Day 8: the North Cape
Nov. 1st, 2004 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenThe roof of the world: Hammerfest and the end of Europe
The northernmost town in the world, Hammerfest, we sadly pass through at after midnight, and with so many things to do early in the morning – October nights start early here – I can't afford to stay up to explore it. Not that there'd be a lot to see at that time, although resident Karsten is keen to sing its praises. He's on the way up from Tromsø. He's an old sailor – I dare not venture how old, but I'm pretty sure he didn't retire too recently. A small, weatherbeaten man who's visited China and anywhere else I can name, his English is basic but functional – the first Norwegian I have ever met who isn't fluent. "I… not say so much, so good, but I… I understand. I getcha, no problem." He's delighted to learn I speak a smattering of Norwegian – as is Sigrunn, the statuesque Valkyrie barmaid ("Of COURSE I'm Norwegian! I'm six foot tall and blonde," she says, gesturing with a two-foot plait at an enquiring - male - passenger. "Where do you THINK I'm from?" To me, in Norwegian, she says, "well, yeah, I've had an English boyfriend, as well, and he didn't learn one word of Norwegian. [Switching to English.] Not bloody interested."
I think Sigrunn doesn't want to condescend to me - and she speaks excellent colloquial English, plus functional German. Someone does throw her with unexpected French, though. In contrast, Karsten, who's not that much better at my language than I am at his, is happy to speak v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y to me, with small easy words, and we get on fine. Hammerfest, he says, is His Town. I must visit it and come drinking with his friends. The mere fact that we leave it, after a stay of under three hours, at 5.15am does not daunt him. It does me.
So in practice, our first stop up here is Honningsvåg, a tiny fishing village on the island of Magerøya. Here we disembark for a trip to the North Cape, which is very nearly the northernmost point of Europe. Actually, after it was named and given this honour in about 1655 by a very lost English ship's captain who was looking for China – I kid you not. It was later discovered that Knivskjellodden, a kilometre to the west, actually sticks out about 100m further north. By this point, of course, tourists from an heroic seventeenth-century Italian (who took two years to get here by public transport and, mostly, walking) to the King of Thailand (in 1907) had made their pilgrimage here. It was a bit late to move the visitors' centre, too, although the old one was a lot less impressive than the airy 1990s one that currently graces this extremely bare bit of land.
Honningsvåg is 31km from Nordkapp, giving us time for a scenic tour. In the rain. Falling out of a cloud base of about, oh, ten centimetres.
It has to be said, there's not much here. The town has a bit over a thousand inhabitants and mostly consists of docks and warehouses, although there is a supermarket and a hotel on the edge of town. This used to be a campsite – a remarkably unappealing one, I'd imagine – and it's not a lot prettier now, consistent of a campus of boxy prefab-looking buildings squatting on the rocky ground. The treeline has sunk to sea level hundreds of kilometres south of here, so all that grows is yellowing grass, moss and lichen. "Bleak" is a good word for it, along with "bare" and "barren". Much of the soil is flakes of rock, of which there is an abundance, rearing out of the sea in great rounded lumps, ground down by glaciers but too crumbly to polish smooth.
Our guide here is 17-year-old Jula, a compact, rounded and constantly-giggling brunette with startlingly blue eyes. She doesn't confirm it, but she looks much more like a Sami than a tall pale Norse. She's had to move "into town" recently to go to high school – she's actually from Skarsvåg, Norway's (you guessed it) northernmost fishing village, a few kilometres away on the northern coast. We see it in the distance from the road – a few houses huddling together for warmth. Jula rents her own apartment in Honningsvåg, but it's an exciting place – there are more than 20 people in her class. She was half the entire school roster at home. She loves it, though. Nature is right there, all around you. You can… go for walks! And she loves to go out on her father's fishing boat, even though (giggle) girls aren't really meant to be fishermen. And her friends are there, but she's making lots of new ones in Skarsvåg. If they get bored, they can go out to the Cape and go round the visitor centre. She's been there a lot. She hopes to go on to study, probably in Trondheim, but it's a bit scary.
I'm impressed, with no hint of mockery. She's sweet, charming and nervously but competently trilingual. ("But I much prefer guiding, talking, in English! I hate speaking German!" I can't help but wonder if she says the same to them.) I'd have gone hopelessly insane in weeks if you'd put me here as a teenager. I thought the Isle of Man was bad.
On the drive up from the port to the cape, we pass the turnoff to Jula's village – she points it out with a note of fondness while we goggle at it in astonishment. Then comes the turnoff to Knivskjellodden, the real northernmost point of Europe, otherwise unmarked. "There's nothing there," Jula tells us, dismissively. It's a tough trick to giggle dismissively, but she pulls it off. "There's a visitors' book you can sign, to say you've been, but that's it. There's really nothing to see." She forebears to say that there's bugger all to see at Nordkapp either, but then, by local standards, the visitor's centre is a feast of delights. There's a post office; you can send a postcard with a postcard from the far north. There's a gift shop and café, of course. Jula recommends the waffles: apparently a Norwegian tradition – news to me, I thought they were Belgian myself – they're served with rømme og jordbær syltetøy: the mild local sour cream and homemade-style strawberry jam. It sounded dubious to me, but I could not deny that voice anything, so I tried one. Even tepid, it was truly delicious.
I might as well treat my sense of taste and the others; there is little to delight the eyes. The weather has settled into freezing fog, blown on the howling polar wind, leavened with icy rain.
Nice. Actually, it reminds me of the Isle of Man in my youth: barren windswept hilltops facing into the horizontal rain, with glimpses of the cold iron-grey sea far below. I am almost nostalgic, and in a perverse way, happy. This is something like the kind of weather I expect at the extreme tip of my continent as we head into winter, and I'm not being deprived of any view. There aren't even many seabirds to admire: the sensible ones have all set off for the South for winter.
I stand on the tip of the cape, baring my teeth into the wind. I can't see a thing, but if the weather had been clear and calm, I still wouldn't be able to see a damn thing: there is nothing to see here until the sea freezes to form the polar icecap, far over the horizon. Even the wreck of the German warship the Scharnhorst, sunk here by the British at Christmas 1944, is long gone. I have colossal respect for any men who fought in ships in these freezing seas in the middle of the endless arctic night. One member of our tour group, Peter, is here on his umpteenth trip back to Norway – he can't remember how many, or can't be bothered. He was a signalman on a Royal Navy minesweeper at the close of the war, working the west coast, later with two commandeered German minesweepers. He fondly remembers the friendliness and support of the grateful Norwegians; it has given him a love of the country that persists sixty years later. He smiles as he recalls being chewed out by the captain for not running up the Norwegian flag on May 17th.
"How was I supposed to know it was their Independence Day? I didn't have a clue! I was only a kid!"
I don't know how old he is and I don't want to ask, but he's wearing terrifically well. He's come back to this place he loves, again, with his son and daughter. I hope it's not his last time. I feel an urge to salute him, but I am no serviceman. Mine-sweeping was no task for the timorous.
There's a fair bit to explore at the centre. In the middle of the main chamber, a glass bubble in the floor reveals a rounded bolder. Incised deeply in the rock is a strange looping graffito and the numbers "1907". A case displays a photo of some men in uniform posing around it. It is, in fact, the King of Siam – now Thailand. That year, he formed a hankering to visit the end of the world – their first royal visitor in centuries, if the displays are believed, since the Swedish king. It was not a trivial trip then. Beneath the building, a tunnel runs downhill to the Grotto Bar and an outpost overlooking the sea from some way down the rock face of the cape. Along this tunnel are two small rooms. On the right is a non-denominational chapel, modernist and decorated with blue mosaic – quite lairy by Norse standards. Behind the tiny altar is a pictorial mosaic, showing Jesus, a dove and a cross – according to the sign outside, the only symbols in common to all the branches of Christianity. So it's not much help if you want to pray to Allah or JHVH, then.
Almost opposite is the Thai Museum. Donated in 1989 by the people of Thailand – which I interpret to mean a bureaucrat somewhere – it contains images, statues and various souvenirs of the King's visit, nearly a century ago. Sadly for me – and I daresay most of its visitors – the bulk of the labelling is in Thai script. Well, I take it to be Thai; it's not in my repertoire, so for all I know it could be Gujarati, to be honest. Some labels explain that there are photos of the king, a statue of him and some commemorative medals. The strange looping carving in the rock upstairs, a little like a valentine's heart, is, I learn, the King's signature – or at least initials. I recall that some of the men in the photo were holding a hammer and chisel; I imagine the King signed the rock and his men promptly carved it deeply in. Odd that it didn't register on my that the men in the picture were not Norwegian, especially given how rare a sight any non-caucasians are up here. A black family board the Polarlys at its next stop and they stand out, so few brown faces are to be seen here.
Also in the tunnel are tableaux, set into the walls, of the namers of the cape, in their storm-tossed ship – the other two got truly lost, looking for China, and their starved bodies were found on an Arctic island, years later. The lead ship made it into a Russian port and they were escorted to Moscow as guests of the Tsar.
Others show the first tourists, from the King and Queen of Sweden to that lone mad Italian to the King of Siam. It's a popular place, given that it's not really the furthest north and that there's absolutely nothing of interest to see. Such is the human fascination with extremes – and willingness to be fooled.
- - - - -
For me, one of the most interesting parts was a small Sami family we visited on the way up here from Honningsvåg. On one side of the road are a few wooden houses, which aren't mentioned. On the other, a long hut with a sign saying "SOUVENIRS" and a man in a remarkable hat standing holding a reindeer. He is Nils Oscar Smorre, and his is the world's northernmost reindeer-herding family. Several rather ineffectual fences straggle around the area, not visibly impeding the movement of a dozen or so reindeer which wander about randomly. I get the feeling that Nils Oscar has restrained his more by the large bucket of "reindeer moss" – a fruticose lichen, Cladonia spp. – in which its nose is buried. There's moss scattered on the ground all around, which I suspect is why there are so many animals around. I daresay the labour of gathering it is poorly rewarded by the profits of selling trolls, dolls and postcards, but hey, it's a living. To me, the wooden houses look more appealing than the crude tent standing next to Nils Oscar. It's a simple conical arrangement of wooden poles with tarpaulins draped around it. At ground level, there's a circle a few meters across, scattered in reindeer hide, with a smoky fire burning in the middle. The peak of the tent is open, allowing the smoke to escape.
It looks a grim life to me, constantly following the herds, living in this, with no spare time or room for many possessions – certainly not books, let alone modern luxuries such as electronics for music, radio or TV. Even so, I'd not be the one to tell these people that they must give up their lifestyle and settle down like the fishermen and farmers from further south. Yet that is what they are doing and I'll bet that in a few generations there's nothing more left of the Norwegian Sami than some Norwegians with a few weird words in their vocabulary, a trace of an epicanthic fold and a tendency to plumpness.
Declining to pose with him, I buy a couple of postcards depicting a slightly younger and less weather-beaten Nils Oscar. I cannot speak his language, to my shame, so I ask him in Norwegian.
"Excuse me… These pictures. They are you, no?"
"Yes, they are."
"Then can I have your autograph, if you'd be so kind?"
He looks at me. I cannot read his deeply-wrinkled face, either. But he nods, grabs a pen from the plump, cheerful woman at the till – perhaps his daughter, though surely not the golden-haired child in the photos from the '60s or '70s – and scrawls his name across the back.
I hope he's pleased at this tiny gesture of recognition. The faces on my coach are more surprised: they were too busy photographing reindeer, or posing with an impassive Nils Oscar, to notice the resemblance or to actually try to talk to him. Getting his autograph didn't occur. He just stood there in the frigid wind, his colourful embroidered tunic dirty and threadbare, his red hat, like a jester's or something worn by a teenager at a rock festival, flopping in the wind. He didn't speak to the tourists nor they to him. Some merely dropped a few kronor in the hat by the tent.
To be honest, following migrating deer around Finnmark and northern Norway doesn't sound like an exciting, stimulating or honour-filled life to me, but I think that in many ways it's better than this.
The northernmost town in the world, Hammerfest, we sadly pass through at after midnight, and with so many things to do early in the morning – October nights start early here – I can't afford to stay up to explore it. Not that there'd be a lot to see at that time, although resident Karsten is keen to sing its praises. He's on the way up from Tromsø. He's an old sailor – I dare not venture how old, but I'm pretty sure he didn't retire too recently. A small, weatherbeaten man who's visited China and anywhere else I can name, his English is basic but functional – the first Norwegian I have ever met who isn't fluent. "I… not say so much, so good, but I… I understand. I getcha, no problem." He's delighted to learn I speak a smattering of Norwegian – as is Sigrunn, the statuesque Valkyrie barmaid ("Of COURSE I'm Norwegian! I'm six foot tall and blonde," she says, gesturing with a two-foot plait at an enquiring - male - passenger. "Where do you THINK I'm from?" To me, in Norwegian, she says, "well, yeah, I've had an English boyfriend, as well, and he didn't learn one word of Norwegian. [Switching to English.] Not bloody interested."
I think Sigrunn doesn't want to condescend to me - and she speaks excellent colloquial English, plus functional German. Someone does throw her with unexpected French, though. In contrast, Karsten, who's not that much better at my language than I am at his, is happy to speak v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y to me, with small easy words, and we get on fine. Hammerfest, he says, is His Town. I must visit it and come drinking with his friends. The mere fact that we leave it, after a stay of under three hours, at 5.15am does not daunt him. It does me.
So in practice, our first stop up here is Honningsvåg, a tiny fishing village on the island of Magerøya. Here we disembark for a trip to the North Cape, which is very nearly the northernmost point of Europe. Actually, after it was named and given this honour in about 1655 by a very lost English ship's captain who was looking for China – I kid you not. It was later discovered that Knivskjellodden, a kilometre to the west, actually sticks out about 100m further north. By this point, of course, tourists from an heroic seventeenth-century Italian (who took two years to get here by public transport and, mostly, walking) to the King of Thailand (in 1907) had made their pilgrimage here. It was a bit late to move the visitors' centre, too, although the old one was a lot less impressive than the airy 1990s one that currently graces this extremely bare bit of land.
Honningsvåg is 31km from Nordkapp, giving us time for a scenic tour. In the rain. Falling out of a cloud base of about, oh, ten centimetres.
It has to be said, there's not much here. The town has a bit over a thousand inhabitants and mostly consists of docks and warehouses, although there is a supermarket and a hotel on the edge of town. This used to be a campsite – a remarkably unappealing one, I'd imagine – and it's not a lot prettier now, consistent of a campus of boxy prefab-looking buildings squatting on the rocky ground. The treeline has sunk to sea level hundreds of kilometres south of here, so all that grows is yellowing grass, moss and lichen. "Bleak" is a good word for it, along with "bare" and "barren". Much of the soil is flakes of rock, of which there is an abundance, rearing out of the sea in great rounded lumps, ground down by glaciers but too crumbly to polish smooth.
Our guide here is 17-year-old Jula, a compact, rounded and constantly-giggling brunette with startlingly blue eyes. She doesn't confirm it, but she looks much more like a Sami than a tall pale Norse. She's had to move "into town" recently to go to high school – she's actually from Skarsvåg, Norway's (you guessed it) northernmost fishing village, a few kilometres away on the northern coast. We see it in the distance from the road – a few houses huddling together for warmth. Jula rents her own apartment in Honningsvåg, but it's an exciting place – there are more than 20 people in her class. She was half the entire school roster at home. She loves it, though. Nature is right there, all around you. You can… go for walks! And she loves to go out on her father's fishing boat, even though (giggle) girls aren't really meant to be fishermen. And her friends are there, but she's making lots of new ones in Skarsvåg. If they get bored, they can go out to the Cape and go round the visitor centre. She's been there a lot. She hopes to go on to study, probably in Trondheim, but it's a bit scary.
I'm impressed, with no hint of mockery. She's sweet, charming and nervously but competently trilingual. ("But I much prefer guiding, talking, in English! I hate speaking German!" I can't help but wonder if she says the same to them.) I'd have gone hopelessly insane in weeks if you'd put me here as a teenager. I thought the Isle of Man was bad.
On the drive up from the port to the cape, we pass the turnoff to Jula's village – she points it out with a note of fondness while we goggle at it in astonishment. Then comes the turnoff to Knivskjellodden, the real northernmost point of Europe, otherwise unmarked. "There's nothing there," Jula tells us, dismissively. It's a tough trick to giggle dismissively, but she pulls it off. "There's a visitors' book you can sign, to say you've been, but that's it. There's really nothing to see." She forebears to say that there's bugger all to see at Nordkapp either, but then, by local standards, the visitor's centre is a feast of delights. There's a post office; you can send a postcard with a postcard from the far north. There's a gift shop and café, of course. Jula recommends the waffles: apparently a Norwegian tradition – news to me, I thought they were Belgian myself – they're served with rømme og jordbær syltetøy: the mild local sour cream and homemade-style strawberry jam. It sounded dubious to me, but I could not deny that voice anything, so I tried one. Even tepid, it was truly delicious.
I might as well treat my sense of taste and the others; there is little to delight the eyes. The weather has settled into freezing fog, blown on the howling polar wind, leavened with icy rain.
Nice. Actually, it reminds me of the Isle of Man in my youth: barren windswept hilltops facing into the horizontal rain, with glimpses of the cold iron-grey sea far below. I am almost nostalgic, and in a perverse way, happy. This is something like the kind of weather I expect at the extreme tip of my continent as we head into winter, and I'm not being deprived of any view. There aren't even many seabirds to admire: the sensible ones have all set off for the South for winter.
I stand on the tip of the cape, baring my teeth into the wind. I can't see a thing, but if the weather had been clear and calm, I still wouldn't be able to see a damn thing: there is nothing to see here until the sea freezes to form the polar icecap, far over the horizon. Even the wreck of the German warship the Scharnhorst, sunk here by the British at Christmas 1944, is long gone. I have colossal respect for any men who fought in ships in these freezing seas in the middle of the endless arctic night. One member of our tour group, Peter, is here on his umpteenth trip back to Norway – he can't remember how many, or can't be bothered. He was a signalman on a Royal Navy minesweeper at the close of the war, working the west coast, later with two commandeered German minesweepers. He fondly remembers the friendliness and support of the grateful Norwegians; it has given him a love of the country that persists sixty years later. He smiles as he recalls being chewed out by the captain for not running up the Norwegian flag on May 17th.
"How was I supposed to know it was their Independence Day? I didn't have a clue! I was only a kid!"
I don't know how old he is and I don't want to ask, but he's wearing terrifically well. He's come back to this place he loves, again, with his son and daughter. I hope it's not his last time. I feel an urge to salute him, but I am no serviceman. Mine-sweeping was no task for the timorous.
There's a fair bit to explore at the centre. In the middle of the main chamber, a glass bubble in the floor reveals a rounded bolder. Incised deeply in the rock is a strange looping graffito and the numbers "1907". A case displays a photo of some men in uniform posing around it. It is, in fact, the King of Siam – now Thailand. That year, he formed a hankering to visit the end of the world – their first royal visitor in centuries, if the displays are believed, since the Swedish king. It was not a trivial trip then. Beneath the building, a tunnel runs downhill to the Grotto Bar and an outpost overlooking the sea from some way down the rock face of the cape. Along this tunnel are two small rooms. On the right is a non-denominational chapel, modernist and decorated with blue mosaic – quite lairy by Norse standards. Behind the tiny altar is a pictorial mosaic, showing Jesus, a dove and a cross – according to the sign outside, the only symbols in common to all the branches of Christianity. So it's not much help if you want to pray to Allah or JHVH, then.
Almost opposite is the Thai Museum. Donated in 1989 by the people of Thailand – which I interpret to mean a bureaucrat somewhere – it contains images, statues and various souvenirs of the King's visit, nearly a century ago. Sadly for me – and I daresay most of its visitors – the bulk of the labelling is in Thai script. Well, I take it to be Thai; it's not in my repertoire, so for all I know it could be Gujarati, to be honest. Some labels explain that there are photos of the king, a statue of him and some commemorative medals. The strange looping carving in the rock upstairs, a little like a valentine's heart, is, I learn, the King's signature – or at least initials. I recall that some of the men in the photo were holding a hammer and chisel; I imagine the King signed the rock and his men promptly carved it deeply in. Odd that it didn't register on my that the men in the picture were not Norwegian, especially given how rare a sight any non-caucasians are up here. A black family board the Polarlys at its next stop and they stand out, so few brown faces are to be seen here.
Also in the tunnel are tableaux, set into the walls, of the namers of the cape, in their storm-tossed ship – the other two got truly lost, looking for China, and their starved bodies were found on an Arctic island, years later. The lead ship made it into a Russian port and they were escorted to Moscow as guests of the Tsar.
Others show the first tourists, from the King and Queen of Sweden to that lone mad Italian to the King of Siam. It's a popular place, given that it's not really the furthest north and that there's absolutely nothing of interest to see. Such is the human fascination with extremes – and willingness to be fooled.
- - - - -
For me, one of the most interesting parts was a small Sami family we visited on the way up here from Honningsvåg. On one side of the road are a few wooden houses, which aren't mentioned. On the other, a long hut with a sign saying "SOUVENIRS" and a man in a remarkable hat standing holding a reindeer. He is Nils Oscar Smorre, and his is the world's northernmost reindeer-herding family. Several rather ineffectual fences straggle around the area, not visibly impeding the movement of a dozen or so reindeer which wander about randomly. I get the feeling that Nils Oscar has restrained his more by the large bucket of "reindeer moss" – a fruticose lichen, Cladonia spp. – in which its nose is buried. There's moss scattered on the ground all around, which I suspect is why there are so many animals around. I daresay the labour of gathering it is poorly rewarded by the profits of selling trolls, dolls and postcards, but hey, it's a living. To me, the wooden houses look more appealing than the crude tent standing next to Nils Oscar. It's a simple conical arrangement of wooden poles with tarpaulins draped around it. At ground level, there's a circle a few meters across, scattered in reindeer hide, with a smoky fire burning in the middle. The peak of the tent is open, allowing the smoke to escape.
It looks a grim life to me, constantly following the herds, living in this, with no spare time or room for many possessions – certainly not books, let alone modern luxuries such as electronics for music, radio or TV. Even so, I'd not be the one to tell these people that they must give up their lifestyle and settle down like the fishermen and farmers from further south. Yet that is what they are doing and I'll bet that in a few generations there's nothing more left of the Norwegian Sami than some Norwegians with a few weird words in their vocabulary, a trace of an epicanthic fold and a tendency to plumpness.
Declining to pose with him, I buy a couple of postcards depicting a slightly younger and less weather-beaten Nils Oscar. I cannot speak his language, to my shame, so I ask him in Norwegian.
"Excuse me… These pictures. They are you, no?"
"Yes, they are."
"Then can I have your autograph, if you'd be so kind?"
He looks at me. I cannot read his deeply-wrinkled face, either. But he nods, grabs a pen from the plump, cheerful woman at the till – perhaps his daughter, though surely not the golden-haired child in the photos from the '60s or '70s – and scrawls his name across the back.
I hope he's pleased at this tiny gesture of recognition. The faces on my coach are more surprised: they were too busy photographing reindeer, or posing with an impassive Nils Oscar, to notice the resemblance or to actually try to talk to him. Getting his autograph didn't occur. He just stood there in the frigid wind, his colourful embroidered tunic dirty and threadbare, his red hat, like a jester's or something worn by a teenager at a rock festival, flopping in the wind. He didn't speak to the tourists nor they to him. Some merely dropped a few kronor in the hat by the tent.
To be honest, following migrating deer around Finnmark and northern Norway doesn't sound like an exciting, stimulating or honour-filled life to me, but I think that in many ways it's better than this.
