Norway - Day 10: Homeward bound
Dec. 26th, 2004 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenVardø, Vadsø and Hammerfest
And so the Polarlys reaches the end of its voyage to the top of the world – or at least its inhabited portion – and turns to point its prow towards the balmy South. The last couple of stops have given us a taste of the real North. It's bleak and in places frankly ugly. Our tour guide, Kari, a Norwegian who lives in Ipswich with her English husband, is apologetic. She warned us that the towns of the far north didn't bother much with their appearance. That we'd see no gardens and rubbish like cars just abandoned in people's yards. Well, in fairness, it wasn't that bad.
The tiny fishing ports are unlovely, yes, but they're functional. If you can't grow anything more than grass and moss, there's not much point in trying to cultivate a garden. Still, the towns, though plain, are fairly tidy, and there's little vandalism or litter. Kirkenes itself is far enough south that gardening and farming is possible and it's visibly trying to transform itself from a brutal miners' dormitory into an attractive place to visit and live.
As we sail back, we visit some of the many tiny ports that seem to lie in every inlet. Many of these we passed in the night last time, so I rise early and go ashore at two of them, Vardø and Vadsø. I needn't have bothered: after a few, one set of docks is much like another. What's impressive is how busy they are. Even at 6am, there's a scurry of activity as harbourmen rush to load and unload cargo. We all marvel at the extent of these towns. So far from anywhere else, with no chance of farming, these are substantial towns of two, three thousand people or more, stretching for kilometres along the sheltered shores of the northern-facing fjords. To visit each one, the ship must make a substantial detour, sailing miles inland along fjords and then retracing its path after a bare 3m minute stop. Up here, though, the Hurtigrute really is a lifeline; it's still the primary way to get goods in and out.
By mid-morning, the sleet that fell at Kirkenes has turned to snow. In October, it's early but not that unusual. Out at sea, little settles, but we passengers rush ashore to photograph the thin dusting on the ground and on another not-quite-right rock garden. By nightfall, it's settling thickly, and when the ship docks just before dinner, a crowd gathers on the quay. A gaggle of the younger waitresses and chambermaids, all in uniform, run giggling down the gangplank for this winter's first snowball fight, to general delight, although it only lasts five minutes before they have to start preparing for dinner.
As Kari says, it's a true Norwegian scene. A small and less than decorative town's harbour area is transformed by a few inches of snow into a pristine white wonderland. Everyday items like bollards, rolls of cable, heaps of sand and even a delivery van seem somehow magical when iced like a wedding cake.
I stop to chat to Oddbjørn, the ship's passenger liaison. A polite and charming young man, fluently trilingual and as smooth as you like, he's been charming the many elderly ladies on the trip. All day every day he makes announcements over the ship's PA about sites to be seen, upcoming events and so forth; he prints a daily newsletter, has an inspirational quote of the day in three languages on the noticeboard, prints out newssheets of the world headlines for English, French, German, American and Spanish readers. He is indefatigable.
But he seems unmoved by the snow, or indeed by the gambolling waitresses. (Personally, my suspicions are that his interests do not lie in that particular direction.) He knows me by now; I'm usually the last one back aboard at every stop, and I surprised him by speaking Norwegian to him as he pointed me towards our first excursion. He gives me a look of almost disappointment as I happily take photos of the snow.
"We don't see this stuff much in England," I protest. "Well, not in my part, anyway. I never saw this much until a few years ago!"
"You have to remember," he says, wearily, "that for the people up here, this now won't go away until maybe May next year. It's no novelty for them."
I cannot argue with this. "But it's still one to me," I respond, "and Lisa and Lia and Sørunn and Siv-Irenn seemed to like it!"
Perhaps his good cheer is just a veil. If so, it's well-maintained.
Next morning, we stop at Hammerfest, where the snow is now falling constantly. I didn't see it on the way up, but now, in the swirling white, it's quite lovely. I have come prepared, with a long leather coat with insulated lining, two sweaters and a broad-brimmed hat. I've experienced several Norwegian winters before.
The main tourist destination here is the Polar Bear Club, as plugged by Kari. For a fee, you get to join this society and are rewarded with a certificate and a small polar bear lapel pin. Kari's is special: her bear stands on an icepack, denoting that she joined the special Svalbard chapter. The club's building also has a small museum, which I am happier to pay to see – but there's not a lot to it. A variety of stuffed polar animals and some old-fashioned snow hunting equipment are the bulk of it; myself, I find more interest in the photos of old Hammerfest and their captions.
This town has been a busy one since the 1600s. An English visitor then was clearly impressed: he reports how odd it is to walk the streets of this remote place and hear nine languages being spoken around him. Though there is not much to do here apart from trade, he writes that the locals pass their time by throwing a great many soirées and parties, and that these are just as good as anywhere, with good food, music and company. "I can report," he says, "that the ladies of Hammerfest as quite as lovely as those of Paris or London," and encloses an etching of two local sisters to prove it.
It is, to be honest, a bit of a tourist trap, though if you don't join the club the entrance fee is modest. Instead, I set off into town to the other town museum: the war museum.
It's dedicated to the after-effects of the German occupation. The chap on the counter tells me where to go and what to see, which is very helpful, but perhaps my accent is too good, as he tells me entirely in rapid Norwegian. I catch enough of it to get the gist and am too chastened to ask if there's an English audioguide or anything – which is a pity, because this isn't a tourist place, this is for the locals. Everything's in Norwegian only.
I cope.
Early in the second world war, the Nazis moved into Norway and took it over. Tens of thousands of troops were sent here, many in the far North, where Hitler believed that an Allied re-invasion of Western Europe would start. Apart from sea battles and a few strategic air strikes in the south, he was wrong, but the Nazi expulsion was started from the North by troops from Russia, many of whom paid with their lives. As the Germans retreated south, they lay waste to the country. Every telegraph pole was felled, all laboriously hand-planted by small crews who spent years in the 1860s and 1870s working their way slowly across country, linking even the most distant towns to the nascent network. As the Germans left each town, they razed it to the ground. No buildings were left standing; entire settlements were reduced to the smoking rubble of their foundations. The people up here build in wood; nothing survived. In Kirkenes, the townsfolk took refuge in a deep tunnel in the mine, thousands of people living in a few hundred metres of tunnel into the cold rock. In Hammerfest, it was even worse; there was nowhere to go except into the woods.
When they heard the Germans were coming, people took their most precious belongings and tried to keep them safe in the only available way: they buried them. Whole suites of furniture, prized possessions, the local barber's leather swivel chair, imported from Chicago in 1909; everything was wrapped in tarpaulin and concealed underground, where it stayed for years.
So the whole town is only a little over fifty years old. They all are, up here. Everything had to be rebuilt in the whole north of the country. It goes a long way to explaining why it's so plain and utilitarian: buildings were centrally planned, sometimes prefabbed in units, and thousands of them were thrown up in the space of three or four years.
At first, conditions were very basic. There are reconstructed homes from right after the war, from the late 40s, the early 50s; entire families living in a single room, cooker in one corner, beds and cot in the other, dining table in the middle. Almost complete self-sufficiency was the only way: people made their own clothes, furniture, toys, everything. At this time, Norway was grindingly poor. It was before North Sea Oil and pretty much the only thing that got the ravaged country back on its feet was the Marshall Plan. This was America's great effort to rebuild Europe, and Norway benefited hugely.
After a decade, signs of improvement are coming fast. Families have two or even three rooms, there is disposable income and magazines start to appear advertising home furnishings and fashion. The contrast here must have been even more extreme than in other parts of Europe; whole Norwegian families went from scratching a living to relative prosperity in ten years. The museum shows the development of a whole new economy, with new Norwegian-language media advertising Norwegian-tailored luxury goods. In 1949, with a new salon built, the barber dug up his chair, and it served for more than fifty more years.
The centre of the building is a tower, and as you descend, photographs show the reconstruction of the town. There are architects' plans – that's one trade that did very well – showing how modular houses could be varied slightly as they were built, or later customised. The same street plan was kept, with new houses put up right where the old ones stood. After fifteen years, you can hardly tell the difference between the before and after pictures. It's amazing and chilling to consider that in between was the smoking empty wasteland shown downstairs.
In 45 minutes, I barely have time to scurry around the whole place, but it was well worth the rush. I stroll along the main street, prosperous and filled with cheerful shoppers. This place has seen great change, but Nietsche was right, although some of his admirers weren't. Whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.
And so the Polarlys reaches the end of its voyage to the top of the world – or at least its inhabited portion – and turns to point its prow towards the balmy South. The last couple of stops have given us a taste of the real North. It's bleak and in places frankly ugly. Our tour guide, Kari, a Norwegian who lives in Ipswich with her English husband, is apologetic. She warned us that the towns of the far north didn't bother much with their appearance. That we'd see no gardens and rubbish like cars just abandoned in people's yards. Well, in fairness, it wasn't that bad.
The tiny fishing ports are unlovely, yes, but they're functional. If you can't grow anything more than grass and moss, there's not much point in trying to cultivate a garden. Still, the towns, though plain, are fairly tidy, and there's little vandalism or litter. Kirkenes itself is far enough south that gardening and farming is possible and it's visibly trying to transform itself from a brutal miners' dormitory into an attractive place to visit and live.
As we sail back, we visit some of the many tiny ports that seem to lie in every inlet. Many of these we passed in the night last time, so I rise early and go ashore at two of them, Vardø and Vadsø. I needn't have bothered: after a few, one set of docks is much like another. What's impressive is how busy they are. Even at 6am, there's a scurry of activity as harbourmen rush to load and unload cargo. We all marvel at the extent of these towns. So far from anywhere else, with no chance of farming, these are substantial towns of two, three thousand people or more, stretching for kilometres along the sheltered shores of the northern-facing fjords. To visit each one, the ship must make a substantial detour, sailing miles inland along fjords and then retracing its path after a bare 3m minute stop. Up here, though, the Hurtigrute really is a lifeline; it's still the primary way to get goods in and out.
By mid-morning, the sleet that fell at Kirkenes has turned to snow. In October, it's early but not that unusual. Out at sea, little settles, but we passengers rush ashore to photograph the thin dusting on the ground and on another not-quite-right rock garden. By nightfall, it's settling thickly, and when the ship docks just before dinner, a crowd gathers on the quay. A gaggle of the younger waitresses and chambermaids, all in uniform, run giggling down the gangplank for this winter's first snowball fight, to general delight, although it only lasts five minutes before they have to start preparing for dinner.
As Kari says, it's a true Norwegian scene. A small and less than decorative town's harbour area is transformed by a few inches of snow into a pristine white wonderland. Everyday items like bollards, rolls of cable, heaps of sand and even a delivery van seem somehow magical when iced like a wedding cake.
I stop to chat to Oddbjørn, the ship's passenger liaison. A polite and charming young man, fluently trilingual and as smooth as you like, he's been charming the many elderly ladies on the trip. All day every day he makes announcements over the ship's PA about sites to be seen, upcoming events and so forth; he prints a daily newsletter, has an inspirational quote of the day in three languages on the noticeboard, prints out newssheets of the world headlines for English, French, German, American and Spanish readers. He is indefatigable.
But he seems unmoved by the snow, or indeed by the gambolling waitresses. (Personally, my suspicions are that his interests do not lie in that particular direction.) He knows me by now; I'm usually the last one back aboard at every stop, and I surprised him by speaking Norwegian to him as he pointed me towards our first excursion. He gives me a look of almost disappointment as I happily take photos of the snow.
"We don't see this stuff much in England," I protest. "Well, not in my part, anyway. I never saw this much until a few years ago!"
"You have to remember," he says, wearily, "that for the people up here, this now won't go away until maybe May next year. It's no novelty for them."
I cannot argue with this. "But it's still one to me," I respond, "and Lisa and Lia and Sørunn and Siv-Irenn seemed to like it!"
Perhaps his good cheer is just a veil. If so, it's well-maintained.
Next morning, we stop at Hammerfest, where the snow is now falling constantly. I didn't see it on the way up, but now, in the swirling white, it's quite lovely. I have come prepared, with a long leather coat with insulated lining, two sweaters and a broad-brimmed hat. I've experienced several Norwegian winters before.
The main tourist destination here is the Polar Bear Club, as plugged by Kari. For a fee, you get to join this society and are rewarded with a certificate and a small polar bear lapel pin. Kari's is special: her bear stands on an icepack, denoting that she joined the special Svalbard chapter. The club's building also has a small museum, which I am happier to pay to see – but there's not a lot to it. A variety of stuffed polar animals and some old-fashioned snow hunting equipment are the bulk of it; myself, I find more interest in the photos of old Hammerfest and their captions.
This town has been a busy one since the 1600s. An English visitor then was clearly impressed: he reports how odd it is to walk the streets of this remote place and hear nine languages being spoken around him. Though there is not much to do here apart from trade, he writes that the locals pass their time by throwing a great many soirées and parties, and that these are just as good as anywhere, with good food, music and company. "I can report," he says, "that the ladies of Hammerfest as quite as lovely as those of Paris or London," and encloses an etching of two local sisters to prove it.
It is, to be honest, a bit of a tourist trap, though if you don't join the club the entrance fee is modest. Instead, I set off into town to the other town museum: the war museum.
It's dedicated to the after-effects of the German occupation. The chap on the counter tells me where to go and what to see, which is very helpful, but perhaps my accent is too good, as he tells me entirely in rapid Norwegian. I catch enough of it to get the gist and am too chastened to ask if there's an English audioguide or anything – which is a pity, because this isn't a tourist place, this is for the locals. Everything's in Norwegian only.
I cope.
Early in the second world war, the Nazis moved into Norway and took it over. Tens of thousands of troops were sent here, many in the far North, where Hitler believed that an Allied re-invasion of Western Europe would start. Apart from sea battles and a few strategic air strikes in the south, he was wrong, but the Nazi expulsion was started from the North by troops from Russia, many of whom paid with their lives. As the Germans retreated south, they lay waste to the country. Every telegraph pole was felled, all laboriously hand-planted by small crews who spent years in the 1860s and 1870s working their way slowly across country, linking even the most distant towns to the nascent network. As the Germans left each town, they razed it to the ground. No buildings were left standing; entire settlements were reduced to the smoking rubble of their foundations. The people up here build in wood; nothing survived. In Kirkenes, the townsfolk took refuge in a deep tunnel in the mine, thousands of people living in a few hundred metres of tunnel into the cold rock. In Hammerfest, it was even worse; there was nowhere to go except into the woods.
When they heard the Germans were coming, people took their most precious belongings and tried to keep them safe in the only available way: they buried them. Whole suites of furniture, prized possessions, the local barber's leather swivel chair, imported from Chicago in 1909; everything was wrapped in tarpaulin and concealed underground, where it stayed for years.
So the whole town is only a little over fifty years old. They all are, up here. Everything had to be rebuilt in the whole north of the country. It goes a long way to explaining why it's so plain and utilitarian: buildings were centrally planned, sometimes prefabbed in units, and thousands of them were thrown up in the space of three or four years.
At first, conditions were very basic. There are reconstructed homes from right after the war, from the late 40s, the early 50s; entire families living in a single room, cooker in one corner, beds and cot in the other, dining table in the middle. Almost complete self-sufficiency was the only way: people made their own clothes, furniture, toys, everything. At this time, Norway was grindingly poor. It was before North Sea Oil and pretty much the only thing that got the ravaged country back on its feet was the Marshall Plan. This was America's great effort to rebuild Europe, and Norway benefited hugely.
After a decade, signs of improvement are coming fast. Families have two or even three rooms, there is disposable income and magazines start to appear advertising home furnishings and fashion. The contrast here must have been even more extreme than in other parts of Europe; whole Norwegian families went from scratching a living to relative prosperity in ten years. The museum shows the development of a whole new economy, with new Norwegian-language media advertising Norwegian-tailored luxury goods. In 1949, with a new salon built, the barber dug up his chair, and it served for more than fifty more years.
The centre of the building is a tower, and as you descend, photographs show the reconstruction of the town. There are architects' plans – that's one trade that did very well – showing how modular houses could be varied slightly as they were built, or later customised. The same street plan was kept, with new houses put up right where the old ones stood. After fifteen years, you can hardly tell the difference between the before and after pictures. It's amazing and chilling to consider that in between was the smoking empty wasteland shown downstairs.
In 45 minutes, I barely have time to scurry around the whole place, but it was well worth the rush. I stroll along the main street, prosperous and filled with cheerful shoppers. This place has seen great change, but Nietsche was right, although some of his admirers weren't. Whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.
