Norway is a beautiful Scandinavian country, with a fairytale landscape that is littered with waterfalls, fjords, glaciers, lovely fishing villages and mountain ranges. But this is not a story about Norway. This is a story about one of the many roads into Norway; a road with the weirdest looking monkeys, a buzzing lake, watery eyes and trees; lots and lots of trees.
What is this mysterious place I’m talking about? Sweden; a country that is best known for its blondes, IKEA meatballs and having a syndrome about hostages named after the capital.
In 2010 I made a month long road trip by motorhome through Norway with my best friend and our girlfriends. To get there, we took the long way round and decided to cross the bridge that runs from Copenhagen in Denmark to Malmö in Sweden. From there on we drove to Stockholm and then started driving north. And that is where this story starts.
The first day of driving north left us baffled by the vastness of the Swedish spruce and pine forests. Boy, do Swedes love trees! It is absolutely no surprise that it was a Swede who started IKEA. Even if every person in the world would buy a LACK side table, it looks like Sweden would still have plenty of spruce left to be unable to see the forest through the proverbial trees.
Vastness and repetition, however, do start to get boring after a while, and the way north through Sweden is a long one. On the second day we were still quite impressed with the forest, but we would have been glad to see something that was not a tree for a change.
We did, however, get to see what must be the loneliest postman in a long history of postmen. The closest village on the road we were following was over 20 miles away, with no trace of any other side roads, or even houses. And there he was, a brave postman fighting to get his bicycle up a hill, cursing the day his mother said: “Hey, it looks like the postal service is looking for employees. Wouldn’t you like that? You will get to meet a lot of new people”. The Swedish postal service only hires the best, the bravest and the boys who listen to their mother. Mothers, they can make any son go postal.
It was on the same day that one of my travel companions expressed some confusion about signs by the side of the road that warned about what she called some “very weird looking monkeys”. Wait, hang on! Monkeys? I thought in stunned silence, I didn’t know that Sweden had monkeys? My brain went in overdrive trying to figure out what crucial piece of information I had missed, until we had driven a couple more miles and the travel companion suddenly exclaimed: “There, you see! The monkey sign!”
Here is a picture:
Yep, you guessed it. Sweden has no monkeys. That’s the Swedish sign to warn about crossing moose, from then on known as the monkeys of the North.
That evening we spent the night by the side of a lake, which seemed like a very romantic place to camp:
However, if you are ever in Sweden, there are two places where you should never set up camp:
- In, or close to, a forest. The reason being ants the size of peanuts.
- In, or close to, a lake. The reason being either … well … wet feet obviously, or mosquitos.
In case you have never been in a motorhome, it is basically the engine and front of a van with a living compartment behind it. I didn’t know this myself, but apparently mosquitos can find their way through the air vents in the front of a motorhome. If you have ever been plagued in your bedroom by one of those sneaky buggers that buzzes in your ear all night and thought that was bad, you have not experienced terror until there have been dozens of the bloodsuckers assaulting you for 10 consecutive hours. The slaughter was real that night. Imagine the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones; about the same amount of blood and screaming, only with slightly more buzzing.
By the third day, the only way we could still muster up the courage to look at the trees in our sleep-deprived condition was by playing the game “spot the moose”; a game where, surprisingly, you look at trees and try to spot a moose. And yes, that is just as exciting as it sounds. The game goes a little something like this:
You point and exclaim “I think I see a moose!”, after which you take a better second look, sigh, and say “Sorry guys, it was just another tree.”
We would play it for hours until our eyes started to water and we were sure that all we would see for nights to come, burned on the back of our eyeballs, were trees. Then, just as we had given up all hope to see a moose, this young fella showed up by the side of the road. Apologies for the blurry picture; he was fast!
Then, after an 850 mile drive from Stockholm, the trees stopped. It was as if someone had drawn an invisible line across the landscape, a border North of which no more trees would grow. That line is called the Arctic Circle. Once you cross that line, Sweden becomes a tundra landscape as far as the eye can see. Which in all fairness is not very far, because there are mountains all around, but let’s move on!
If this tundra landscape struck us as beautiful, the best was yet to come. As soon as we crossed the border into Norway, the view changed drastically. Steep mountain ranges rose up on all sides, a wild, fast-flowing river ran alongside the road and all around us we could see waterfalls, some of which tumbled down hundred metre high cliffs. We had finally reached it; a country so beautiful it can only be accurately described by a seasoned author – which I am not – so let me just show you a picture:
If you ever find yourself in Sweden, just remember the following rules of thumb:
- A moose is not to be confused with a monkey. It upsets the locals.
- Respect the postmen, even if their mothers tricked them into the job.
- Don’t camp in or near a forest or a lake, although finding such a spot is a statistical improbability.
- Trees. Seriously Sweden, trees! Tell the local population that it’s time to get some help for their tree fetish, because the situation has really gotten out of hand.
- Quickly drive to Norway instead, where they have at least 3 different types of trees. The variation is amazing!