Norway | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Jan

2013: a year in the world

Sri Lanka masks

Happy New Year!
By now, most of you in the northern hemisphere should be scrounging around for the asprin or box sets of Dr Who – or, judging from Facebook, run a marathon or some other such oxygen-sucking activity. Here in the southern hemisphere, there are thoughts of work tomorrow. Ugh. Let’s not go there.

It’s raining here, the Christmas pudding is back on the boil and it’s time for tea and reflection. The tea is Russian Earl Grey, from Harrods, which seems a good way to kick off a year in the world…

…I’m not going to win points for originality, but I fell in love with London again: the cheesy, the touristy, the lot, from Harrods to London Bridge.
The city’s on a high, with energy levels up there with the London Eye. The Tate Britain has
just opened after a £45-million renovation, the Shard glimmers over
Southbank, the grungy quarters have reinvented themselves as edgy design
destinations, cashing in on their bad old days, when the High Street
might be known as the Murder Mile… it was all fabulous (except the serious cold snap, but hey, that’s London in November).

Leopard spotted in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka

For sheer sell-your-pants-off stories, Sri Lanka left all other destinations in the shade. It didn’t hurt that the Lonely Planet named it one of 2014’s must-visit countries.The food, the fabulously quirky fantastic shopping, the leopard spotting and the warmth and security of the country all stitch together for a great holiday destination, without overwhelming the sub-continental novice.

This was also the year I learned to make gnocchi, rekindling a post-Aitkin love of pasta.
The destination: the King Valley, in northern Victoria, just a shade
under our modest little Alps. The teachers: the Pizzini and the Simone
families. Forget milk and honey, this is the land of pork and prosecco.

The year 2013 also finally brought a return to Egypt, this time
to bring the Small Girl to her other spiritual (and ethnic) home. I saw
how a population can survive when all the news reports we see tell us
they are being gassed in the streets and chased by tanks. They just keep
going on: going to work, to school, to the market. And they just keep
hoping the generals and the politicians – the big men – treat them
better than pawns on a chessboard.

Fashion parade in Thimphu, Bhutan

I know Egypt will recover, hopefully
soon after the next presidential elections. But in the meantime, Tahrir
Square, the scene of the revolutions, is lush and green, well maintained
and clean. I have never seen it look better. So there is some good come
out of this whole, messy Arab Spring.

The most unexpected experience was attending Bhutan‘s first indigenous fashion parade, beneath the stars in the mountain kingdom. Visiting two tiny countries at either end of India – Sri Lanka and Bhutan – was an eye-opener as to the powerhouse of the sub-continent, and how these tiny nations fight to maintain their identities in the face of ‘a billion shouting Indians’ (their words, not mine).

This year and next mark a flurry of solar activity, resulting in the best showings of the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis.

Deck 9, Midnatsol,

About the same time as I was teetering on a rolling deck of the Hurtigruten, somewhere in northern Norway,
trying to take a photo that wasn’t just a series of squiggles, the
Southern Lights, the Aurora Australis, were reportedly putting on a
great show in Tasmania, about an hour’s flight from home. With another winter of high solar activity ahead, maybe that’s next year’s goal?

Here’s wishing you peace and happiness for 2014 (with the Year of the Horse promising prosperity, to complete the trifecta).

Nov

Bill Clinton, Norwegian chess and the depths of the polar night: on the Hurtigruten

The view from the Panorama Lounge on
decks 8 and 9, MS Midnatsol.

This morning was spent eavesdropping on two old fellas from San Diego: from taking photos with Bill
Clinton, to Russia as a re-emerging military power and car parking in downtown San Diego.

On this
journey on the Hurtigruten, from Kirkenes in far northern Norway to Bergen in the south, the guests are predominantly British, American and German. I catch Australian accents more times than I
expected, many drawn by the lure of spotting the Northern Lights.

There is also a substantial
smattering of Norwegians using the ship for its original purpose: as a means of transportation between the country’s coastal towns and cities.

The
Hurtigruten is a route, not one particular ship (‘hurtig ruten’ = fast route’). A ship leaves Bergen every day of the year and has
been doing so since 1936, interrupted only by wars. My ship is the MS Midnatsol,
(Midnight Sun) built in 2003 and with 644 berths, can take up to 1000
passengers.

One of the many lounges on the MS Midnatsol,

The oldest
ship, the MS Lofoten, was built in 1964 and takes just 153 passengers.
Apparently it’s very popular with tourists, though locals fight to understand
why. “It’s just an old barge, compared with the Midnatsol,” one tells me.

Our cabin
is a cosy little affair: two couches fold down to make comfortable beds,
there’s a little desk and a bathroom. There are hooks and nooks to tuck your
gear away in, though the ship’s lounges, cafes and libraries are preferable,
with their panoramic windows and wi-fi which, undestandably, gets a bit shaky when the weather is tossing the ship around on the stretches of open sea.

“You won’t
starve on the journey,” a waitress tells me sorrowfully. Our induction to the chef’s
hand is lunch, with five types of fish including roasted cod, gravalax (smoked
salmon), tubes of Mills Caviar and yes, today features a reindeer casserole
with onions and mushrooms.

The dining room on the MS Midnatsol.

Stopping at
coastal habitations, sometimes for less than 15 minutes, we’re encouraged to
jump off and explore, be it a polar bear museum, taking a dip in the Arctic pool on the open Deck 9 or listening to a midnight concert when we reach Tromso. With restaurants, gym,
auditoriums, laundry and saunas, it’s a floating world, yet unlike the global
cruise liners, all the staff are local or from neighbouring Sweden.

And with reindeer pate
and caramelised cheese on the menu, live chess broadcasts on the local tv station and a gift shop full of toy trolls and
snowflake knits, it’s undeniably Norwegian.

Nov

Catching the light fantastic: the Northern Lights in Norway

The view from deck 9, MS Midnatsol. Photo: Belinda Jackson

I have seen
the light! The Northern Lights! That shimmering curtain of luminescent green
that cloaks the Arctic Circle in the winter months.

Coy and as unpredictable
as the Sydney bus service, we struck it lucky by spying the lights on our very
first night on the ship. The lights made a brief appearance before dinner –
which only keen watchers managed to catch – but put on a post-dinner show for
all. They reappeared around midnight after the crowds had gone to bed, to dance
and skate across the sky for just a few of us well-rugged travellers on the
Hurtigruten, here in northern Norway.

“We waited
six nights before we saw anything,” a fellow cruiser told me, while helping me
set my camera to catch the phenomenon, which is the result of solar flares
hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. ISO ramped up, exposure 10 seconds, manual
focus, camera tied to a deck chair: for we photographic amateurs, it’s really a
case of pointing, shooting and hoping that something shows up at the end.

But let me
blow a few myths: if you were standing on deck in sub-zero temperatures at
midnight waiting for a ray of green light to hit you in the face, you’d be
waiting a long time. According to the ship’s guest lecturer Dr John Mason, most
of the colours in the Northern Lights are invisible to our eyes: we just can’t
see the red and turquoise bands with the naked eye. Green is the most apparent
colour, followed by violet, but even then, when you look into the sky, they show
up more like a hazy grey cloud against the clear black sky.

Point a
camera at the grey clouds and you’ll see the eerie green rays appear in your
final photo – and even then only when you open the lens for up to 15 seconds.
It’s not always like this, otherwise the Lights wouldn’t be in Sami folklore, long
before cameras became a natural extension of our arms.

The band of
green light was a bridge between earth and heaven upon which departed souls
would travel, a mystical, powerful force that is as strong a lure for us today.

Nov

Norway asks: what does the fox say? ‘Brrrrrr.’

The new Astrup Fearnely museum, by too-hot architect Renzo Piano.

“I hear
it’s a bit of a backwater,” says an unnamed expat living in Sweden, looking
across at neighbouring Norway. Talk about winning friends… but I’ve heard this before, Swedes sniffing at what
they see as hard-smoking, hard-drinking Norwegians who are rich from oil, not
from hard work.

It’s the classic ‘fight-with-your-neighbours’ scenario. Think Britain and France. The USA and Canada. Australia and New Zealand.

If you
tuned into Norway’s national tv station NRK, you’d probably agree. Previous
programs include 12-hour features on stacking firewood, knitting and a minute-by-minute
program of the cruise/cargo ship route, the Hurtigruten, which makes its way up
and down the Norwegian coastline, from Bergen to Kirkenes. It was a 134-hour, non-stop
broadcast from one of the ships, and it rated its pants off.

“Did you
see the program?” an urbane concierge asks me at Oslo’s beautiful Grand Hotel. “It
was great!”

Elkburger at the face of new Nordic food, Kolonihagen,
in Oslo’s gritty Grunerlokka district.

“Sorry, can’t
say I did,” I reply. “But I’m going to be living it instead.”

After a day
in Oslo, where the nonsensical Norwegian hit song ‘What does the fox say?” blares
from cosy-looking bars, we fly to icy Kirkenes, way up in the northernmost tip
of Norway, in the Finnmark region, to start our trip.

To give you
an idea of the locale, Kirkenes is two hours’ flying time from Oslo, heading
due north, in the Arctic Circle. It’s 7km from the Russian border and 37km west
of Finland. Murmansk is 250km away, about four hours’ drive.

Looking out
of the plane window, the blackness is spotted infrequently with orange lights indicating
some sort of dwelling. The ground is white with snow and ice, slick with
running water and while the temperature reads a relatively balmy 2.2 degrees
(positive), the wind chill factor drags it down somewhere below zero.

“It’s quite warm for this time of year,” the
taxi driver tells me. “A few years ago, it was -20C in early November.” My face
starts to crack just at the thought of that cold.

Dinner is a
very red chowder with pepper, king crab and chunks of cod, and a reindeer
burger the size of a side plate: for all its insanely low temperatures, this is not a desert. The land provides.

Follow

2013: a year in the world

Bill Clinton, Norwegian chess and the depths of the polar night: on the Hurtigruten

Catching the light fantastic: the Northern Lights in Norway

Norway asks: what does the fox say? ‘Brrrrrr.’