Is That A Moose?

From Iceland it is off and onto the greener shores of Norway and Sweden.  Opting for the travel recipe that had worked for us all so well in Iceland, Emily and I decided to hire a car once again and travel as we pleased around these two countries.  A little trick we discovered when facing the abhorrent expense of hiring a car in Norway was to actually pick one up in Sweden.  This little gem saved us over 50% on our rental.

Set with a car which we picked up in Stockholm, we next had to procure the camping essentials.  Swedish shops, unlike most in other European countries are pretty easy to navigate.  The people are friendly and offer you a perky "hey hey" as you efficiently make your way from giant store to giant store in a feat of well organised consumerism.  A few hours of shopping and we had our bbq for the road along with a stupendous amount of charcoal to make sure every meal was a cracker.  With a host of other essentials as well we returned to Norway.  

 10kg of charcoal!  BBQ everything!

 BBQ makes Emily happy

Norway is by far the most expensive country of the three we traveled.  We found that the only way we could afford to travel in any sort of sustainable fashion was to camp.  Luckily the weather at the time was great and finding a campground could not have been easier.  Finding a friendly local on the other hand was more of a chore.  Such a shame for such an overwhelmingly beautiful country.

 What a gorgeous campsite

Gotta love the turfed roofs

A view from the tent

Making our way through the south of Norway we headed for the town of Levanger where we were to meet two of Emily's friends and recieve a great introduction to the local way of life.  Emily's friends Richard and Maria put us up with the greatest of hospitality, the kind I am more readily used to receiving in my part of the world rather than Europe.  For us travelers this was a grant of fresh air from the more usual indifference and nonchalant attitude of the general European crowd.  With Maria working, Richard invited both Emily and myself to come hiking and fishing for 3 days up around the Swedish/Norwegian border.  This was Scandinavia at its best.  Aside from the beautiful nature and vast surrounds, I really admire the Scandinavian desire to be outside and experiencing it all.  Hiking, skiing, fishing and many more activities are all embraced by the general public in numbers that boggle the mind.  The general fitness and outdoor education of people is quite amazing, especially for countries blessed with what I consider to be less than ideal weather.  But the weather is no deterrent. It can rain, snow or sleet, these guys just get out and do what they want to.  They really are crazy, but in a cool kinda way.

 2am hotdogs over the fire.  Camping at its best.

 Everything is made better with beers!  Cold beers!

Perhaps a dip in the lake was not such a good idea...

We also got introduced to the game of kubb, a lawn based sport best suited to a few beers.  Having a blast of a time I decided I should give making my own version of the game a go when I got home. 

My version of the game kubb, made after my return to Australia

Loving the time spent with Emily's and now my new friends, we moved north along the fjords towards the Lofoten Islands.  It wasn't long before we were again greeted by the ever so consistent grunts and general unsociable mentality of the locals.  After our time spent with Richard and Maria though we were more resilient to the situation and managed to keep ourselves distracted by such things as reading internet lists of the top 10 things others hated about the Norwegians.  Hahaha, there were some crackers!  

 The Saltstaumen.  This is the world's strongest current.  It flows at 40km per hour!

 Along the way to the Lofoten Islands.  This is a beachside view from north of Bodo.

Traveling Norway is a lengthy affair.  Not only is the country long and the roads winding but one thing we did not anticipate was that the national maximum speed limit being set to 80km/h!  This really ate into our time and forced us to consolidate our travel plans.  But none the less we made the Lofoten Islands and were very happy to do so.  The islands are every bit as stunning as they are said to be.  The weather maybe not so much...  We did manage to jag a few good mornings/evenings here and there which we used to do some quick hikes.  The vast open spaces and shear accessibility of it all was impressive.  If you couldn't see a track, make your own.  If you thought you could climb that mountain, well just do it.  It was fantastic.  I only wish the photos we had taken could truly express how impressive the nature is on these islands.

 Reine on the Lofoten Islands

The fishing industry is the main industry on these islands.  Here are one of the many cod drying racks that dot the island.  Note: take your photo upwind from one of these babies!

 Mountain top views.  Clear waters are what these islands are known for.

The views are vast

 The islands are less wooded and more grassy than southern Norway.

 Handstands are always a favourite.

 As are a jumping shot.

How does your own little cove for camping sound?

 The locals even help out and provide you with a few essentials

Though the Lofoten Islands are well frequented, you can still find your own patch without too much issue.  With the weather not being the best however, camping is a fairly rough way of getting around.  It is good for the short term but looses its flavour after a while.  The Lofoten Islands also reside within the Arctic Circle, a fact you don't readily miss during this part of the year.  The day extends 24 hours as the sun never sets below the horizon.  Aside from messing with your sleeping patterns it really seems to make a mess out of some of the local birds.  They seem to sing and cowl at all hours until they can do it no longer.  They then  zonk out, reset to do it again.  The poor buggers have no day/night cues to set their rhythm to!

Beginning in the west of the islands we slowly made our way east and back to the mainland.  As we did, the weather began to change.  What was now bad pockets of rain and cold had become days of rain and cold.  This weather really put a hamper on our hiking plans for the Abisko National Park in the north of Sweden.  Looking at the state of some of the trekkers to have traveled the King's Trail we realised this to not be a good idea.  That's okay, camping on snow was never my thing.  So with these plans foiled we thought "how about we just focus on a sole achievement.  Seeing a moose in the wild".  Well good luck to you on that one!  Here are a few little known facts about the moose (called elk in this part of the world):

Firstly, there are approximately 300,000 moose in Sweden.  To protect the forestry, permits for 100,000 to be killed each year are granted by the government.  About 250,000 Swedes flood the hills over a very short period each year to bag a moose.  Now for the pertinent part.  Moose are goddam ninjas and I guess they have to be!  Actually they are more like four legged Chuck Norris'.  You can't find one unless you go all commando and join a posse of about 249,999 others.  They are as big as cars and yet almost cannot be seen unless by shear accident.  They have stealth features like you wouldn't believe.  How can a 400 to 700kg animal be so hard to see!  Well, they can run 60km/h, jump from a standstill over 2m, hear you coming with either of their ginormous ears or smell you with one hellava nose. 

So we just let that one be.  If we saw a moose great, if not, well I'm not going to freak.  And so we devised a plan to beat the weather.  We would just drive to a place where the forcast said it would be sunny.  Simple!  This probably had something to do with the fact that we ended up putting nearly 9,500km on the car in 5 weeks...  The plan kinda worked but now that we were in Sweden, at least the people were friendly.  And when I say friendly, I mean fantastic.  Crossing between Norway into Sweden was such a contrast and added a whole new element of joy to our travels.  Getting into the throw of things we even celebrated the coming of Midsummers with more than a few beers.  We also had a secretly stashed bottle of rum and a biiiiiig roast.  Emily really got into the swing of things and pushed her new fire bug status into overdrive managing to burn holes in our tent and duck down jackets...  Way to go Em...  Luckily we were both too "festive" to figure that out until the morning.  

Or you can meet a guy who has some pet moosen.

Wild camping at the base of a waterfall.

 Views of a waterfall

Solitude in the Sarek National Park

Moving camp away from the shame of our antics we setup 50km down the road in order to recover.  Little did we know that the Midsummers celebrations actually seem to properly start on Midsummers day and not Midsummers Eve.  Huh, maybe we jumped the gun...  We were greated at midday at the new camp ground by about 20 over 65's absolutely banging off their heads drunk and singing Swedish tunes!  Wow.  This is when I gained a new found respect for these people.  They carried on with their very social festivities until about midnight when most of them passed out on the grass next to a campfire they had made.  Some passed out face down, utterly unable to walk.  Again, they were over 65, some even around the 80 mark!

 

1am The morning after Midsummer and it is still light south of the Arctic Circle.

The following day, clear headed and feeling good that others were now taking over our mantles for feeling bad, we looked to the weather maps for predictions of sunshine.  Following our new objective of sun at any cost, we made our way through Gothenberg and onto Lund, a town just outside of Malmo.  Here we found the sun and all its beautiful, beautiful warmth.  To celebrate we went strawberry picking in one of the local strawberry fields and ate great bakery food until our eyes bulged.  Sunshine and contentment!  Loping our way around we finally traveled for Stockholm and our flight out.  Stockhlom itself is a nice city but suffers the plagues of gypsies the same as most big cities now in Europe.  One pretty memorable highlight is the Vasa Museum which houses an old wooden ship salvaged ,intact, after sinking in the harbour during the 1600's.  Recovering the ship was apparently the largest salvage operation/restoration ever conducted.  It really is spectacular.  

All in all, Scandinavia is a very visually impressive place.  The stunning nature is a real draw card.  We spent more than a tidy sum traveling around and are happy to have done so.  Would I go again though...  Nope, I'm heading somewhere stupidly warm instead!             

Vikings and The Land of Fire and Ice

Velcomin to Iceland, a land of vikings past, exorbitantly long names and hot tubs.  It is a quirky country that has definitely done a ninety degree turn on what I had expected to find.  Coming from literally "the other side of the world" I was under the impression this land would be an unspoiled wilderness, neglected by the masses and home to some more hardened characters.  After all, who wants to holiday in a country that advertises how cold it is by it's very name?  Well apart from one stupid Aussie and his co....  So wasn't I surprised to learn that tourism is Iceland's second largest industry behind fishing.  Apparently the Europeans love the place but as we found out, maybe this is a bit more of a one way love.

Iceland is a small island, slightly smaller than Tasmania back home (the little dangly bit off the bottom of Australia) and with a similar population.  For it's size however it projects an aura of expansive wildernesses.  The air is clean and with no trees around you can see for many miles in every direction.  This makes Iceland spectacular.  It is truly the hardest place I have ever traveled to to photograph.  You just can't seem to capture the expanse nor can your camera seem to handle the colour contrasts.

Traveling with my girlfriend Emily we arrived well before the peak tourist season of July to September.  Though it is colder during these months we found the landscapes far more impressive as there was still a good amount of snow around.  We also benefited from almost no tourists, cheaper services and a more generally accepting population.  Hiring a little car for a great rate, we circumnavigated the island over the course of two and a half weeks camping out at our leisure and often for free.  We took every side road available to us and discovered many a really cool little nook and cranny.  

Not only is the island interesting but so too are its people.  We found the locals to be a little stand-offish at first but if you engaged with them they usually turned out to be quite friendly.  And it is not unlike an Aussie to yarn so this suited me well.  Plus if you could make them laugh, you were in!  The Icelandic's have a similar ratio of people per square km as we do back home in Australia.  This is what really had my head spinning when they told me that there was an expected one million tourists to arrive this summer!  That is as many tourists in Iceland as locals every month of the summer.  And seeing their infrastructure, I have no idea how this will work.  I am just glad I am not there to witness.  

Personally, as we traveled I could see the toll this many tourists was beginning to take on many of the locals.  If one Frenchman can piss me right off, imagine what a country full of them could do.  I also find European travelers, the vast majority of those who come to this country, to be quite difficult.  So I feel for you Iceland.  The tourist dollar is needed though and hence the conundrum.  In the north of the country the locals seem much more friendly and welcoming.  They obviously get less travelers here as it does take some time to make your way around the island.  Many travelers only give themselves a small number of days to see Iceland and then channel themselves into the South which is much more readily accessible.

Having the time to travel though is amazing.  The landscapes changed day to day.  You get to experience massive volcanic expanses with the odd volcano jutting out, lava fields, giant mountains and fjords, snowy flat lands, glaciers, lagoons and the list goes on and on.  Iceland is an explorers delight.  

There is not much in Iceland in terms of flora and fauna.  Being so isolated from the world and having formed volcanically like other places such as the Galapagos Islands, Iceland is mostly a domain for birds and sea life.  The highlights of our sightings were whales in the fjords, seals on the coastline, puffins in the cliffs and reindeer on the flats.  But what is lacking in this regard is well compensated for in others.  One such other is the abundant hot pools.  Oh my god I love this little feature.  Every town has at least one.  Free ones are dotted around the place for those who choose to find them and some a well worth the find.  All too often I see blogs posting the details of some little local gem.  Not this blog, if you want to find them, find them yourself.  I want to keep some things away from the masses to allow the more intrepid to find.  Message me if you are looking for something in particular and I may help out with some deets.

But enough chat.  Here are some photos and commentary to paint a more visual picture.

Iceland is a land of lakes, some frozen....

Fjords, some with whales in them...like this one as seen from the road.

Some instead have seals in them....  Be warned though, as they are hunted they tend to be flighty when you approach them.

Snowy expanses....

Dangerous snow....

And some really dangerous snow....

Glaciers and mountains....  Ice for watching

And ice for trekking....  Photo and foot holds (as seen in the pic) courtesy of my near icy death!

And glacial lagoons....

Big waterfalls....

And big waterfalls....

Warmer waters....

And water slides....

Small volcanoes....

And bigger ones....

Bigger ones with tourists in the middle that is....

Big black beaches....  I sad beaches, not...

And big black viking cars....  I have a wicked collection of viking car photos from all around this crazy country.

Little puffins....

Daring tourists....  Nothing but a 50m drop after that unstable edge....

 

And last but not least.... Sven style horses.

But enjoy the country.  It is expensive but honestly similar in price to Australia.  Don't bother to learn the language but, you'll fail.  If in doubt, mumble the word, it seems to work :)    

Now for an important safety message...  The Icelandic's have an aversion to crossing rivers.  Everywhere we went you were told not to risk it, book a bus, take a bridge, turn around!  So I thought I would publish a little how to, just to help out.

When crossing a river, never go it alone or without the reassurance of a bridge.  If you can't find a bridge 

consider your options of turning around or catching a tour....  Consider parting with your money to avoid disaster should the need arise.

This man is a trained professional, his actions should not be copied.

Even if the waters appear only an inch or two deep, it is danger danger, danger!  Always find a bridge, even if you have to walk a solid 3km or more to cross it.  It will give you a happy feeling to know you will now be okay.  

See, happy face :)

And enjoy Iceland!

                

Less Work More Tasmania

After handing in my resignation once again I am free to pursue my own vices.  Question: what is it about the quality of employment I keep on finding my way into these days that has me happily following this path yet again?  It seems that in engineering people’s egos are getting bigger and team work has become nothing more than a catch phrase rather than a road map to efficiency.  The office environment is becoming a mash up of the usual Dilbert standard of cartoon and the latest version of the soap opera Neighbours.   I look around me as the good engineers become less abundant, mostly moving on to find more fulfilling roles in other fields.  No wonder the manufacturing sector is dying in this country.  With the loss of the more skilled individuals, engineering is becoming less of a pursuit for new and ingenuitive solutions but rather a farcical race to recycle old designs in an attempt to minimise business overheads.  I see in the news that Australia has some challenges ahead in terms of its standard of living as we have all grown complacent to these very issues and I wonder where my contribution is to lie.  Things to ponder while on the road I guess.  I know, I know, what a note to start my next blog on!

So on I role with the more fun stuff.  Despite my dissatisfaction with my most recent employment, it did pay well.  This has left me enough in the bank for yet another round of travel. Yay!  I’m starting closer to home this time however.  The premise for my next round of travels is to trek the artic regions of Norway and Sweden with a little side visit to Iceland.  The only issue with all this though is that these areas are only really accessible to the kind of trekking I want to be doing during the summer periods of June to August.  I quit my job at the start of February because I didn’t have the mental fortitude to sit through a few extra months of dead end engineering.  Perhaps a sign of weakness on my behalf, though more probably a realisation that I would rather do something/anything but.  So what to do to fill my time?  Well that was a brief 10 second pause before the answers started flooding. 

My plans are to travel with Emily my girlfriend around Australia for the interim, visiting mates and seeing place I have yet to feel underfoot.  We will start with a trip to Tasmania and get some hiking/camping experience before making a trip to Fraser Island to visit some friends and do some beach camping.  Following all this the Great Ocean Road looks like a fair prospect with a few other side trips listed as potentials.

Planning and travelling to Tasmania requires little effort and it wasn’t long before we had bought some extra kit, packed our bags and flown to Launceston.  In Launceston we picked up a hire car and hit the road.  The hire car was a good choice as there are so many nooks and crannies to Tasmania and you really need to be mobile to access them. 

Tasmania is a vastly different beast that I had thought.  The cities seem to be quite bogan with a simple stop to pick up food from Woolworths having me double and even triple checking the car was locked.  Outside the cities however, the countryside is vast and wild.  We found the people to be very friendly, especially in the north west of the state and their love of good bakeries had them firmly planted in my book as “okay”.

The amount of wildlife around the place is astounding.  Emily being from the motherland (England) had never experienced anything of the like and to suddenly be absolutely surrounded by almost every Australian animal to make a post card was off the charts amazing.  If I can make any recommendation to others wishing to travel Tasmania it would be to camp your way around and get amongst the wildlife.  For this reason, I have broken from my usual blog format to provide some info on where to go to see and do what.  It’s no Lonely Planet guide but that said it is probably 100 times more helpful…  So let’s get to the good stuff:

Starting with the camping, we followed a simple recipe.  We had our own light weight tent, sleeping bags, roll matts, etc. which we were carrying for our hiking.  To this we added a cheap esky, gas cooker, folding chairs and other cooking essentials bought from Kmart in Launceston.  The grand total of our outlay was $70 but now we had all we needed to camp for 2 weeks.  With the car to ferry ourselves around we started looking for some free campsites. 

Tasmania is littered with free camping.  All you need is a one off national parks permit ($30 per car) and you are set to go.  Free camping in our experience is a good way to really get into nature when in Tasmania.  The facilities around the place are first rate.  They are actually so good that my mind was boggling at how it all was afforded.  The one obstacle you will find to free camping however is the lack of information readily available on where you can camp.  There is a simple answer to all this but.  If there isn’t a sign saying you can’t camp there….hello free camping.  You will find yourself alternating between the free camps and paid ones however if only to find yourself a shower.

As for finding animals.  How can you not?  Kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons and platypi are just about everywhere you look!  Latrobe was one place where we first went in search of platypi though and to be honest it was a little disappointing.  I think the most disappointing feature was that this was the area where everyone went to look for a platypus.  Despite the locals telling everyone that they are shy animals and you have to approach them with this in mind, you always find those who just don’t get it.  In my experience, nine times out of ten this will be Japanese tourists.  We suffered one of these nine times.  I’m not in any way against Japanese tourists but f@ck me dead, they do my nut in.  Not to worry however, we soon discovered that platypi are in almost every river, deep or shallow.  I stopped counting after seeing ten.  While camping at the Mole Creek caravan park I actually awoke to one eyeballing me.  So cool.

 

There are huge ants...

The more remote you go, the better the experience.  We took three days to trek the Walls of Jerusalem, a famous trek in the northern middle(ish) of Tasmania.  What a fantastic hike!  The weather can be a little fickle up on the highland plateaus with snow occurring even in summer but if you prep with this in mind you will be ok. 

Aside from the abundance of animals we encountered, deadly snakes, kangaroos, wallabies and the odd wombat, it was the people who really made it fun.  Oh and the scenery was off the chain too which did also contribute.  Back to the people however.  Running into another hiker would result in a 30 minute chin wag, especially with me leading the charge.  On one occasion, we had lunch with two Aussie lads of after they basically fell off the side of a mountain after setting out on a self-made exploration.  They found their way to us by the time honoured cooee method. Emily was truly flabbergasted as to what on earth was happening.  In a second instance, we later met a father and son who were making their own tracks hiking and trout fishing each of the backcountry lakes to the south of our travel route.  If those guys didn’t have the most wicked lifestyle in a bag I will eat my hat.  I was sooo jealous.

On the way in.  The big backpack is mine...

Our basecamp up on the plateau.

A view of the plateau heading up to Mt Jerusalem

Climbing Soloman's Throne

The view from the top. 

Just taking a break dangling the legs

Back at the camp, the locals encroach 

This is a pademelon.  They have less hair on their ears and tail.  They are also the size of a small wallaby

And this is a wallaby... (ladies, cue the awwwww)

Just another picture perfect scene

Hiking your way around will have you crossing paths with a few black tiger snakes.  Not to worry too much, just stare em down and they’ll move on.  Long pants or gaters are probably a very good idea but.  Emily, scared of snakes, sent me forward as fodder for any snakes too lazy to move off the path.  If you think this was a little rough from my perspective, I should note that I had little to worry about.  My girlfriend has the heaviest set of feet this side of the extinction of the dinosaurs.  The only snakes we crossed paths with were those locked to the ground in fright! 

In the Tarkine region of Tasmania we managed to see two wild and healthy Tasmanian devils.  A real highlight of the trip.  Here we also saw a bazillion possums and pademelons plus one very rare black spotted quoll.  Camping at the Julius River free camping area (not the RV one but the day use area) we also began to realise how treacherous it would be to drive between the hours of dusk til dawn.  There is that much wildlife around during these times that you need to be doing either 30km/h or risk damage to your car.  This really is because most the animals around are nocturnal feeders.

Swapping the west with the east of Tasmania we went to Freycinet national park.  This area is definitely more touristed than the west of the island.  Here we stayed a couple of days in Bicheno where we came across a good number of little (fairy) penguins.  Sitting around just on dawn and having 20+ of the little guys mooching around literally at your feet was a pretty special moment.  If only there were tourists wandering into the dunes behind the beach and disturbing the penguins nesting sites in an attempt to grab a photo.  There seems to always be someone who stuffs it for the rest of us.

And Tasmania has beautiful beaches too.

Penguinos!  This was just one batch to make it to our feet!

Avoiding the bad weather of the west coast we remained one more day on the East and visited the Mount Field national park to see some big trees.  Daaaammmnnn they were big!

 

The trees are this big!  If you look carefully you will see Emily at the base.

As our trip came to an end, the one animal that had eluded Emily was the wombat.  I had seen one but she hadn’t.  To rectify this we headed for a caravan park in Kelso, in the North of Tasmania.  We were told by the nice lady running the park that there were wombats about and boy was she on the money!  We pitched our tent and bang on dusk were in the midst of a herd of hungry grazing wombats!  You were almost falling all over them as they littered every square meter of free space.  The possums weren’t much better.  I took to hitting them with my shoe just to keep them from getting into the car, our tent and others dinners! 

 

Big and little wombats

 And they are approachable too...  Maybe because they are blind...

 And then there were possums.  This little guy was 1m above our tent.

All in all Tasmania has impressed a true sense of wilderness upon me.  The whole adventure was affordable and quite amazing.  I now have plans to return for another round of trekking.  This time something quite challenging, the South West track..  To close out I have to thank my mate Matt for hooking me up with his father and a tonne of free cherries from their cherry farm.  There is probably a solid 200km of sprouting cherry trees on the side of the road to the Tarkine thanks to all the fruit we ate!  And him shooting his malfunctioning plastic owl while we ate breakfast was a true bit of Australiana for Emily haha.