Wild Swimming!

If summer ever actually comes, I wouldn’t mind trying out a few of these…

Norway, again

At some point I will probably stop banging on about Norway, but I am hysterically overexcited about this trip as, for a combination of reasons, I haven’t left the country since Budapest at Xmas and clearly this should not be allowed to happen again, because it makes me CRAZY.

As we are visiting at the height of high season, and as I will be accompanied by my boyfriend, who is a more nervous traveller than me, and because I don’t fancy spending my 30th birthday wandering the streets, I have done far more pre-booking than I normally would. Booking train and bus travel has been pleasantly easy: with the help of NSB, I’ve booked train travel from Oslo to Bergen, and from Åndalsnes to Oslo; they have a rather fabulous system that allows you to pick up the tickets on the train itself, which will save last minute weeping and thrashing about on the platform as the train chugs off into the distance. I’ve also booked the bus from Ålesund to Åndalsnes through Nor-Way. However, annoyingly enough, Hurtigruten’s online booking form doesn’t seem to work, and won’t let me book passage from Bergen to Ålesund; I’ve emailed them and hopefully they will get back to me eventually. (As an aside, Hurtigruten’s website fills me with intense travel-longing: I would love to do the trip all the way up the coast from Bergen to Kirkenes*, or even on to Spitzbergen, but that is for another day, possibly when I am retired and have nothing to do but take slow boat rides all over the world (by which point Spitzbergen will be a tropical wonderland, if all we’re being told about global warming is true).

Accommodation has been more tricky to find, but I have prevailed. Part of me feels too ancient for hostels, at least when I am travelling with my boyfriend (when I’m alone I’m still happy to bed down in a dorm), but Norway’s insane expense has conquered me, and so we are booked into the Anker Hostel in Oslo, and the HI Hostel in Ålesund (I haven’t stayed in a HI Hostel since Reykjavik in 2004, and admittedly that was lovely, rather than grim and institutional as HI Hostels tend to be in my head, so my hopes for Scandinavian HI Hostels are high). Still, we have double rooms and en suites in each, and both seem very well located and, most importantly, are CHEAP, which will hopefully enable me to scrape together enough spare kroner to have a beer on my birthday. In Bergen we are going comparatively upmarket and staying at the Alkoven Guesthouse, which, with disarming modesty, describes itself as “a nice place to stay in Bergen”. And of course we will have a night on the Hurtigruten (if the bastard booking agents ever call me back), which will be fantastic because one of my great loves is sleeping on transport (in proper beds, on long-distance transport, I mean, rather than dozing off on the bus to work) and we will GO TO SLEEP IN ONE PLACE and WAKE UP IN ANOTHER, like magic. Hurrah!

*Possibly untrue, possibly fascinating fact, which I was told by a Norwegian bloke I met in Girona a few years ago: the easternmost point of Norway is further east than Istanbul…

Norway

The thing about booking travel months in advance is that you tend to forget it’s happening, and then suddenly it is May and you’re going in June and gosh, actually, it’s quite soon, isn’t it, and shouldn’t my boyfriend get his passport renewed, perhaps?

Anyhow, owing to my dearth of foreign travel so far this year, I am getting VERY EXCITED INDEED about Norway. Fjords! Wooden churches! Ridiculously expensive alcohol! …Other things! I admit that I am shamefully ignorant about Norway, but in some ways it’s nice to go somewhere without too many preconceptions, I suppose.

We’re flying in and out of Oslo, but I don’t really plan to spend more than a couple of nights there. The obvious thing to do would be to head to Bergen, both to look at some fjords, and because I’ve heard that the train trip between Oslo and Bergen is particularly spectacular. If I was sensible, given that we’ve only got a week, I’d leave it at that, but JEB tempted me with his talk of Alesund’s Art Nouveau glory. Turns out it’s fairly straightforward to get from Bergen to Alesund by ferry, which sounds enormously appealing in itself - but I can’t seem to find anyway of getting from Alesund back to Oslo without retracing my steps, other than flying, which I am loath to do. Normally I wouldn’t be worrying about this so far in advance, but because my time in Norway is limited, and it’s going to be the peak of high season, I’d really like to get as much booked ahead of time as possible. Hmmm, perhaps I will have to go against my better judgement and actually USE A TRAVEL AGENT…

Back, for real this time. (Probably.)

Yes, well, sorry for that unintended hiatus there, which was largely to do with wanting to wait until I have a fancy new website with this blog embedded within, so that I could do some sort of dramatic relaunch. But alas, that has not happened yet, and so here I am, and I will endeavour to update a couple of times a week, but who knows, really?

Anyhow. Spring has sprung in Glasgow, and I have spent the last couple of weekends thoroughly breaking one of my new year’s travel resolutions, by flying internally to both Nottingham and Cardiff. Oops. Nottingham was a rather riotous hen do, which included an assault course at Adrenalin Jungle and a night of ill-advised boozing at Bistro Live (for the record, I stayed in the Park Inn, which was fairly decent, if not ideal location-wise); Cardiff was a much more leisurely weekend spent with family and friends in the Wye Valley. I flew bmibaby, which was about as much as you can expect from a budget airline, and at least it wasn’t delayed; I head some nightmare stories from the Flybe customers who were left alone and bereft in Cardiff departures after everyone else had flown away…

However, due to circumstances unforeseen, Cuba has been called off, and I am left with no concrete travel plans until Norway for my birthday at the end of June. Horrors! Nor is there anything concrete after that; I have vague plans of a few days in Ireland in July, hopefully Sudan and Sydney in August (finances permitting), Jersey in September, and Morocco for xmas, but NOTHING IS BOOKED! I MAY NEVER LEAVE THE COUNTRY AGAIN! Which is perhaps why I am becoming tempted by the evil ads that Caledonian MacBrayne are littering the underground with: photos of stunning, white, sandy beaches, with the punchline being that no, it’s not St Kitts, or Antigua, or Cancun, but Eigg. The iciness of the water pictured in these ads is unimaginable…