Day 4: Trondheim, Rorvik and beyond
Oct. 22nd, 2004 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenBefore dawn, the Polarlys docks at Trondheim, former capital and the major city in these parts. (Some older Norse still call it Trondhjem - its name in Bokmål - though the days when it was Nidaros are long gone.) With two universities and some 20,000 students to only 150,000 inhabitants, this is a thriving, busy city, nestling in a river valley surrounded by mountains.
Here, I have local guides – an ex-girlfriend's brother and sister-in-law, Sigurd and Hilde. Although the gangplank hit the docks at 6am, we left meeting until a slightly more reasonable 8 – but little is open in Trondheim at such an hour, so I broke my fast at my hosts' apartment in a residential district inland from the town.
Although the heavy industry is gone from here now, the old trade districts are now transformed into riverside apartments or development centres for telecommunications and other modern businesses. Hilde works ten minutes from their apartment for the Norwegian national internet registry, which maintains a far tighter leash on website names than the more relaxed American and British registries. With three national languages – traditional southern City Norwegian, bokmål, modern country Norwegian, nynorsk, and the Sami language – an official hybrid of the various dialects of the people of Lappland in the far north – the American-designed Internet is a problem. How do you call a website "bokmål", for example, when the American ASCII computer alphabet contains no "å" – or "æ" or "ø", either. There are standard conventions – the Danes often use a double A for Å, so that the town of Århus has www.aarhus.dk, but it's not ideal. Her husband Sigurd, meanwhile, spends two to three days a week working in Oslo or further afield still, flying into the office in the morning.
The days of steamships as the artery of life and commerce are gone. However, the government still props up the route, as it has done since August Kriegsman Gren announced the competition to run a service from Trondheim to Hammerfest in 1891. Local heavyweights Det Nordenfjedke Dampskipselskab and Det Bergenske Dampskipselskab said it was impossible to do in the endless winter nights. There were only 28 lighthouses amongst the literally thousands of islands of the north-western seaboard and just two marine charts.
Local captain Richard With had been keeping his own precise notes and records, though, and the upstart Vesteraalens Dampskipselskab said it could do it. The first run took 67 hours, arriving at 03:30 – half an hour early. Before this, letters took three months to make the journey in summer and five months in winter. Now, it takes days. He's not forgotten: at Trondheim, the Polarlys ties up next to southbound Hurtigruten vessel Richard With.
After breakfast, they take me hiking in the tree-covered hills above the city. These are utmark, land that is owned, either by individuals or the state, but unused and open to the public. From the forest, just ten minutes drive out of town, you can look down at the town, under 4km across, built around the meandering river. The flat land around the edges is still cornfields, golden in the warm sunshine of a perfect autumn day. This is the very northern edge of the range of the European oak tree, Quercus robur. There's still room for trees here – the treeline is at seven to eight hundred metres, around half the height at Bergen – but only a short way north, it's down to 70 metres. Much less than that and it meets sea level and there are no trees at all, but down here in Trondheim there is fertile farmland, although it lies at the same latitude as northern Canada.
We're too far north for the wild strawberries that I enjoyed in the hills above Porsgrunn, far in the south, a few years ago, but the woods are rich in wild mushrooms - it's common to come mushroom-picking up here. Even at first thing on a Sunday morning, by the time we're heading back, the woods are coming alive with walkers, from solitary people and those with dogs to entire families, three generations out for a constitutional in the weak sunlight. It's refreshingly cool and crisp, just warm enough for me to have to carry my coat as we pick up the pace a little. You can't help but envy people who have such amenities on the doorstep: hiking all year, skiing in winter, parks and farmlands for gentler strolls and of course the sea, with fjords for gentle cruises or many small islands and nearby towns for coastal sailing. This would be a wonderful place to live, were I not so fond of going out in the evenings quite so much - though Sigurd defends its nightlife vigorously.
Only a few more stops on the route, though, at about 7am tomorrow, we will cross the Arctic Circle into the land of the midnight sun – and the three-month night of wintertime.
More on Trondheim to come - I visited again on my return journey and had time to explore the city a little.
(And I've added an extra paragraph right now, since this seemed unduly scanty.)
Here, I have local guides – an ex-girlfriend's brother and sister-in-law, Sigurd and Hilde. Although the gangplank hit the docks at 6am, we left meeting until a slightly more reasonable 8 – but little is open in Trondheim at such an hour, so I broke my fast at my hosts' apartment in a residential district inland from the town.
Although the heavy industry is gone from here now, the old trade districts are now transformed into riverside apartments or development centres for telecommunications and other modern businesses. Hilde works ten minutes from their apartment for the Norwegian national internet registry, which maintains a far tighter leash on website names than the more relaxed American and British registries. With three national languages – traditional southern City Norwegian, bokmål, modern country Norwegian, nynorsk, and the Sami language – an official hybrid of the various dialects of the people of Lappland in the far north – the American-designed Internet is a problem. How do you call a website "bokmål", for example, when the American ASCII computer alphabet contains no "å" – or "æ" or "ø", either. There are standard conventions – the Danes often use a double A for Å, so that the town of Århus has www.aarhus.dk, but it's not ideal. Her husband Sigurd, meanwhile, spends two to three days a week working in Oslo or further afield still, flying into the office in the morning.
The days of steamships as the artery of life and commerce are gone. However, the government still props up the route, as it has done since August Kriegsman Gren announced the competition to run a service from Trondheim to Hammerfest in 1891. Local heavyweights Det Nordenfjedke Dampskipselskab and Det Bergenske Dampskipselskab said it was impossible to do in the endless winter nights. There were only 28 lighthouses amongst the literally thousands of islands of the north-western seaboard and just two marine charts.
Local captain Richard With had been keeping his own precise notes and records, though, and the upstart Vesteraalens Dampskipselskab said it could do it. The first run took 67 hours, arriving at 03:30 – half an hour early. Before this, letters took three months to make the journey in summer and five months in winter. Now, it takes days. He's not forgotten: at Trondheim, the Polarlys ties up next to southbound Hurtigruten vessel Richard With.
After breakfast, they take me hiking in the tree-covered hills above the city. These are utmark, land that is owned, either by individuals or the state, but unused and open to the public. From the forest, just ten minutes drive out of town, you can look down at the town, under 4km across, built around the meandering river. The flat land around the edges is still cornfields, golden in the warm sunshine of a perfect autumn day. This is the very northern edge of the range of the European oak tree, Quercus robur. There's still room for trees here – the treeline is at seven to eight hundred metres, around half the height at Bergen – but only a short way north, it's down to 70 metres. Much less than that and it meets sea level and there are no trees at all, but down here in Trondheim there is fertile farmland, although it lies at the same latitude as northern Canada.
We're too far north for the wild strawberries that I enjoyed in the hills above Porsgrunn, far in the south, a few years ago, but the woods are rich in wild mushrooms - it's common to come mushroom-picking up here. Even at first thing on a Sunday morning, by the time we're heading back, the woods are coming alive with walkers, from solitary people and those with dogs to entire families, three generations out for a constitutional in the weak sunlight. It's refreshingly cool and crisp, just warm enough for me to have to carry my coat as we pick up the pace a little. You can't help but envy people who have such amenities on the doorstep: hiking all year, skiing in winter, parks and farmlands for gentler strolls and of course the sea, with fjords for gentle cruises or many small islands and nearby towns for coastal sailing. This would be a wonderful place to live, were I not so fond of going out in the evenings quite so much - though Sigurd defends its nightlife vigorously.
Only a few more stops on the route, though, at about 7am tomorrow, we will cross the Arctic Circle into the land of the midnight sun – and the three-month night of wintertime.
More on Trondheim to come - I visited again on my return journey and had time to explore the city a little.
(And I've added an extra paragraph right now, since this seemed unduly scanty.)
