Spain to Norway on a Bike Called Reggie

by Andrew P. Sykes

  Their body language suggested that I was interrupting something, although, bearing in mind the distance between them, I wasn't quite sure what that might be.

  'Hi,' I said, a little uneasily. 'Do you speak English?'

  At this point the man started to speak Norwegian, at speed, and the girl giggled, uncontrollably. His intonation and tone implied that I was the butt of his words.

  'Just joking,' he then said.

  The subsequent few hours were a frustrating struggle. The camping area was in the shade, boggy and on a slope. The washing machine system was a costly, time-consuming palaver. And Boss Hogg and his girlfriend could be seen outside their ranch, flirting. Oh dear… Had Helmut's take on life on the road now rubbed off on me?

  —

  It was a cold, bright start to Saturday and cycling day 68. I hadn't slept well due to the incline of the pitch, but I was eager to try to put the bad experiences behind me and move on to new, preferably flatter, pastures. Oslo was my destination for the day, and I intended to take the following day off in order to explore the capital.

  Cycling route 1 sent me off in the direction of a town called Sarpsborg where, according to the electronic sign, I was the thirtythird person to have arrived by bike that morning. Quite impressive for 8.30 a.m. The sign also reminded me that the Norwegian for 'cyclist' was syklist, a word sufficiently close to my surname that it would surely have the Norwegians crying with laughter.

  In recent days, Reggie's gears had been slipping and the brakes were looking decidedly worn, so my main preoccupation in Sarpsborg was to find a mechanic. Dodging the roadworks along the main street, I quickly found a bike shop and a bearded mechanic called Petter who was up for the challenge. He needed to finish the job he was doing so asked me to return in a couple of hours when the work would hopefully be completed.

  'What's your name?' he enquired. This was my chance; prepare yourself, Petter, for an attack of mirth.

  'Andrew Sykes,' I replied. 'Sykes, as in syklist.'

  'S-Y-K…' he clarified.

  '... E-S,' I completed.

  Not even a smirk.

  Leaving Reggie to have his mechanical worries tended by Petter, I wandered further into the centre of town. Unsure as to how much I might have to pay for the work to be done, my own concerns were financial. I found a cash machine and withdrew 2,000 Norwegian kroner (NOK), or around £160. I hoped that this would keep me going for a few days at least, even after having paid for the repairs. I then found the main square, ordered a coffee and started to read up on all things Norwegian. Up until then, Norway had been, for me, a bit of a blank canvas. My guidebook did its best to fill me in on the tourist stuff but I needed some hard facts so went online to consult the CIA Factbook. First up was a bit of background information:

  History: Vikings… Union with Denmark… Swedish invasion… Twentieth-century independence… Neutrality in WW1 and WW2… But invaded by the Nazis anyway… Discovery of oil and gas… Rejection of EU membership.

  Geography: Slightly larger than New Mexico… (How big is New Mexico?*)… Rainy year-round on west coast… (Bugger.)… Highest point 2,469 m… One of the most rugged coastlines in the world… (Double bugger.)

  Then came the financial stuff.

  Economy: GDP per capita: $68,400…

  At this point I looked up the CIA Factbook entry for the United Kingdom.

  Economy: GDP per capita: $41,200…

  A difference of around £20,000. It seemed logical to assume that a higher GDP would equate to higher prices but as I scanned through the data, there were no further clues. Finally came confirmation about the source of the country's wealth.

  'Norway saves state revenue from petroleum sector activities in the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, valued at over $800 billion,' explained the CIA spies.

  That was a lot of rollmop herring.

  Mindful of the financial situation, I refrained from ordering a second coffee and opted instead to go for a haircut. The trim was courtesy of Mohammed, an Iraqi refugee who had arrived in Norway in 1995 after the first Gulf War.

  'Why did you choose Norway?' I asked.

  'I didn't. I wanted to go to Canada or Australia but Norway chose me [CIA Factbook: 'Net migration to Norway in 2015 was 7.25 per 1,000 people; net migration to the United Kingdom in 2015 was 2.54 per 1,000 people.'] so I couldn't go elsewhere,' he explained. 'Life in Norway is so boring compared to Baghdad. Everyone spends so much time inside. And Ramadan is a real problem in the summer, as the days are so long.'

  He did have a point. For a Muslim in Norway in 2015, not only had the holy month been in the summer, but it had also straddled the longest day of the year. Mohammed still had another three weeks of daylight fasting ahead of him.

  'How much for the haircut?'

  'It's normally a hundred and seventy kroner but you're a foreigner so just a hundred.'

  Perhaps Mohammed had been reading the CIA Factbook too.

  I returned to the bike shop and chatted with Petter as I watched him finish working on Reggie.

  'How much for the repairs?'

  'Five hundred and fifty-eight kroner.'

  Fifty pounds. No discount for foreigners. It could, on reflection, have been a lot worse.

  As I had also found elsewhere in Scandinavia, good-quality segregated cycle paths beside most roads were the norm in Norway and I made full use of them whenever possible. I picked up the signs for the pilgrims' route near a small town called Halmstad and followed them for much of the day. It was turning out to be a gentle introduction to Norway. The unseen Oslofjord was gradually narrowing a few kilometres to my left, leaving me to cycle through a green landscape dominated by arable farms. Yet in no way did the area feel remote. Aside from the many red barns strewn across the land, it was difficult to travel more than a few hundred metres without passing another substantial – and usually white – house, an out-of-town shop or a small factory. Between the road and the fjord was a railway line and to my right a major highway; there was even a sizeable airport in the small town of Rygge. This was countryside that was trying its best to be part of the urban club but, thankfully for me, repeatedly failing to gain full membership.

  As the sun made progress towards the west, I continued to make progress north. In the mid-afternoon I paused in Moss, where I sat on the sloping banks of a short, narrow canal and watched as small boats took a shortcut to the northern reaches of the fjord. There would be no shortcut for me, but I didn't mind. North of Moss, the increasingly deep blue sky created a wonderful backdrop for the landscape of small towns, villages and lakes beside which I was now passing. There was no wind to speak of and no good reason to stop. Occasional pauses to fuel up on chocolate kept my energy levels high and there was little chance of my enthusiasm waning. By early evening, I was increasingly confident that I would arrive somewhere near Oslo by the end of the day.

  Then, as the road I was following emerged from the trees to coalesce with the shore of the Oslofjord, I found Camping Oslofjord. The facilities weren't great and the noise from two roads on either side of the hill where it was located was inescapable. However, the welcome from the twenty-somethings running the place was cheerful – they didn't ridicule me for my lack of Norwegian – and it would be my home for two nights, as I took time out to explore Oslo, some 10 km further north.

  Reading through the list of things I could possibly do in the Norwegian capital, I decided to focus my attention on just one. This didn't mean I had to neglect my customary wander: impressive new opera house, oversized bronze tiger in front of the station, lots of plaques about playwright Ibsen, walk around the perimeter of the Royal Palace, receive ticking-off from guard for taking photographs of his sentry box... I then caught a ferry across the fjord to my chosen destination of in-depth tourism, the Fram Museum.

  I was on a cycling quest to the polar north, stopping in Nordkapp only because Slartibartfast had seen fit to stop designing fjords and put a sea there. Most people I met who had visited Nordkapp had crui
sed there on a luxury ship. Few had travelled overland and even fewer had cycled. I was beginning to consider myself as a polar explorer, of sorts. So when I noticed in my guidebook that the Fram Museum was dedicated to err… people like me, and even contained 'the world's most famous polar ship' – the 400-ton, 40 m long Fram – I was on my way.

  Back in the late nineteenth century, if you were an explorer who wanted to explore the Arctic Ocean in winter, you had a problem. The boat that you were planning on using would become encased in ice and crushed. Adventure over – back home to the wife and kids. (Sorry, it did seem to be a male-only profession back in those days.) Chances are, however, that you weren't Fridtjof Nansen, described as 'one of the greatest men Norway has ever nurtured… and a legend in his own lifetime'**. Nansen proposed a solution: design and construct a ship – the Fram – that when surrounded by ice would be pushed up and float with the ice pack itself. By doing so he would be able to prove the theory that there was an ocean current and drift of sea ice from Siberia towards Greenland via the North Pole.

  The Fram set off in June 1893 and by September it had indeed become encased in ice off Siberia. It wasn't crushed and over the course of the next three years the ship drifted, as predicted, across the Arctic Ocean. However, when he realised that it wasn't going to cross the North Pole itself, Nansen and fellow explorer Hjalmar Johansen decided to set off on dog sledges to try to do it themselves. They left the Fram at 84 degrees north in March 1895 and started walking in the knowledge that they would never be able to find the boat again. By this point I was beginning to see where the 'legend' epitaph came from. After only a month, battling extreme cold, Nansen realised that it would be impossible to reach the Pole so at 86°14' – the furthest north anyone had ever travelled – they turned around, heading for home. It would take them over a year to get there and their journey involved fighting off polar bears, shooting walruses for their skins, blubber and meat, and sitting out the long winter in their 'den', a stone hut that they built with their own bare hands.

  Back in Norway, the Fram and its crew were presumed lost so it must have been a bit of a surprise when Nansen and Johansen rocked up on the boat of British explorer Frederick G. Jackson who had bumped into them in June 1896 on Franz Josef Land. As for the Fram, she drifted with the ice and arrived back in Norway just five days after Fridtjof and Hjalmar.

  All this explorer stuff left me feeling somewhat inadequate. The museum was full of tales such as the one of Nansen and his chums. The Fram itself went on to escort Otto Sverdrup to the Canadian Arctic and then, perhaps most famously for a Briton brought up on tales of heroism on the part of Captains Scott and Oates, Roald Amundsen to the shores of Antarctica.

  More than a century after all these events had taken place, I returned to the campsite to contemplate my own quest to the north. It was unlikely that I would have to battle extreme cold, resort to killing the local wildlife to feed and clothe myself or build a hut to sit out the dark winter months. It might get a little nippy from time to time, my emergency can of ravioli (now replenished after Sweden's 'emergency') could well see another outing and I might have to be prepared to slum it occasionally in a hotel if my tent got a bit too damp… But a quest it was and as I set off in the direction of Nordkapp, I could feel the spirits of Nansen, Sverdrup and Amundsen willing me, a plucky Englishman, on. I may be some time.

  * * *

  * Since you ask… 315,194 km2, or 15 times the size of Wales. (BACK)

  ** I could go on. According to the Fram Museum: 'He was the personification of a great hero; the first among sportsmen, explorers, research workers, statesmen and humanitarians. Long after his death millions continued to remember him as the foremost exponent of human compassion.' What's betting he was also a sensitive lover, changed nappies more efficiently than Mary Poppins and tossed a mean salade niçoise? (BACK)

  THE TWENTY-FIFTH DEGREE

  60°–61° NORTH

  29 June–1 July

  It had been a slightly bizarre night of post-midnight comings and goings on the campsite south of Oslo.

  Excuse me, madam, it's now past midnight and I'm curious. Why do you keep moving your car?

  And you, sir, why did your friends turn up with two more caravans and then disappear?

  The woman over there with the short leather skirt? Why are you cleaning your van with a vacuum cleaner at 2 a.m.?

  These were all questions I asked, but not within earshot of anyone who might be in a position to give me an answer. I was reminded of the 'business activities' of the women of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and on the campsite in Montargis. But here? Near Oslo? Surely not.

  I headed back into the centre of Oslo. The grey sky and rain of the previous day had been replaced by bright sunshine – perfect weather for the fjordside opera house of gleaming white marble and glass to look its best. Its architecturally obtuse angles gave it the look of a stealth bomber, albeit one painted white, and its influence on the old port district nearby was clear to see. Around a dozen gleaming towers had only just been completed on the opposite side of the road to the opera house. Each tower had been built in a distinct style and was a different shade of white, black or brown. There was no hint of any nods to the past; they had clearly been designed and built looking unashamedly to the future, and they looked wonderful against the backdrop of a blue sky and mirrored in the water of the harbour.

  The plan had been to pick up some cycling/camping/polar explorer (?) brochures at Den Norske Turistforening, or DNT – the national tourist office – located in a more traditional street in the centre of Oslo. It is a sign of our times that the world has moved so far online that all the nice woman who served me could do was to point me in the direction of various websites, many of which I had already visited. Every now and again I yearned to live in the world of Fridtjof Nansen and his explorer chums where the question 'Have you looked online?' had yet to be uttered by anyone ever.

  It was a long, steep climb out of Oslo through smart, well-kept suburbs. In the centre of the capital I had been struck by the extent to which certain areas were being rebuilt, seemingly for the twentysecond century, never mind the twenty-first. In the residential areas, however, the penchant was for covering the buildings with large, colourful murals. It reminded me of the Albanian capital Tirana, through which I had cycled in 2013. There, the city's former mayor Edi Rama had encouraged a policy of painting the drab communist era buildings so as to cheer the place up and the strategy had worked a treat. I wondered what the motivation had been for doing a similar thing in architecturally interesting Oslo.

  After 20 km of almost continuous climbing, there was a short descent towards the small town of Lillestrøm and it was there that I found my first sign for cycle route 7, the pilgrims' route. This would be the cycle path that would hopefully take me as far as Trondheim, at which point I would again hook up with the coastal route, number 1, as far as Nordkapp.

  It was a liquorice allsorts of a day on the bike. I had already cycled through a city and its suburbs but ahead of me was open countryside. The terrain was equally mixed: ups and downs of varying lengths separated by longish stretches of flat riding. Even the weather wanted to show me just how wonderfully eclectic it could be: predominantly sunny in the morning but later in the afternoon a storm to rival the one I had endured on the approach to Salamanca, in Spain. On this occasion, I was caught out and drenched before I decided to cower under a bush. When the rain kept falling, however, I came to the conclusion that I couldn't possibly get any wetter so re-entered the tank of water and continued cycling. If Fred Astaire could sing and dance happily in the rain, I was up for the challenge of cycling in the rain and having fun doing it. I may even have broken out into song.

  In the early afternoon, the sun was shining again and I was happily pedalling my way along the cycle path when I noticed a horse a few metres from the track on my right. What big ears you have was the thought that passed through my mind before I slowed down and took a better look. That was no horse.
From what I assumed to be a safe distance, I quickly took a photograph. When I reached a nearby petrol station, I stopped again to examine the photo in more detail but before I could do so, I was approached by a Norwegian woman, also on a bicycle, speaking excitedly in her native tongue. I held up my hands in an attempt to slow her down.

  'Sorry. I don't speak Norwegian,' I explained.

  Her English wasn't great but markedly better than my Norwegian which, after only a few days in the country, was still limited to 'hei', 'ja', 'nei' and 'Jeg vet at jeg ligner Fridtjof Nansen, men jeg er faktisk bare en syklist fra England*.'

  'Did you see the… elk?' she asked, unsure that she had used the correct word.

  'The moose?' I replied.

  'Ja. But in Norway it is an elk,' she clarified.

  'Yes, I did. Should I have been worried?'

  'They're only dangerous if you are between them and their babies.'