I visited the Vasa in her museum. She was a ship that sank in 1628 in a strong wind only 1300m into her maiden voyage. She was top heavy, a design flaw, Sweden was a great power and the king was impatient to launch her. Sound familiar? Other than the salvage of her cannons she lay undisturbed in Stockholm harbour until she was salvaged in 1961. She was extraordinarily well preserved due to the cold Baltic waters and a snapshot of Swedish society four centuries ago.
In 1988 she was moved to the Vasa Museum. When I visited her, she was in a temporary museum called the Vasavarvet, being treated with polyethylene glycol. Today the Vasa Museum is the most popular in Scandinavia.
Skansen on Djurgården (obviously a cognate of Tiergarten in German) is an open air museum and park, and a quick way to get an introduction to Swedish natural history and culture.
And if you are a kid, get to view or pet animals.
Up till then I had only heard about runestones in Norse tales.
There was a demonstration workshop on the grounds.
A major shopping street in Stockholm.
Most of the photos following were actually taken on the return visit but posted here to avoid breaking up Stockholm across two posts.
I remember passing a Swedish girl outside a shopping centre who was wearing a fishnet blouse that left nothing of her buxom chest to the imagination. She swished past so fast that by the time my brain registered what I'd seen she was gone. I thought, wow the Swedes are very relaxed about public nudity. If this happened today I would look around to see if there were fashion photographers following her.
When I first arrived I called at the tourist centre for a city map. Unfortunately they were out of the English version, but seeing that they had the French version, I asked for that. I should check if I still have it in my keepsakes,
I missed good films after all those weeks on the road. I had seen mention of Fitzcarraldo, a film by Werner Herzog, a filmmaker I respected. So I thought, surely they would have English voiceovers for an international film? Today I don't understand my flawed logic. As it turned out, it was voiced in German and subtitled in Swedish. I had to see it again in London to get the full story. Later, in Rochester, I saw Les Blank's "making of" film, Burden of Dreams. The intriguing thing is that Herzog pulled off an engineering feat equivalent to what the fictional Fitzcarraldo had done in the screenplay.
Stockholm has a unique hostel, the af Chapman which used to be a training ship for the Swedish Navy. I didn't try to get a bed here as I knew it would be very popular. But I did pay it a visit. I stayed in a hostel in the suburbs, very bucolic but also some ways by metro. I remember the stations were deep underground, perhaps to be well under the frost line?
Stockholm has a gorgeous harbour.
It is flaunted a lot in tourist brochures. Or go to an Ikea store to see a poster.
Colourful sculptures in the vicinity of the water.
Gamla Stan, the old town, with narrow alleyways.
And lots of milling tourists.
Some scenes of Stockholm taken before heading south to Malmö. This looks like a market but I remember nothing of it.
Some kind of formal occasion.
A street entertainer.
Geometric pattern on the plaza.
In the evening I boarded an overnight ferry bound for Helsinki. The archipelago that surrounds Stockholm is impressive. Stockholm is one of several cities that lays claim to the title Venice of the North.
There are islands of all sizes, some with what looked like holiday homes with boat landings.
One that is a navigational landmark with lighthouse.
Hackneyed but I can't resist photographing sunsets.
I waited for the yacht to line up to take this photo.
It was comfy inside the huge ship. I had not booked a berth or even a seat so I found a suitable spot in the lounge for my sleeping bag. It wasn't the most restful of nights, mainly due to the noise from people going past even in the small hours of the morning (duty free alcohol in international waters might be an explanation), so I was bleary eyed the next morning in Helsinki. You'll get to see the size of the ship in the next post.
It's a long train trip from Oslo to Stockholm, about 10 hours, so it's most likely that I took the overnight train. I found that there are two pictures of Uppsala, a handful of pictures of Stockholm, and Helsinki after that. So I come to the conclusion that I either stayed only one night in Stockholm or not at all, and explored it in more depth the second time through. Sleeping on overnight trains to save on accommodation and time was a strategy I used a few times. But you miss the landscape in between.
I needed somewhere to while away a couple of hours, and Uppsala which is about an hour north of of Stockholm seemed as good as any. Uppsala University is the oldest in Sweden.
This is the cathedral, probably the grandest in Sweden as Uppsala is also the ecclesiastical centre of Sweden.
The main street of Uppsala. If my guesstimate of my visit date is correct, it would have been a Saturday morning and this would account for the lack of traffic.
There are some good pictures of the Stockholm archipelago as the overnight ferry cruised towards Helsinki, so this time I'll merge the photos from the return visit with those of the one-day first visit.
Bergen is the second largest city in Norway and my chance to see a bit of the west coast. The Montana hostel there has stunning views over the city from its location on Mount Ulriken.
I encountered a senior hosteller there who looked in his 60s or 70s but fit as a fiddle. He was the oldest person I'd seen in a hostel so far and it planted the idea in my mind that age need not be a barrier to backpacking.
In the evening I joined a group of hostellers to await the sunset over the harbour.
And this is what we eventually were privileged to see.
Only an afterglow left.
The next day I explored the harbour which dates from the 11th century.
Grieg was born in Bergen and his home Trouldhaugen is a museum. Unfortunately it's some ways out of Bergen, so I had to leave it for another year, perhaps.
This fountain is in a lake near Byparken.
One of the most scenic railway trips in the world is the one from Oslo to Bergen via Myrdal with an excursion to Flåm on a branch line. Flåm is at the head of the longest and deepest fjord in Europe, the Sognefjorden.
You can spot traces of reflection from the window glass so these pictures were probably taken from the train. I'll keep the commentary to the minimum required to maintain the layout.
Swift mountain stream.
Mirror like lake.
Snow on the peaks, even in summer.
I remember that it was a very comfy train and that sections of the line were protected with snow shelters. If you look at the left of the picture you can see a protected section of the line where we had just been, or were about to go.
It looks bare in summer and probably just all white in winter.
At Myrdal I changed to the 20 km branch line, which descends to sea level at Flåm. As you can imagine, the views of the valleys are spectacular.
This is probably the Kjosfossen waterfall, within view of the line and one of the main reasons tourists take this trip.
I think those spectators came by road from Flåm since train passengers would have to wait for the next service if they made a stopover.
Another waterfall, perhaps Rjoandefossen.
Nearing town of Flåm, at sea level.
And I was there, with the sign to prove it.
Flåm did not have a youth hostel, and other accommodation would have been expensive, so I returned to Mydal and proceeded westwards to Voss where there was one. It's close to several lakes. One was walking distance from the hostel.
I overnighted here and took these pictures.
Local flora.
I made a stopover in Gothenburg to break the long journey to Oslo. I can't find any photos from there. But I met and shared a room with Wolfram, a German student who studied physics. We later corresponded for many years; he liked to tell me about the plays and films he had seen. I think he rose to a high position in the academic world, but we lost touch after he got married. I have a photo he sent of his wedding.
A reader has tracked down this fountain for me. It's near the Nobel Museum, which I probably visited but have no recollection of. This design looks old fashioned and the building behind looks grey and forbidding. I was probably attracted by the sculpture on the wall.
The Scotsman pub in this shot of the main pedestrian street of Oslo is still there.
This is the sea memorial sculpture on the peninsula of Bygdøy. Several museums are located here, including the one below. Note the natives enjoying the summer day.
I visited the Kon-Tiki museum which exhibits artifacts from Thor Heyerdahl's journeys. His account of the intrepid Kon-Tiki journey captured my imagination when I was a kid. When I digitised these slides I thought this was the raft, but it would have been flat, as it was made from balsa logs lashed together. In fact this is the Ra II from a later journey, which sailed from Morocco to Barbados.
Here is Kon-Tiki, or rather a reassembly of it, since the raft broke up on the reefs when they reached Polynesia.
The debate over whether Polynesia was settled from the west or from the east continues. It seems that DNA testing partly supports Heyerdahl's theory that it was settled from South America, or that at least there was contact.
I walked back to the city from Bygdøy to save on bus fare. Oslo is not a big city; the walk is about 5 km by the map and would have taken me an hour and half perhaps. I recall being grumpy because I had confirmed what the guide book wrote, that Scandinavia was expensive. But I must have liked the colours of this garden that I passed to take a picture.
At least it was a pleasant day and there were some feathered natives to look at along the way.
Large and handsome specimens too.
Frogner Park with the Vigeland Installation, a large outdoor collection of the sculptor's works. I just learnt that he designed the Nobel Peace Prize medal. Learn something new everyday.
I also visited Holmenkollen, where the ski jump Holmenkollbakken has been used for winter Olympics. But I went also to get a vantage point over the city.
Unfortunately grand vistas never look quite as good squeezed into a small picture on a screen. You had to be there.
A distant view of the harbour.
