SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 4/1 Alpine scenery and islands

I realised when I woke up that I’d forgotten to take my beta-blockers after the party the night before. Oh well, I thought. Maybe they’ve done their job, and it’s not the end of the world if I fall ill now. I’ll stop them. I can go back to being just me, not me plus some alien chemical. (There speaks someone addicted to her morning cup of coffee and her evening glass of wine.)

Breakfast – with many of guests having stayed overnight in the hotel - was a continuation of the party with some of us just as voluble and some of us not. After which I decided that I’d like to head off and explore the woods some more. (Apparently all woods in the country belong to someone but you have the right to roam in them - I think.)

I inveigled Frog, my brother J and his wife K (the author of the poem the night before) into accompanying me. Sadly the woods came to an end fairly soon and we were out again in the broiling sun. All four us wore hats and three of us suncream but I hadn’t seen a single Norwegian in a hat and they all had shamelessly bronzed bodies and faces. Perhaps they needed the sun after the winter, or perhaps the sun simply wasn’t as damaging in this northerly latitude, even though at the moment it felt as if it was.
    I remember my mother was always obsessed with the sun. If the sun was out we, and she, had to be out in it. Perhaps it was her Norwegian heritage.

The sensible hats worn by Frog and me whenever we were out in the sun (photographed in the UK)

We found ourselves in a flat green area with small fields and a sprinkling of houses, hemmed in by the ever-present rocks and fir trees.

    ‘Ooh,’ said K, ‘How Alpine.’

    All the houses – in fact all the houses Frog and I had seen – were in traditional style, smallish and wooden, with pointed roofs, and painted red, white or yellow. The design must have worked and it certainly made the most of local resources, or perhaps there was a law to say they had to be built like that.

    It was a pretty spot and obviously a boon to the Norwegians to have some flat areas where they could grow vegetables, but personally I preferred the wide wild spaces. It was to these that we now headed but before we got to them we came to a road which we decided to take, the walk already being much longer than planned, and after much discussion, use of a compass and study of the timetable at a bus-stop managed to agree on which way to turn in order to get back.

A boat-trip had been arranged for most of the close family, English and Norwegian, for the afternoon, setting off from Grimstad, which turned out to be a stunningly pretty – and stunningly busy – seaside village.

    The signposts on the way had whisked us on to the E18 which was a nuisance as it was a toll road and we had no idea how much the tolls were (our presence on the road being automatically detected and the toll deducted from the security deposit we’d paid the car-hire company). I’d wanted to take us the pretty route, by the back roads, but hadn’t yet got the hang of the map.

    What with the tolls, and the traffic, and all the people milling about, and the heat, Frog and I had a small altercation about where to park the car which was shaming as we were giving a lift to J and K. Frog then entered into another tussle with a parking-ticket machine, with my brother trying to help, and I decided to make myself scarce and try and find the boat. Time was getting short and we had no idea what sort of a boat it was. Eventually I found a Norwegian cousin, and we all found the boat, just as it was leaving. 

    The boat turned out to be a delightful chuggy fishing-boat-type vessel, with a sun-bleached wooden deck. It was a sort of bus-boat in that it dropped people off at all the islands in the bay in the morning and then picked them up again in the afternoon.

    There certainly were a lot of islands, most of them little more than lumps of granite, topped with a couple of stunted trees and some withered grass. I remembered chugging out to one in a clinker-built pram in my childhood for picnics and days out. I'd loved it. It was child-sized. You could explore every inch and make it your own. It was like a safe boat, or the back of a friendly whale.
    All the people on the islands were decorously clothed in swimming costumes, which surprised me, but perhaps they’d put them on for the boat. As we waited at the islands (presumably like a bus, the boat ran to a timetable) I could see that the water was perfectly clear but black again when you got close up, like the lake. Why was that? Was it because of the colour of the underlying rock? It didn’t tempt me to swim but I expect I would have got used to it.

    At least here on the east coast in the south they didn’t have the dangerous tides we have in the UK. We shelter them from that apparently.

    On the boat, seriously outnumbered by all of us, was a black family, obviously on a sight-seeing trip like us. Sadly, we didn’t mix. I tried to smile at the children but I didn't know what language to address them in. I’d noticed some black people in Arendal, and because they looked North African (slim and neat) I’d presumed they were refugees. They appeared well fed and well clothed and happy enough but I wondered how well they integrated and what they thought of this distinctive, isolated and self-sufficient northern land? It wasn’t like the UK where we’re all mongrels, where we’ve had immigration for centuries and where we sort of belong to the continent of Europe, whether we like it or not.

    I’d asked Peder Johan at the party why Norway chose not to be in the EU and he said it was because they needed to keep control of their fishing waters. I envied the country such simplicity. 

     Frog had found out from his neighbour at the party the name of the pennant flag he was looking for. It was called a vimpel (from which we get our word 'wimple').* Then, he got talking to the skipper of the boat and discovered where to buy one. Then, after a long and somewhat confused detour on the way back from the boat trip trying to find the shop, he was at last the proud owner of something he'd wanted ever since we'd arrived. (Thank you to J and K and Norwegian cousin Ar, passengers in the car, for their patience.) 

Thank goodness the hotel was on a beach. As soon as we got back, I dived into the sea, in desperate need of refreshment, mental as well as physical. It had been wall-to-wall people for the last 24 hours and I wasn’t used to it. I was frazzled.

    As I dripped across the grass back to our room, I met one of my sisters.

    ‘There’s a meal arranged for all of us in the hotel dining-room at 7 tonight,’ she said, ‘with drinks first in aunt's room.’

* Frog wants me to make it clear here that - in Norway at least - you can fly a pennant 24 hours a day: you don't have to take it in at night like you do a flag. Many of the Norwegian houses flew one.

Click here for the next instalment