Day 1: Bergen
Oct. 14th, 2004 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenUpstairs bar, Scruffy Murphy's, Stortorget, 10pm, 30 Sep 04
There is something about visiting a city for the second time, after a long interval, that is a little like greeting an old friend for the first time in years. It's a good sensation: they're familiar, yet there will be little differences. It's only possible to befriend a city by living in it, of course, although some can quickly become infatuations - but always unrequited ones. They only want you for your money.
I am in Bergen, Norway's second city, in the fjordlands of the west coast of Europe's longest nation. Pick up Norway and move it its own length south, and while the northern towns would lie within the same country's latitudes, Oslo would be as far south as Rome. I am travelling through Tromsø and Hammerfest, the world's most northerly city and town respectively, to Kirkenes on the Russian border, further east than Istanbul. I was last here, very briefly, ten years ago, on my first ever visit to this most beautiful of countries - for it has some of the most spectacular scenery Earth has to offer, matched with the highest standard of living there is, too. And, because every silver lining has a cloud, some of the world's highest taxes and the most expensive alcohol, as well. As a visitor – albeit a regular, if occasional one - for more than decade now, the former doesn't bother me, and the latter wouldn't nearly as much as it does if the beer was any good. Alas, it isn't. Here in a fake Irish pub, listening to Dire Straits - I yield to none in my pursuit of authenticity, and this city is a tourist trap par excellence - I'm drinking a pint (no, not some fraction of a litre) of locally-brewed Hansa lager. And it's dire.
But no matter.
A common element to many European cities I have known is that there is almost invariably some wide open space in the centre, ringed with large, imposing buildings - though often unlovely - which for some reason are consistently topped with huge neon advertising signs. It's something Britain doesn't really do - London's Piccadilly Circus is instantly recognisable for its signage, so rare is the phenomenon.
In Bergen, it's the old harbour, which is the end of a fjord - which as any GCSE geographer will tell you is a flooded valley carved by a glacier. Norway's fjords are arguably the world's finest - indeed, the Norwegians gave us the word. Here in the western edge of continental Scandinavia, the rock strata are folded and creased and convoluted, and these deep wrinkles were then ground away by the glaciers of the ice ages and flooded by the North Sea and the North Atlantic. These are cold, grey, uninviting seas; one suspects that the only people who would wish to swim in it are the sort who actively enjoy leaping naked out of saunas, rolling in the snow, plunging into icy water and scouring one another with birch twigs. And rinse and repeat. I blame Lutherism, myself. Some of the locals naturally vigorously deny this and point accusingly at the Finns, who everybody thinks are weird.
I must confess at this point that I have once gone swimming in a fjord. It was July, high summer - I am not completely daft - and far in the south of Norway, near Stathelle in Telemark. And it was glorious. While the water was disturbingly brown, like the runoff from a Yorkshire moor - and if you've never drunk the fresh icy water from a moorland stream, you've missed one of Britain's great treats. But it was warm, almost bathlike - quite unexpected, especially given how cold it feels when dashed in your face by the swift passage of a small motorboat taking you to one of it's owner's favourite islands.
It's that kind of country. No, not everyone has a boat - this is a twenty-first-century country, it has urban poor and a growing problem with drug use and street crime. Still, for a hundred thousand Sterling you can buy a five or six bedroom house overlooking the coast in outlying regions of the relatively balmy South. With Norwegian pay scales, at this kind of price, it's not a great luxury to keep a boat or yacht for summer. And with literally tens of thousands of tiny islands around the coast, many only a handful of metres across, there are plenty to go round. Pick one, sail out, have a swim and then lounge around in the sun on your own personal islet. Bigger ones often have tiny holiday cottages perched on them. This is a country with much to offer, and it's really going to be deeply shafted if the greenhouse effect both raises sea levels and causes the Gulf Stream to shut down.
But back to the fjords. What results from these wrinkled rocks, ruched up like a pleated skirt – or, more prosaically, a torn piece of corrugated cardboard – the folds' long axes pointing out to sea, are a myriad of deep valleys leading far inland, carved by ice and now filled with calm water. They're seldom perfectly straight and the kinks and wiggles block the breakers. You can sail around placidly inside, but stray close to the mouth and suddenly you find yourself tossed around like the change in the pocket of an enthusiastic Dance Dance Revolution player. It's more than disconcerting: in a small boat, it's truly frightening, and your response is to turn tail and flee back into sheltered waters.
If you're not piloting yourself - or at the mercy of a sadistic host - but instead relaxing on a large cruise ship, the upshot is numinous views of towering cliffs over smooth water, precipitous valley walls that make England's peaks look like a scale model. Scattered amid this epic landscape are islands, busy little towns and villages and a culture that still lives much of its life on the sea road. Trips that might take a flying crow a few kilometers can here take hundreds by road or train, even with a government that literally spends a fortune - one earned from North Sea Oil - on providing a positively lavish infrastructure, in large part to try to persuade people to stay in the North. There are subsidies, tax breaks and massive investment to keep these gorgeous but remote and often bleak and forbidding vastnesses populated. Tiny villages have their own airports with daily flights, but still, the ships that ply up and down the coast - and this 2000km long country has 15,000km of coast - lovely crinkly edges, as Douglas Adams observed - still form one of the major links of the northern communities.
That and a very significant tourist industry.
There is something about visiting a city for the second time, after a long interval, that is a little like greeting an old friend for the first time in years. It's a good sensation: they're familiar, yet there will be little differences. It's only possible to befriend a city by living in it, of course, although some can quickly become infatuations - but always unrequited ones. They only want you for your money.
I am in Bergen, Norway's second city, in the fjordlands of the west coast of Europe's longest nation. Pick up Norway and move it its own length south, and while the northern towns would lie within the same country's latitudes, Oslo would be as far south as Rome. I am travelling through Tromsø and Hammerfest, the world's most northerly city and town respectively, to Kirkenes on the Russian border, further east than Istanbul. I was last here, very briefly, ten years ago, on my first ever visit to this most beautiful of countries - for it has some of the most spectacular scenery Earth has to offer, matched with the highest standard of living there is, too. And, because every silver lining has a cloud, some of the world's highest taxes and the most expensive alcohol, as well. As a visitor – albeit a regular, if occasional one - for more than decade now, the former doesn't bother me, and the latter wouldn't nearly as much as it does if the beer was any good. Alas, it isn't. Here in a fake Irish pub, listening to Dire Straits - I yield to none in my pursuit of authenticity, and this city is a tourist trap par excellence - I'm drinking a pint (no, not some fraction of a litre) of locally-brewed Hansa lager. And it's dire.
But no matter.
A common element to many European cities I have known is that there is almost invariably some wide open space in the centre, ringed with large, imposing buildings - though often unlovely - which for some reason are consistently topped with huge neon advertising signs. It's something Britain doesn't really do - London's Piccadilly Circus is instantly recognisable for its signage, so rare is the phenomenon.
In Bergen, it's the old harbour, which is the end of a fjord - which as any GCSE geographer will tell you is a flooded valley carved by a glacier. Norway's fjords are arguably the world's finest - indeed, the Norwegians gave us the word. Here in the western edge of continental Scandinavia, the rock strata are folded and creased and convoluted, and these deep wrinkles were then ground away by the glaciers of the ice ages and flooded by the North Sea and the North Atlantic. These are cold, grey, uninviting seas; one suspects that the only people who would wish to swim in it are the sort who actively enjoy leaping naked out of saunas, rolling in the snow, plunging into icy water and scouring one another with birch twigs. And rinse and repeat. I blame Lutherism, myself. Some of the locals naturally vigorously deny this and point accusingly at the Finns, who everybody thinks are weird.
I must confess at this point that I have once gone swimming in a fjord. It was July, high summer - I am not completely daft - and far in the south of Norway, near Stathelle in Telemark. And it was glorious. While the water was disturbingly brown, like the runoff from a Yorkshire moor - and if you've never drunk the fresh icy water from a moorland stream, you've missed one of Britain's great treats. But it was warm, almost bathlike - quite unexpected, especially given how cold it feels when dashed in your face by the swift passage of a small motorboat taking you to one of it's owner's favourite islands.
It's that kind of country. No, not everyone has a boat - this is a twenty-first-century country, it has urban poor and a growing problem with drug use and street crime. Still, for a hundred thousand Sterling you can buy a five or six bedroom house overlooking the coast in outlying regions of the relatively balmy South. With Norwegian pay scales, at this kind of price, it's not a great luxury to keep a boat or yacht for summer. And with literally tens of thousands of tiny islands around the coast, many only a handful of metres across, there are plenty to go round. Pick one, sail out, have a swim and then lounge around in the sun on your own personal islet. Bigger ones often have tiny holiday cottages perched on them. This is a country with much to offer, and it's really going to be deeply shafted if the greenhouse effect both raises sea levels and causes the Gulf Stream to shut down.
But back to the fjords. What results from these wrinkled rocks, ruched up like a pleated skirt – or, more prosaically, a torn piece of corrugated cardboard – the folds' long axes pointing out to sea, are a myriad of deep valleys leading far inland, carved by ice and now filled with calm water. They're seldom perfectly straight and the kinks and wiggles block the breakers. You can sail around placidly inside, but stray close to the mouth and suddenly you find yourself tossed around like the change in the pocket of an enthusiastic Dance Dance Revolution player. It's more than disconcerting: in a small boat, it's truly frightening, and your response is to turn tail and flee back into sheltered waters.
If you're not piloting yourself - or at the mercy of a sadistic host - but instead relaxing on a large cruise ship, the upshot is numinous views of towering cliffs over smooth water, precipitous valley walls that make England's peaks look like a scale model. Scattered amid this epic landscape are islands, busy little towns and villages and a culture that still lives much of its life on the sea road. Trips that might take a flying crow a few kilometers can here take hundreds by road or train, even with a government that literally spends a fortune - one earned from North Sea Oil - on providing a positively lavish infrastructure, in large part to try to persuade people to stay in the North. There are subsidies, tax breaks and massive investment to keep these gorgeous but remote and often bleak and forbidding vastnesses populated. Tiny villages have their own airports with daily flights, but still, the ships that ply up and down the coast - and this 2000km long country has 15,000km of coast - lovely crinkly edges, as Douglas Adams observed - still form one of the major links of the northern communities.
That and a very significant tourist industry.
