Hypermobility

I am safely returned from Norway, and a whole decade older! Or something. And it was fabulous.

Things to know about Norway:

1. It is expensive. INSANELY expensive. PAINFULLY expensive. After a day or so the best thing to do is just stop mentally converting the prices; I found that on my first day there I was like: “£5 for a beer? That is HIGHWAY ROBBERY!” and by the time we were leaving I was all: “hey, a coffee for £2.50! I am so thrifty!”

2. It is gorgeous. On the penultimate day, on a bus between Ålesund and Åndalsnes, I found myself thinking hyperbolically Norway is the most beautiful place I have ever been! And it is possibly even true.

3. The weather is about as unreliable as you’d think it would be. We had glorious sunshine in Oslo, snow and ice in the mountains between Oslo and Bergen, relentless rain for one day in Bergen, followed by a day of intermittent rain and sunshine, relentless rain and mist between Bergen and Ålesund, increasingly good weather while in Ålesund itself, glorious sunshine again on the penultimate day, turning into torrential rain as our train swept back into Oslo. Pack layers, umbrellas and waterproofs.

Flew in and out of Torp (from Prestwick) and got the Torp Ekspressen bus into the city, which was conveniently timed to meet the flight. We were only in Oslo for two nights and one day all together, and we did little but just wander around. Oslo’s got a really nice feel to it (and is way, way more ethnically diverse than I would have expected), but it’s the sort of city where you just want to hang out in cafes and bars, and that was somewhat beyond our budget.

Stayed in the Anker Hostel, which was perfectly fine for our purposes (double room with en suite for 500kr – cheap by Norwegian standards), and I’d probably recommend it, though next time I may plump for MS Innvik: beds on a boat! In terms of food, we didn’t set foot in a proper restaurant the entire time we were in Norway, but there was good felafel to be found in the Grünerløkka district nearby.

On the second day we got the early morning train from Oslo to Bergen. I’ve got to say that NSB really puts UK trains to shame, largely due to the ease of online booking, and the rather superb service they offer of picking up the tickets while on the train. Brilliant: you make your reservation, sit in your allocated seats, and then a nice conductor comes along and gives you your tickets. It is awesome, and every country should have this. Also, the Bergen line is pretty spectacular – as we headed into the mountains we were excitedly photographing every smudge of snow we saw, but by the time we reached Finse, the highest point of the railway, the trainline was surrounded by drifts of snow and half-frozen lakes. Fairly impressive, given that it was the day after midsummer.

Photos are available here. At some point I’ll get round to labelling them, not to mention removing the embarassing ones…

More tomorrow.

I’m planning on having a few days in Ireland over the summer, to do some research for the novel that I’m supposedly ghost-writing. The original plan was that I’d spend a few days with my parents in South Wales, and then get the Swansea to Cork ferry, allowing me to visit an old friend in Cork whom I don’t see nearly enough. But it turns out that the Swansea Cork ferry doesn’t run any more (yes, they say they hope to resume operations in 2008, but I haven’t found evidence of this). Boo. I had an awesome time overnight on that very ferry in 1996, where I met an American blues band and played poker with them all night.

But all is not lost! I can get the train to Pembroke instead, and get the ferry to Rosslare, which is significantly quicker, and gives me the chance to have a look at Pembroke, where I have never been, but which I have heard good things about. And from Rosslare, I can easily head across to New Ross, the very place I have to visit for my research. Hurrah! (Well, at least in theory it should be easy, but Bus Eireann annoyingly doesn’t have searchable timestables. Bah.)

Then surely it would be a shame to go all that way and not visit my friend in Cork, so I could head across there for a day or so, and then up to Dublin for more research and friend seeing. And, you know, if I have gone that far without increasing my already-gargantuan carbon footprint, why not keep it up? I can get the train from Dublin to Belfast, the ferry across to Stranraer, and the train from Stranraer back to Glasgow. ALl that travel, and I can be environmentally smug, to boot! Excellent.

…are in full swing. I have come to the sad conclusion that I can’t really justify the expense (or indeed the air miles) of a trip to Sydney for my friend’s wedding; much as I would love to be there, it’s likely to be over £1000 for the flight alone. Which, just: no, especially considering the trip to Sudan that I really need to make, for PhD purposes.

But for every negative there is always a positive, and in this case it is the fact that I can spend longer in Sudan, and, if I manage the flights correctly, could also spend a week or two in Libya on the way back. Hurrah! The Sudan part of the journey is a bit tricky, and I will need to figure out what the current visa/travel permit situation is. For PhD reasons I need to get to the South, and if that was all I wanted/needed to do, it would probably be easiest to fly to Nairobi or Entebbe and organise transport to Juba from there – but I have friends in Khartoum whom I really want to see. Hm. I would go and consult a travel agent, but I really doubt that any of them can be particularly helpful when it comes to SPLA permits or Southern Sudan Airlines.

In my head right now, the best option would be something like: cheap one-way flight to Entebbe, travel from there into South Sudan either by plane or bus (scroll down), flight from Juba to Khartoum, and then, inshallah, cheap Afriqiyah airlines flight home from Khartoum to London via Tripoli, where I can break my journal for a while and have a poke around.

In addition to Matia Tours and Explore, whom I mentioned before, a brief collection of Libyan tour operators who might be the sort of thing I’m after:

 - Raki Tours. No mention of the cost of their tours on the site, plus the added irony of a company named after a type of Turkish booze offering tours of a dry country, but (sorry chaps) their website looks sufficiently amateurish to make me believe they may be well-priced.

- Caravanserai Tours. Not cheap, but comprehensive.

- Arkno Tours, who seem to be Caravanserai’s local partner. Again, no prices on their website. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS? Argh.

- Azjar Tours. No prices. GRRRRAAAAARGH.

- Aha, a fairly thorough and varied list of Libya tours (WITH PRICES!) on infohub. Now, this is the sort of thing I’m talking about (and makes me wonder how many of the more expensive tours are including airfares). I need an hour or so spare to thoroughly go through that list.

- Olympy Tours. For some reason their name alone makes me laugh.

I am a TOTAL GENIUS. While googling helplessly for information on how to get from Marrakech to Dakhla to Nouakchott to Bamako to Tombouctou yesterday, I stumbled on dozens of the travel wikis that now seem to abound. Yawn. Things like Wikitravel are great in many ways, full of useful information and interesting trivia, but the thing is, if I’m planning a trip, it’s likely I already know what I want to see when I get there, and while recommendations for hotels and restaurants are useful, they’re also fairly easy to come by.

When I am searching the web for travel information, though, as a fairly well-informed traveller, it’s information about the nuts and bolts of travel information that I’m after. It’s all very well to find out that Location X has a fascinating 14th century mosque, but I can figure that out on my own; what I need to know is how to get from X to Y, how long it takes, how much it costs, and whether the road is impassible in the wet season. That’s the sort of information that makes LP’s Thorn Tree invaluable – the personal experiences from people who have recently done the trip that you want to do – but that sort of information is hard to archive in a forum, and hard to find.

So: wouldn’t it be awesome if there were some sort of travel wiki that concentrated on getting from A to B, where you could just type in, say, Dakhla to Nouakchott into neat little boxes, and get information on how to get their by bus, or bush taxi, or whatever, as well as testimonials from people who have made the trip? It’s possible that such a thing already exists, and if it doesn’t, I certainly don’t have the technical skills (not to mention time or energy) to bring it into being, but if anyone wants to take the idea and run with it, and give me all the credit and potential money, do feel free.

The mention of the Festival au Desert in Essakane, Mali, has seriously fired me up for a North-West African extravaganza in December-January. Who knows if it will happen – as ever, if I have the money, I probably won’t have the time, and vice versa, but planning is always good, even for trips I never take (as I think I may have mentioned, I have had trips to Central America and West Africa planned since at least 1997).

Continuing my tradition of spending xmas outside the UK, I had vague plans of spending xmas in Marrakech with my parents and boyfriends, probably flying out about a week in advance to have a look around Morocco (which I have never visited). It looks like two weeks to travel overland from Marrakech to Tombouctou is fairly reasonable (hurrah for Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, which kno all). Let’s see: according to Hans Rossel’s Morocco travel pages, there are daily buses from Marrakech to Dakhla, Western Sahara (though I would be tempted to spend a little longer in Western Sahara, if at all possible). From Dakhla it seems that one can cross into Mauritania in a variety of comedic ways.

From Nouadhibou, just into Mauritania, there are apparently fairly nightmarish 30-50 hour truck/land rover rides to Nouakchott (there are also direct flights, apparently, but as we all know, Flying Is Cheating.  Nouakchott to Bamako is apparently three days at a push, and Bamako to Tombouctou is the same.

And then what? Back to Bamako, and thence to Banjul and a cheap flight back to the UK? It seems that there is transport from Bamako to Dakar (possibly detailed on the Dakar Demm Dikk site, though my French is too rusty for speed-reading). Hmmm. Worth it for the sake of adventure, or totally insane?

Watching footage of the rain-sodden tents at Rockness over the weekend, and gloomily contemplating my fast-approaching 30th birthday, I had a moment of wondering whether I am now officially Too Old For Festivals (with the possible exceptions of ATP, where you get to sleep in chalets, or Bestival, which sounds lovely. However, I have come to the conclusion that actually, I am not too old for festivals; it is just that festivals have now fallen into the category of Things I WIll Happily Do In The Name Of Travel, But Are Too Uncomfortable In My Own Country (see also: overnight bus trave – fine in e.g. Turkey; nightmarish in the UK).

Three festivals that I would happily go to, decided completely arbitrarily:

- The Dragacevo Trumpet Festival in Guca, Serbia from 6-10 August this year. I have a bit of a Thing for Balkan brass bands, as well as the Balkans in general, and a Bosnian ex-colleague used to rave about this festival to me. I’m busy that weekend this year, otherwise I would be so there.

- Burning Man, of course: last week of August in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Less of a festival than a temporary community, apparently, I have been hearing stories and seeing pictures of Burning Man for years and years. It’s the sort of thing that I will probably never get round to doing, but blimey, it would be awesome.

- The Festival au Desert, Essakane, Mali, 8-10 January 2009. And oh, that is enormously tempting, especially as I was thinking of being in Morocco for xmas – it could be some sort of North African extravaganza! I have longed to go to Mali for years, especially Tombouctou and the Dogon Escarpment; I shall have to think about that one.

Any other ideas?