gear', 'Paul; gear', 'GEAR!' While desperately trying to throw the stick back into gear, Hannah kept gaining speed and I could almost make out what was on their plates.

  First gear had gone, and now we were already too fast for second. I jammed into third and with a roar of our strained engine we started to slow, just in time to hit the bottom of the hill. Turning hard right, the whole cab veered hard on its side and started to slide. Fortunately the loose snow stopped the top-heavy cab from flipping as she slid round, instead settling to a stop just around the corner, leaving us to check our heartbeats and observe the family dig in, oblivious to their near demise.

  We found Johan's house at last; a small mansion he was housesitting, complete with sauna and frozen garden. He welcomed us in and we told him of our near-death experience over a nice relaxing dinner.

  Staying with Couchsurfers was brilliant for two reasons: firstly they often cooked their local speciality meals for us and secondly they showed us cool places in their city that we would never have found by ourselves. Johan did both of these things and after a good night's sleep, we found ourselves strapped into ice skates on a humongous frozen lake.

  The entire circuit was ten miles long; no problem we thought as we raced off confidently. Two and a half miles and many slips later I fell by the wayside, and after five miles Leigh came and joined me in the outdoor cafe on the edge of the lake, laughing that I looked like 'Forrest Gump on Ice'.

  We sat there eating the ubiquitous Swedish hot dogs and waited to be joined by a sweaty but triumphant Paul, who had finished the whole circuit.

  After an evening of drinking and dancing to Abba songs at a university party that Johan took us to, we staggered out to the sauna – perhaps not advisable after the evening's dehydrating exertions. If we thought the heat of the sauna was a bad idea the previous night, we knew for certain that it was in the morning as we groaned and peeled ourselves out of bed for the 700-mile journey towards Finland and the Arctic Circle.

  When people first started asking us why we were taking such a long route, why we were driving up to the Arctic Circle before heading out into Russia then down through North Africa, the Middle East, India, China and South East Asia, rather than just zipping down to Australia in a straight line, we thought it was funny to tell them that no true taxi driver ever takes you the shortest way. However, after explaining this time and time again – and particularly after hours of driving through the vast icy pine forests of northern Scandinavia – we didn't find our smart answer quite so funny.

  During the days we exhausted our iPod music collections and chatted about every topic under the sun. We were sustained by the 'road sandwiches' that had become our staple diet. They were filled with various pastes of dubious origin that came from the rows of ost – squeezable tubes that filled the chilled section of every Scandinavian shop and whose contents ranged from reindeer to shrimp. After a few meals-worth of experimentation, our favourite turned out to be BaconOst.

  After struggling up over the horizon at 9 a.m. the sun dipped back below it again at 4 p.m., which inevitably meant we had to drive in the dark. This night driving consisted of long solitary stretches of darkness punctuated by the sudden interruptions of the dazzling spotlights of giant oncoming wagons. Their explosively powerful lights could be seen from hundreds of metres away, to give the best possible chance of missing the moose, deer or any of the other dangerously large forest animals most likely to become roadkill.

  Thankfully, the moment we crossed the border into Finland, at about 65 degrees north, the roads immediately became smoother and wider. We were now on the last stretch to Rovaniemi, capital of Lapland and best known for being the home of Santa Claus.

  By now, we had got the hang of this Couchsurfing lark. It was cheap and easy and we had loads of fun. When we arrived in Rovaniemi, our host, Taina, and her family were incredibly welcoming. We became just three more of her large brood, digging into the vast pile of lovely food she set out and playing with Lego with her toddlers. On the way to their house we had seen two snowmobiles speeding along the banks of the river and over dinner Leigh mentioned that he would like to go for a ride on one of the giant jet-ski-like contraptions. We asked our hosts how we should go about hiring them but Taina and her husband, Tony, exchanged a look and said they didn't have a clue.

  After the meal we went back to the Lego with the kids but outside the window there was the unmistakable 'rum… rum… rum… rumbababababababab' of a two-stroke engine starting up. I looked out and saw Tony on a huge snowmobile.

  'You can go and have a ride if you want,' Taina said, beaming.

  She didn't have to offer twice; I was already dressing in my snow boots, ski jacket and hat and running out the door. The controls were simple: push a little lever to go and pull another one to stop. I rode around in a little circle grinning like a schoolgirl on a pony.

  'If you want, just follow that track, it goes to a meadow. Put these goggles on though,' Tony said, laughing at my enthusiasm.

  My headlights showed a path in the snow heading into the dark forest, with barely enough room for me to squeeze between, let alone the snowmobile. Gingerly, I edged forward in short lurches as I got the feel for the throttle. Nothing was in front of me but trees and darkness. However, they soon disappeared, revealing a narrow meadow. Tentatively I started to build up speed as the wind whipped at my jacket and hat and snow beat against my goggles. Nothing was in front of me, so I went faster, and then faster still. Getting to the end, I spun round and floored it. The acceleration almost pulled my arms off and within a few seconds I was doing 35 mph, in the dark on a machine I'd never used before. Bringing it back to the house, I ran to the lads.

  'You have GOT to come and play on this.'

  Leigh sprung up and ran outside. By then a second snowmobile had appeared, so I sped off into the darkness, leaving Leigh lurching his way forward just as I had been.

  After about 20 minutes of the most incredible fun, we went back and tried to get Johno.
>
  'Maaaate, seriously, come and play. SERIOUSLY.'

  'But it's freezing,' he replied, '… and I'm busy playing Lego.'

  Since we'd been gone he'd built a rather impressive car-ship-house, which the three year old was attacking with his own housecar-ship. After a bit of gentle persuasion he was soon convinced and by that evening he was as hooked as we were.

  The thick forests around Taina and Tony's house were zigzagged with snowmobile tracks. Their eldest daughter, Santra, and her friend had taken on the role of our guides and we spent the evening zooming around almost as fast as Hannah once we got to know how to use the machines.