Norway - Day 9: Kirkenes
Dec. 25th, 2004 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenSo far, we've not been struck by the beauty of Finnmark. This is the last stop. We're already heading south – on account of there being nowhere much to go north of North Cape – but after Kirkenes, the ship turns around and heads back towards Bergen again. Kirkenes is the region's last chance to redeem itself as a place of beauty.
And what is here in Norway's most remote corner, east of Istanbul, north of Sweden and Finland both? We're 1,150km from Helsinki – less than half as far as the 2,500km to the capital Oslo, and our starting point in Bergen is 2,600km away.
What is here is a disused mining town.
Our guide, Torbjørn, is the first male guide of this trip. His English is hoarse and guttural and he gets a lot of the vowel sounds wrong. I'm used to this, as I know what the sounds of Norwegian and Swedish are like, but it throws a lot of people. To make matters worse, as opposed to the more conventional technique of speaking ad libitum, he's reading from a script – and it repeats itself. A lot.
"Here on the left, you can see a large building. On the left. It is very new and it cost fifty million Norwegian crowns. It is on the left. This large building is our new sports centre. It is very new. It cost fifty million Norwegian crowns."
Then – I'm not making this up – we go round a roundabout and along the other side of the building and he goes through it all again.
The sports centre was quite impressive, in a sort of many-hundreds-of-meters long Nissen hut sort of way. No expense had been spared on decoration. Really none.
The sights of Kirkenes are many but not exactly beguiling to the eye. Most of them revolve around two things: the town's mine and the proximity to the Russian border. The town centre is small and unremarkable, with the usual Norwegian chainstores: Rimi and ICA and Expert and –nille. The first oddity I notice is the sign for the main street, invariably called Stortorget. This time, it also says Сторторгет, which throws me for a second, until I realize. It's in Russian. So is the town library – both Bibliotek and Библиотек. There aren't many such signs, but they're there. These pass unremarked by our guide, perhaps on the reasonable basis that not many Brits can read Cyrillic and they're unremarkable words anyway. What he does point out is a road sign on the edge of town. One side points to Киркенес and Kirkenes, on the other, Мурманск – Murmansk.
(I beg the indulgence of any Russian-speaking readers for any errors; my Cyrillic is not so much rusty as a faint impression in the soil.)
A signpost to a well-known Russian city causes quite a stir; I confess to a frisson myself. This truly is somewhere far-off and unknown, and it drives home just how far we have come. This country is vast; not only does it stretch further than from the Hebrides to Rome, it goes from the western coast of Europe to its Eastern edge, too.
It sports the world's northernmost railway, now disused, running 8km from the port to the mine works, as Torbjørn tells us… before we get to it, when we see the start, as we pass parallel to a stretch and again at the mine at the far end.
One stretch of the road lies between the line and a small lake, quite pretty in its way, but today a sheet of iron-grey ripples driven by a bitter wind. Before the war, it was the town's water supply, but no longer: now, it's too polluted.
But our first stop was the mine.
It's a strip mine. Open to the skies, huge stretches of the landscape have been ripped completely away, leaving giant gashes in the earth, grey and ugly, with water pooling in the deepest. I need scarcely point out that it was Norway's northernmost mine - probably the world's. What they delved for here was iron – or more precisely, iron ore. Very rich iron ore: from 25% up to 40% metal. Overlooking the vast chaos of the mine is a small information board – but it's for business visitors, not tourists. Even if you were interested in the geology of the area, which I am not, hugely, it's all in Norwegian.
Next to it is a picnic table. The kind you find outside a pub, with integral benches. It is laden, seats and all, with a feast – of rock. Big cold grey chunks of rock. I stoop to pick up several fragments.
"Is this ore?" I ask Torbjørn.
"Oh, no," he says, "this is just rock. This is ore," picking up a fragment superficially identical to my untrained eye. (My training is as a biologist; if a rock doesn't have fossils in it, we're not much interested.) He pulls a small magnet from his pocket. It picks up his fragment but spurns mine. He passes another to me; I can collect my own ore samples by merely passing it over the ground. It's quite amazing.
Torbjørn enthuses over the place. There are huge stolid grey buildings, for processing the ore in some mysterious way. Great rusting iron chimneys, huge spoil heaps, and outside the reception area, a sort of Zen rock garden as built by someone who's had the concept described to them but isn't entirely clear on the notion. It comprises an arrangement of huge lumps of ore, from 5 tonne tiddlers to some 30 tonne chunks the size of a car. They've been carefully placed in no apparent patter whatsoever, sitting on the concrete apron, a walkway weaving between them. This is what we produce and we're proud of it.
It's a man's place, in a way, I suppose; unrelieved by any decorative features or designed for anything but brute utility in a harsh job in a harsh climate, but with the occasional touch of humour. Independent bits of machinery such as vehicles and digging machines were individually named, all with female names; we are shown a huge rusting yellow earthmover of some form, like an acromegalic JCB, its tyres taller than I am. The very large dumper truck in front of it is quite dwarfed.
It's called Marion.
A dozen men could stand in its digging bucket without crowding. In fact, they regularly do. Just by the mine entrance is a housing estate, the most British-looking of its kind I've seen in Norway – which is not a compliment. Where its entrance road joins the main road, there's a bus shelter.
Apparently, over the years, this repeatedly got vandalised.
It's not surprising. Kirkenes went into a considerable slump in the late 80s when the mine closed, and as Torbjørn puts it, "we all thought out town would die." There was nothing here but the mine. But now, they've found new industries: tourism, fishing, shipworks, new businesses, and a unique position at the head of the European highway leading from here straight into Russia. This the main land gateway between Norway and Russia; you can drive from here straight to Vladivostok ("Eastern Gateway") on a single road.
But in the meantime, times were hard. I'm not surprised the local kids smashed the place up a bit.
They don't any more. Not because they're deliriously happy to be here – somehow I rather doubt that – but because the glass bus shelter was replaced with one of Marion's buckets, upturned on a brick foundation. There's plenty of room to shelter under there and the kids are unable to harm it in any way whatsoever. Without something the size of Marion, they can't even push it over.
It's a fun touch and a typical bit of local humour. I can't say it's a very pretty bus shelter, but then, have you ever seen a pretty bus shelter?
After the mine, it's off to the border checkpoint. As we drive out of the town into the countryside, it becomes a bit less forbidding. There are meadows and forests. Looking back, I half expected permafrost and no scrap of green, but actually, there are farms here. We’ve come a couple of hundred kilometres south from Nordkapp and we're below the treeline again; there are birches everywhere and pines and other conifers too. This isn't a very mountainous area, by Nordic standards, but high in the craggy hills, there are summer houses, and apparently it's a great area for cross-country skiing.
The checkpoint itself is at the end of a long lake called Pikevann – "Girl Lake", as Torbjørn puts it, although "Maiden" is a bit more poetic. Literally, that would make it Maiden's Water. Hmm. Perhaps not.
It was meant to be 40km or so further west, using a river as a natural boundary, but this would have put an old church inside atheist Russia, so they moved it a bit. It's not a welcoming place. There's a small carpark, a tiny prefab holding a souvenir stand, and some information boards, in English, Norwegian and Russian. They tell you a little about the area and threaten dire things if you stray too far. No siteseeing, no pedestrians, no trespassing, no taking of suspicious photographs; no fun, really. You can peer through the open gates at the buildings of a small administrative compound, and beyond, into some frankly identical-looking countryside which is imbued with some special significance because it's Russian.
Actually, it all looks vaguely Russian up here. The unfarmed land has stands of beech but it's mostly long grass, rich with herbs and wildflowers. It's flat or gently undulating, atypical for Norway but just how I picture the steppes. I find it easy to imagine it continuing like this for thousands of miles, riding a bike for day after endless day across the taiga, right across Siberia and the north of Eurasia to the Pacific Ocean. This has been a long journey, but knowing that this road would take me to the mysterious east, though really foreign lands, a country where I've never been, don't speak the language and can barely read the alphabet, fills me with a yearning to just keep going. Not by bike, actually – it's too far; I want a big tough jeep or something, solid and unfancy and not worth stealing, packed with supplies and a course in conversational Russian.
I snap back to reality. We're still in Norway and we cannot even step onto Russian soil. I can't see any guards but I don't want to push my luck. This side, just before the gates, are posts marking the border. One side's half green, half red; the other, fierce yellow and brown stripes like the warning markings of a wasp. The signboards tell you that you don't cross into the other-coloured area unless you have a damned good reason and papers to prove it.
So instead, we run for shelter from a sudden shower of sleet into the souvenir shop. It's tiny, cramped, and currently even more full of tourists than tat, but it's a close run thing. For once, though, it's not all trolls and moose. You get bears and Matrioshka dolls as well. There's also some cheap decorative jewellery and some exquisite wood carving and beautifully-dressed dolls. If there's one thing Russia has lots of, it's manual labour. For once, I'm tempted by a tacky souvenir. It's an apparently hand-painted mug. One side and has trolls gambolling in a meadow – then there are the colourful border posts, and on the other side, a family of brown bears. One side of the handle says "Norge" and the other "Руссиа". It's twee and contrived but it’s somehow appropriate. We're standing here on an anonymous and unremarkable bit of highway except for a purely arbitrary human boundary, so why not mark it with a symbol of the two countries touching.
On the way back, the coach drives up into the most elevated bit of the town, Priest's Hill, giving a panoramic view over the town. It's no Bergen, but I can see why the locals are proud. It's a forbidding place to make a living, and they're only here because of the mine. To survive and even prosper now that's gone is an achievement to be proud of.
On the way back to the ship, we went past the sports centre again. "This large building on your left is our new sports centre," begins Torbjørn…
And what is here in Norway's most remote corner, east of Istanbul, north of Sweden and Finland both? We're 1,150km from Helsinki – less than half as far as the 2,500km to the capital Oslo, and our starting point in Bergen is 2,600km away.
What is here is a disused mining town.
Our guide, Torbjørn, is the first male guide of this trip. His English is hoarse and guttural and he gets a lot of the vowel sounds wrong. I'm used to this, as I know what the sounds of Norwegian and Swedish are like, but it throws a lot of people. To make matters worse, as opposed to the more conventional technique of speaking ad libitum, he's reading from a script – and it repeats itself. A lot.
"Here on the left, you can see a large building. On the left. It is very new and it cost fifty million Norwegian crowns. It is on the left. This large building is our new sports centre. It is very new. It cost fifty million Norwegian crowns."
Then – I'm not making this up – we go round a roundabout and along the other side of the building and he goes through it all again.
The sports centre was quite impressive, in a sort of many-hundreds-of-meters long Nissen hut sort of way. No expense had been spared on decoration. Really none.
The sights of Kirkenes are many but not exactly beguiling to the eye. Most of them revolve around two things: the town's mine and the proximity to the Russian border. The town centre is small and unremarkable, with the usual Norwegian chainstores: Rimi and ICA and Expert and –nille. The first oddity I notice is the sign for the main street, invariably called Stortorget. This time, it also says Сторторгет, which throws me for a second, until I realize. It's in Russian. So is the town library – both Bibliotek and Библиотек. There aren't many such signs, but they're there. These pass unremarked by our guide, perhaps on the reasonable basis that not many Brits can read Cyrillic and they're unremarkable words anyway. What he does point out is a road sign on the edge of town. One side points to Киркенес and Kirkenes, on the other, Мурманск – Murmansk.
(I beg the indulgence of any Russian-speaking readers for any errors; my Cyrillic is not so much rusty as a faint impression in the soil.)
A signpost to a well-known Russian city causes quite a stir; I confess to a frisson myself. This truly is somewhere far-off and unknown, and it drives home just how far we have come. This country is vast; not only does it stretch further than from the Hebrides to Rome, it goes from the western coast of Europe to its Eastern edge, too.
It sports the world's northernmost railway, now disused, running 8km from the port to the mine works, as Torbjørn tells us… before we get to it, when we see the start, as we pass parallel to a stretch and again at the mine at the far end.
One stretch of the road lies between the line and a small lake, quite pretty in its way, but today a sheet of iron-grey ripples driven by a bitter wind. Before the war, it was the town's water supply, but no longer: now, it's too polluted.
But our first stop was the mine.
It's a strip mine. Open to the skies, huge stretches of the landscape have been ripped completely away, leaving giant gashes in the earth, grey and ugly, with water pooling in the deepest. I need scarcely point out that it was Norway's northernmost mine - probably the world's. What they delved for here was iron – or more precisely, iron ore. Very rich iron ore: from 25% up to 40% metal. Overlooking the vast chaos of the mine is a small information board – but it's for business visitors, not tourists. Even if you were interested in the geology of the area, which I am not, hugely, it's all in Norwegian.
Next to it is a picnic table. The kind you find outside a pub, with integral benches. It is laden, seats and all, with a feast – of rock. Big cold grey chunks of rock. I stoop to pick up several fragments.
"Is this ore?" I ask Torbjørn.
"Oh, no," he says, "this is just rock. This is ore," picking up a fragment superficially identical to my untrained eye. (My training is as a biologist; if a rock doesn't have fossils in it, we're not much interested.) He pulls a small magnet from his pocket. It picks up his fragment but spurns mine. He passes another to me; I can collect my own ore samples by merely passing it over the ground. It's quite amazing.
Torbjørn enthuses over the place. There are huge stolid grey buildings, for processing the ore in some mysterious way. Great rusting iron chimneys, huge spoil heaps, and outside the reception area, a sort of Zen rock garden as built by someone who's had the concept described to them but isn't entirely clear on the notion. It comprises an arrangement of huge lumps of ore, from 5 tonne tiddlers to some 30 tonne chunks the size of a car. They've been carefully placed in no apparent patter whatsoever, sitting on the concrete apron, a walkway weaving between them. This is what we produce and we're proud of it.
It's a man's place, in a way, I suppose; unrelieved by any decorative features or designed for anything but brute utility in a harsh job in a harsh climate, but with the occasional touch of humour. Independent bits of machinery such as vehicles and digging machines were individually named, all with female names; we are shown a huge rusting yellow earthmover of some form, like an acromegalic JCB, its tyres taller than I am. The very large dumper truck in front of it is quite dwarfed.
It's called Marion.
A dozen men could stand in its digging bucket without crowding. In fact, they regularly do. Just by the mine entrance is a housing estate, the most British-looking of its kind I've seen in Norway – which is not a compliment. Where its entrance road joins the main road, there's a bus shelter.
Apparently, over the years, this repeatedly got vandalised.
It's not surprising. Kirkenes went into a considerable slump in the late 80s when the mine closed, and as Torbjørn puts it, "we all thought out town would die." There was nothing here but the mine. But now, they've found new industries: tourism, fishing, shipworks, new businesses, and a unique position at the head of the European highway leading from here straight into Russia. This the main land gateway between Norway and Russia; you can drive from here straight to Vladivostok ("Eastern Gateway") on a single road.
But in the meantime, times were hard. I'm not surprised the local kids smashed the place up a bit.
They don't any more. Not because they're deliriously happy to be here – somehow I rather doubt that – but because the glass bus shelter was replaced with one of Marion's buckets, upturned on a brick foundation. There's plenty of room to shelter under there and the kids are unable to harm it in any way whatsoever. Without something the size of Marion, they can't even push it over.
It's a fun touch and a typical bit of local humour. I can't say it's a very pretty bus shelter, but then, have you ever seen a pretty bus shelter?
After the mine, it's off to the border checkpoint. As we drive out of the town into the countryside, it becomes a bit less forbidding. There are meadows and forests. Looking back, I half expected permafrost and no scrap of green, but actually, there are farms here. We’ve come a couple of hundred kilometres south from Nordkapp and we're below the treeline again; there are birches everywhere and pines and other conifers too. This isn't a very mountainous area, by Nordic standards, but high in the craggy hills, there are summer houses, and apparently it's a great area for cross-country skiing.
The checkpoint itself is at the end of a long lake called Pikevann – "Girl Lake", as Torbjørn puts it, although "Maiden" is a bit more poetic. Literally, that would make it Maiden's Water. Hmm. Perhaps not.
It was meant to be 40km or so further west, using a river as a natural boundary, but this would have put an old church inside atheist Russia, so they moved it a bit. It's not a welcoming place. There's a small carpark, a tiny prefab holding a souvenir stand, and some information boards, in English, Norwegian and Russian. They tell you a little about the area and threaten dire things if you stray too far. No siteseeing, no pedestrians, no trespassing, no taking of suspicious photographs; no fun, really. You can peer through the open gates at the buildings of a small administrative compound, and beyond, into some frankly identical-looking countryside which is imbued with some special significance because it's Russian.
Actually, it all looks vaguely Russian up here. The unfarmed land has stands of beech but it's mostly long grass, rich with herbs and wildflowers. It's flat or gently undulating, atypical for Norway but just how I picture the steppes. I find it easy to imagine it continuing like this for thousands of miles, riding a bike for day after endless day across the taiga, right across Siberia and the north of Eurasia to the Pacific Ocean. This has been a long journey, but knowing that this road would take me to the mysterious east, though really foreign lands, a country where I've never been, don't speak the language and can barely read the alphabet, fills me with a yearning to just keep going. Not by bike, actually – it's too far; I want a big tough jeep or something, solid and unfancy and not worth stealing, packed with supplies and a course in conversational Russian.
I snap back to reality. We're still in Norway and we cannot even step onto Russian soil. I can't see any guards but I don't want to push my luck. This side, just before the gates, are posts marking the border. One side's half green, half red; the other, fierce yellow and brown stripes like the warning markings of a wasp. The signboards tell you that you don't cross into the other-coloured area unless you have a damned good reason and papers to prove it.
So instead, we run for shelter from a sudden shower of sleet into the souvenir shop. It's tiny, cramped, and currently even more full of tourists than tat, but it's a close run thing. For once, though, it's not all trolls and moose. You get bears and Matrioshka dolls as well. There's also some cheap decorative jewellery and some exquisite wood carving and beautifully-dressed dolls. If there's one thing Russia has lots of, it's manual labour. For once, I'm tempted by a tacky souvenir. It's an apparently hand-painted mug. One side and has trolls gambolling in a meadow – then there are the colourful border posts, and on the other side, a family of brown bears. One side of the handle says "Norge" and the other "Руссиа". It's twee and contrived but it’s somehow appropriate. We're standing here on an anonymous and unremarkable bit of highway except for a purely arbitrary human boundary, so why not mark it with a symbol of the two countries touching.
On the way back, the coach drives up into the most elevated bit of the town, Priest's Hill, giving a panoramic view over the town. It's no Bergen, but I can see why the locals are proud. It's a forbidding place to make a living, and they're only here because of the mine. To survive and even prosper now that's gone is an achievement to be proud of.
On the way back to the ship, we went past the sports centre again. "This large building on your left is our new sports centre," begins Torbjørn…
