Bergen & Trondheim

Gudvangen bus stop was where I met Anne. A woman who would come to shape my next few days in Norway. The first thing I noticed was her confidence, she was an older woman picking up a young, unkempt man on the way to her old family cabin. She seemed quite happy to pick me up, chat away to me and.. well.. that was the crux of it. She started the ‘conversation’ with, “Let me tell you about me” and by God didn’t she mean it. This woman could talk for, definitely not just Norway, Europe maybe? The Western Hemisphere? Either way I was happily sat down listening to the fascinating tapestry of her life unfurl as the mountains peaks and salmon-filled rivers slid by the window. A quick synopsis of her life would run something like this:

One of the Rockerfellers tried to marry her. Eric Clapton helped Anne’s sister try and find her in Barcelona. Her parents regularly went into the mountains to collect guns because they were in the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis. She used to smuggle clothes and cigarettes into the USSR in the lining of her bag and then smuggle/consume caviar and champagne on the way out. She was on a boat heading to work on the Alexander L. Kielland oil rig as it capsized killing 123 people. She lived in an Israeli kibbutz only populated by Holocaust survivors. A life well lived.

When we reached her family’s old summer cabin she was very emotional, remembering the times she spent there with her parents, hanging out with milkmaids and collecting water from the well. The simple life, her parallel but opposing life in the country. One where the posh house and the nice car didn’t matter and the times spent exploring the hills with the farmer’s son were much more valuable.

After a few tears had been shed, we were on the road to Bergen and Anne went and got us both an ice-cream. She soon found out that I didn’t have anywhere organised to stay in Bergen and got on the phone to see if she could wrangle me a room. Five minutes later, I was officially staying in the guest flat under hers and she said she’d pay for the first night so I would just have to pay £30 for the other two nights (quite the difference compared with the hostel dorm room which cost £80 for two nights and was sold out).

During the final two-hour stint to Bergen the barrage of chat kept coming, the only thing that broke it was a social faux pas. As we were driving through Voss, Anne decided to ask me to guess her age. Now, social convention dictates that as a man I should aim below what I really think when guessing the age of a woman. However, there was one major problem… I was born a winner. Winners don’t bow down to social convention or kneel at the altar of politeness. No no, Anne asked me a simple question and I was going to smash it for six. I took a long hard look at her, trying to unpick the familiar handiwork of the restless and wilful hands of Father Time and took a stab at 72 years old. She was 74. Oooooof, that’s not a bad margin of error at all. I tried to restrain myself from a fist pump and a celebratory cheer especially since she said ruefully that, “Most people guess between 55 and 65.” And the reason, Anne? The reason is… They. Are. Not. Winners. They haven’t got the edge. If you’re going to play the game, play to win.

Perhaps to punish me or perhaps switching to standard operating procedure, Anne changed the barrage of chat from her life and into local and Norwegian history. I tried to continue being an interested passenger but the ice cream high was wearing thin and the combined physical and mental strain of the last week was making it hard to care much about the power of the Hanseatic League.

Cobblestones and Cornflakes

At Anne’s place, she took my olfactory pandora’s box of hermetically sealed dirty clothes and washed them for me, allowed for me to use her shower and soap, then gave me some clothes to wear from her clothes bag for refugees. She rustled up some dinner for us and I tried incredibly hard not to fall asleep. Sunglasses and a new toothbrush were foisted on me after a wonderful dinner of macaroni fish pie with apple cake for pudding. This sustenance made a trip to the shop for essentials possible and I knew I would have to make it up to Anne and so I threw in some ingredients to make her a crumble. But that would have to wait for another evening because it was 21:15 and I felt so tired that I wasn’t sure I would wake up again.

The next day, after a sound eleven-hour sleep, I ate three bowls of cornflakes from my Megabox (a wonderful staple during my occasional forays into towns in the weeks to come), showered and went up to see Anne. She put me straight to work applying balm to my walking boots which I thought were definitely past the threshold for balm usefulness, but I did it anyway, sat in her little garden enjoying the sun. She then insisted on giving me some of the socks she had knitted and she sewed my walking trousers back together, because they had reached a stage of disrepair that made being arrested for public indecency a growing possibility. Then, while she was at it she patched up the hole in the knee with a little duck because Anne means duck in Norwegian. That cute little duck is still with me.

After some intense and frustrating mothering from Anne, we got going. She was heading into town for some reason and said she would drop me off. Of course, that meant a lot of detours to look at various houses and buildings where either ‘famous’ families lived 50 years ago, or a member of her family worked at another time in the past. Eventually though, I was dropped near the funicular and could get the old pistons moving again.

For me Bergen’s charm lay with its extensive cobbled streets, each one a wonder of preservation or dedicated renovation. The white wooden houses with colourful doors were so quaint but had clearly had money, time and effort invested to maintain their character. I spent a long time zigzagging through those lanes, choosing each by the look of the houses, the abundance of flowers or the characterful placement of a pair of chairs outside of a front door. Beyond those steep and narrow old streets was the beautiful but busy harbour where old wood had been warped by the centuries, leaving a tangle of sloping gangways and leering walls. This crooked remnant of a bygone age, a hark back to Bergen’s Hanseatic history, was nice to walk around for a bit even with the number of other tourists.

When the famously frequent Bergen rain came I was in a park so I sheltered under a tree and slumped over my book to mitigate the damage of any rogue drops coming through the leaves. A hearty Indian meal and a shockingly expensive Guinness at an Irish pub for the Euros final filled the rest of my Bergen day before catching the light rail back to Slettebakken for cornflakes and bed.

The next day I discovered an absolute shark fin of a church near to the flat. Sleek green/black tiles rose to a two-pronged peak from the road but from the back the church became a brutalist beast. It was full of sharp angles and concrete slits, looking like an exhaust for some noxious machine belching sulphurous smog from somewhere within the guts of the maze of concrete. Or perhaps it was a huge ventilation system, allowing air in and prayers out. The Norwegians must’ve figured out God’s plan. See, God hates your whining supplication and self-centred pleading, so he made you design churches to trap all the prayers inside, you know, for a bit of peace and quiet. Incidentally that’s why churches have that distinct “church smell”, it’s the slow decay of manky old prayers. For the rest of the day, I desperately tried not to get annoyed with Anne due to her mothering mumsplaining afflication and then I made her (me) a big ol’ crumble.

Ten Hours With a Stranger

Anne had made some enquiries and had consulted her atlas, it turned out that her friend Morten was heading north to Lofoten in a single stint (that’s over 30 hours of driving) and would be happy to take me anywhere along the way. I had decided to stop in at Trondheim for a few days because the tall brother in my final hitch to Sandnes had given me the code to his vacant student room. Trondheim was ten hours away, a daunting social endeavour for most car journeys and a very hit or miss prospect for a carshare with a stranger. Luckily, Morten and I hit it off.

We discussed everything from drug addiction, to the Norwegian folk music scene and the meteorological and geographical reasons behind varying precipitation levels across the country. The breadth of our conversation alongside the never boring Norwegian landscapes helped us to pass the hours. After the Lærdal tunnel (the longest in the world) we climbed up to an alpine landscape of bare dark pinnacles rising from striated and deeply fissured glacier fields. Lakes and rivers ran over the moorland at their blue tongues and presumably fell as 1000m high waterfalls to the green fjords below. Coming down to Utladalen felt like entering a mythical kingdom full of trolls and satyrs, there were wild valleys and gnarled peaks and probably a castle harbouring a fairytale despot keen on hurting a harmless child who had stumbled upon their land.

After passing Lom stave church, the landscape opened up into what looked like the west coast of Scotland and then we dropped down towards sea level through moose-filled pine forests and the rolling farmland surrounding Trondheim.

I Will Never Cheat On My One True Love

In the communal space of the student flat I met Tommy, a 35-year-old who had been hopping back and forth from jail and rehab for the last decade or more. He was very welcoming and was very open about his old life of getting into fights and trying every drug under the sun but also his plan to turn his life around with crypto. A notoriously stable and safe way to make money…

After a decent night’s sleep, I headed out to make the most of the day’s sunshine. Going via a fortress I stumbled my way into Bakklandet, a cobblestone area full of cosy looking places and not a lot of people. Compared to Bergen it was nothing special, so I continued towards one of the main draws of the city for me, the cathedral. As I approached, trees obscured my view, teasing architectural delight with every quivering turn of a leaf or meander of a branch. Soon, I was in front of the western façade and a network of neurons reserved for top tier English Gothic classics were beginning to fire inside me, was this a small and grey Salisbury perhaps? In amongst the statues was a beautiful round window, a touch of class that offset the otherwise aggressively pointy nature of gothic architecture. However, something wasn’t quite right, the statues were looking a little too new. This cathedral was built between 1080 and 1300 so they were doing remarkably well… Or were they? I settled into some research. It turned out that after multiple fires the cathedral had completely burned down in the early 1700s with only a few sections of stone wall remaining. The rebuild began in the 1800s and was finished in 2001. So, what we see today is not the handiwork of ancient crafts people building a church to the new patron saint of Norway, but some fabrication from the hands of a bunch of Victorians and Spice Girls fans. In other words… A lie. My plan to pay the £4 entry was quickly dashed. Feeling I had almost fallen prey to trickery, to the fast pleasures of the modern world, I was ashamed. I had not been far from drawing comparison, from sullying Salisbury’s name with a lesser pretender. But I will not wallow in my shame, I will let it be fuel on the fire of my love. For Salisbury deserves a devoted champion, someone who has faced the trails of international cathedral visitation and remained faithful. I am that champion and will be until my dying day.

After a leafy saunter through the graveyard, the sun came out big guns. I walked along river where old wooden buildings waded out into the flow on stilts. My lunchtime bakery of choice was closed for renovation, so I set my sights on Ladekaia, a restaurant beside an old harbour. To get there from town I wandered a trail along the coast of forested hills, small coves and residential parks. Once I was there, I ate an outrageous number of prawns and headed back feeling I had, for the first time in my life, reached the limit of single sitting prawn consumption. On my walk back, I found that much like in Kristiansand and Sandnes, the city streets seemed deserted. As I walked the long boulevards into the sun, I would look along their lengths and see no more than six people out and about. It was unnervingly quiet for a sunny day.

I completed a little shop for supplies to last the next few days and went back to the flat, and this time there was a different guy kicking about. He was sat on the PlayStation playing Hogwarts Legacy. I threw him a jovial greeting, “Hi, I’m the British guy. I hope Johannes told you about me!” This was of course accompanied by the apologetic awkward grin of a Brit who feels they could be imposing. He turned the considerable heft of his head to glance at me and said, “Yes. I know,” then continued with his game. My usually semi-amenable smile and chipper charm on first meeting had run off him like water off a duck’s back. The antisocial incel powers were strong with this one. An orange can of Monster seemed to be his only companion, and it was drunk with urgency. Once the tipped head gulpfest had ended the slurping began. He slurped up the dregs from the inside first and then hoovered any splashes around the rim. There aren’t many things in the world less endearing than that visuo-auditory coalition.

Pathetic Fallacy Strikes Again

Tommy had told me that his sister worked on the buses and that if you got onboard without a prepaid ticket and tried to pay cash they would just let you on. This had happened in Sandnes and due to the buses in Norway being different systems/apps in every city, I thought it worth playing the dumb tourist card. I was wrong.

Ten minutes into the journey, six ticket inspectors got on dressed like riot police ready for a scrap. I tried everything but crying but they were having none of it. I could see one had some sympathy for me but that didn’t stop me getting fined 68 quid. Sixty eight! For a fifteen-minute bus journey. I was angry that my savings from frugal living had gone to some Norwegian bus company. I was cursing Tommy and I was cursing myself. Things were not good as I stepped out into the rain. But as I would soon find out, things can always get worse.

My chosen hitchhiking spot had a barrier across it, there would be no traffic going through there. So, I walked elsewhere and stood in the rain for over an hour. There was so little passing traffic and my spirits were not high so after weighing up my options I headed for the nearby town of Stjørdal (using the bloody bus app this time) where I would have more options. Once I was back out in the cold, I decided on a night train to Bodø. That would mean I would have a week to explore the Arctic region around Bodø before Emma arrived and wouldn’t have to worry about getting there on time at the whim of hitches. Counterintuitively the weather was supposed to be stellar in the north and I was aiming for some wild camping and coastal exploration but first I had a whole day to spend in and around Stjørdal.

Hunger was the most pressing concern and so I headed for a furniture shop on a business park/ industrial estate, trust me it made sense. Stjørdal was a nothing town. A place you pass through on the train on the way to better places, therefore it wasn’t renowned for its eateries. The only reasonable looking place was a café inside Norway’s answer to DFS, so I reshackled myself to my backpack and after a 30 minute walk I arrived for a brunchtime snack and a warm drink. The wind and rain persisted but my train wasn’t until 23:40. I thought charging too deep into my new book would be bad plan so I left my bag with the baristas and set off for a wander. “Stjørdal must have a nice spot,” I thought, this was Norway after all. 

The nearby village of Hell seemed to be an obvious contender, but the walk looked pretty boring and there wouldn’t be much to see other than a sign saying “Welcome to Hell”, so instead I set off for a green area on the map. The first stretch through the industrial estate was full of bitter smells and the yawning grey of consumerism seemed to engulf everything. However, at its edge I trod a track through fields of deer-crated barley whose fine fronds waved frantically on the hills while they seemed not to move an inch in the troughs of the rolling land. Together as a field, barley seemed to be an instrument of delicate meteorological measurement. The fine filaments twitching at the faintest breath or the whole field putting on a complex dance, a moving map of the wind. After 40 minutes of silent walking, I was at a place called Vikanbukta, sat on a wonderful shoreline.

As on every Norwegian shore, the theme tune was that of strangled cries of gulls and all the while rain crackled on my jacket and fits of wind rumbled a jumpy percussive question in my right ear. Oyster catchers bobbed along on the patches of rippled mud, which rose and fell in mirrored miniature to the pasture around me. The mud flat also housed boulders who seemed to be attempting a westward charge, their trailing wigs of seaweed brushed eastwards. It was as if a timelapse would reveal their locks billowing in the headwind as they vied for position, the smaller rocks tucking behind the vanguard of boulders to reach the clash of waves as one. When I looked carefully each boulder’s wig of seaweed, they were rich, earthy heaps of colour. Crimson tongues of frilled ribbons and pustular lines of ochre and vermillion reflected light dimly under darkened skies. Undulled by the light though was their briny odour. Neither fusty nor rotten, it was in perfect harmony with the saltiness of the air.

In amongst the rocks at my feet, the blueish/purple bruise of a mussel shell would bring some colour to the otherwise grey-dominated beach. Sometimes however the shells showed their concave interiors to the skies, revealing a tarnished purity, a watercolour-white that had been enhanced by the layered colours of the shell bleeding into it.

Beyond the beach and the mud, wind surfers grazed the green-grey sea, while small cabins and houses gratefully accept the protection of rocky outcrops and copses of pine when faced with a fitful sea and accompanying wind. At the bay’s terminus, trees and hills departed the scene, leaving nothing more than a ship’s bridge and the air traffic control tower rising up to meet the wind; the two behemoths facing off across Stjørdal’s gaping dreariness. 

After a burger and some more café time, I went to the train station. The train arrived on schedule, I found my seat and outfitted myself with the hobo sleep mask combo. We’re talking a hooded jacket on backwards (so I could use the hood as an eye/face mask) and the jacket arms wrapped around me (to secure its use as a blanket but also as a substitute for a loving embrace).

Final Thoughts

Robbed blind by high-vis bus ******s and momentarily swindled by the bloody Lutherans, Bergen and Trondheim had their disappointments but they were a much-needed break on the road north. I was now clean but ready to get on the trails again. I had decided to explore Værøy in the forecast sunshine and what a fantastic idea it was.