Some trips you plan. Some trips just carry you along, and all you have to do is keep your eyes open. Our eleven days in Sweden and Norway this July were the second kind. Sixteen of us, one coach, two countries, and more water than I have seen in years.
We landed in Stockholm in the evening, the kind of Nordic summer evening that refuses to end. By half past eight we were standing on the marina at Hammarby Sjostad, the water still, the boats sleeping, all of us squeezed into one frame for the first group photo of the trip. Dinner that night was Indian. Old habits travel well.
Stockholm gave us a full day and used it well. The City Hall first, where the Nobel banquet is held. The Blue Hall is not blue, which the guide enjoyed telling us, and the Golden Hall upstairs really is gold, wall after wall of it, mosaics telling the story of the city in little shining squares. Then the old town, Gamla Stan, with lanes so narrow you can touch both sides if you stretch. And then the Vasa, a warship that sank in 1628 on its first outing, barely a kilometre into its own harbour, and was pulled up 333 years later almost whole. You stand in front of it and it towers over you, dark and carved and quietly embarrassing for whoever designed it. We ended the day in an ice bar, of all places, wrapped in hooded capes, drinking from glasses made of ice. In July. My morning chai felt very far away.
The next morning the coach turned west and Sweden rolled past the window, wheat fields and red cottages and long quiet lakes. We broke the journey at Karlstad, on the edge of Lake Vanern, a lake so big it behaves like a sea. In the evening we walked through a colony of allotment gardens, tiny red cabins with flower beds and flags, each one somebody's summer dream. There is something very content about a country that builds little gardens for its city people.
Then Norway, and the road began to climb. We stopped at an old stave church, black tarred wood, eight centuries old, still standing in its valley like it has nowhere else to be. Inside it is all timber and shadow. Outside, the mountains were getting serious.
The fjord day is the one I will remember longest. A viewpoint in the morning where the water lay far below like poured glass. Then the cruise from Gudvangen to Flam, through Naeroyfjord, the narrow one, where the cliffs rise straight out of the water on both sides and waterfalls fall the whole way down without touching anything. A tiny white church sat alone on the shore, and I wondered who its congregation is, and how they get there. In the afternoon we took the Flam Railway up the valley, one of the steepest train lines in the world, and it stopped midway at a waterfall, Kjosfossen, just so we could all get down and get wet taking photographs. The Norwegians understand drama.
Bergen was next, the old Hanseatic wharf at Bryggen leaning gently after five hundred years, the fish market loud and busy, the city park blazing with roses. Even the manhole covers in Bergen say BERGEN, in case you forget where you are. Then a day at sea on the coastal ferry to Stavanger, watching the wake stretch out behind us and little red and white villages slide past on the skerries. Nobody talked much. Nobody needed to.
Stavanger gave us the wildest morning of the trip. They dressed all sixteen of us in bright red survival suits, put us in a speedboat, and ran us out into Lysefjord, flat out, spray flying, cliffs a thousand feet high on either side. Goats stood on ledges that have no business holding goats. Waterfalls dropped straight into the sea. We came back soaked and grinning. In the afternoon we stood under the three giant bronze swords at Hafrsfjord, planted in the rock to mark a battle fought in the year 872, and then wandered the white wooden lanes of Gamle Stavanger, all cobbles and flower boxes. A full day, that one.
Oslo closed the trip. The City Hall with its twin towers and great clock, the National Theatre, the long promenade, and in the evenings the waterfront at Aker Brygge, where we watched Akershus Fortress across the harbour and the ferries come and go, and a seagull on the pier watched us back with considerable suspicion. On the last day, at the airport, one of us found a Game of Thrones throne and sat on it. After eleven days of boats and coaches and trains, he had earned it.
What stays with me is not the monuments. It is the water. Stockholm built on it, the fjords carved by it, the ferries working it, the waterfalls showing off in it. Scandinavia in July is twenty hours of daylight and water everywhere, and a group of friends in red survival suits laughing like schoolchildren.
The soul came home happy.
HPRD
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