travel

Norway: 24th June Saturday Alesund and Bergen

24th June Saturday

Last night, I stayed in a campsite in Alesund. Its probably the worst place I have stayed in so far on this trip. And that’s because, for a start, it was really crowded. It was urban and it was really noisy. There was a group of people partying really loudly. I’m not sure what time they finished maybe after 11.30 (which is late in a campsite because people tend to hit the sack quite early). Added to that, people arrived late at night, after I’d gone to sleep (or rather while I was trying to sleep) and a couple of groups put up tents next to mine.

On the other hand, some of the campers were very friendly. I remember talking to a Dutch man who with his wife was touring using a beautiful tepee type tent on the same small field as me and a couple of young French cyclists who were cycling all around Europe. There was another single woman on a bicycle with a super-light Nemo tent which I had seen on the internet (that make of tent – not her). It was a small group of guys on motorcycles who made the noise. I wasn’t that close to them, mercifully, but they must have disturbed the whole site. I remember I said hello to one of them when they parked their bikes next to mine. I got one response but the other one just scowled awkwardly at me. The people that run the site (young slightly fed up with the punters’ questions) didn’t seem to consider it worth their intervention. So, I have decided that urban campsites are definitely to be avoided in the future. I camped in my little tent which on this occasion was fine because it was dry.

So, today, Saturday: I set off south on the route to Bergen which I put into the GPS. It was seven hours, a big journey. I’ve been riding down the E39 and am probably about 100k from Bergen, still north of the city. I crossed with two ferries today, I think. Maybe it was three. I can’t remember. I will have to look it up! It was fun.

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A ferry going somewhere

It is super easy.

For the last ferry I remember riding really fast after a car that was clearly in a hurry. I thought I’m going to keep up with them as a challenge (I usually ride in an unhurried way). I thought that maybe they are heading for the same ferry as me only they know when it leaves. But actually they weren’t and when I got to the ferry terminal, the boat had just left. But the next one was in about ten minutes. I stopped in another beautiful lay-by and had something to eat. It was so nice to have a break as last night, as you can imagine, I did not sleep well.

So I wanted a definitely rural setting to camp again and I wanted a cabin. (For the reasons I’ve already set out – more than once…). I kept riding down the E39 and found a campsite called Botnen, not far from Oppedal by a small harbour. The site is on terraces that slope down toward a fjord. Its on lots of levels and there’s a variety of accommodation. I really like it. The slightly fusty couple running it don’t speak much English, if any. And when I asked if they sell beer in their little shop they had no idea what I was asking about – or at least they made out that they didn’t. (its as if Norway becomes some old-fashioned religious country when it comes to drinking alcohol or going shopping on a Sunday) Anyway, I am in my cabin now and if I look down I can see the fjord. It’s a beautiful evening, a long evening as all evenings are here of course. Interestingly, there’s a bit of accommodation down there by the water with four motorbikes parked outside with Swedish plates. So, thinking about last night’s campsite I’m wondering ‘are these going to be four guys making a lot of noise late into the night?’

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Oh no more Harleys

I am so pleased to have got here. It was a long day riding. I got here after 6 and I had set off at about 10am. It was a big day of riding without much stopping. Now, I must relate a story about petrol. I got really worried about running out of petrol. (I had thought that the KTM790 can do 200 miles on a tank – but actually it is quite a lot more but exactly how much more I have never tested.) Of course I needn’t have. I found a rather shabby looking couple of pumps, certainly not a large brightly lit chain like Shell. And there is no one working there of course. I just could not get the petrol pumps to work. I moved my bike from one side of the pump to the other then back again. Then I discovered, of course, that there is a little machine that you put your credit card in. I’ve been doing that from day 1, but for some reason I had been so wound up about running out of petrol that I didn’t see it. Then when I did, the machine said that there was an error – which had never happened before. The error was in Norwegian of course. And there was a hand written sign taped up to one side of the pump that I could not understand, of course. When I looked at my bank app on my phone I saw that it had been charged 110 pounds or Euros for absolutely no petrol and then I repeated the process and I did manage to get petrol and then another £110 seemed to be charged to my card plus the cost of the petrol separately. Hopefully that just disappears after a short while (it did).

I was frazzled but I unwound as I rode. The weather was beautiful, ideal, 23 degrees, hazy sun, bright sun sometimes, lovely road, a bit of traffic but really lovely riding. What I did not do was find a supermarket open to stock up on beers and other things because tomorrow is the dreaded Sunday which shows that I have been here for one week. Supermarkets are not open on Sunday so it is harder to buy food and drink but I think I have enough to get by… I hope I have. So, I am feeling huge relief, tired but very pleased to be in this cabin and looking forward to getting a proper night’s sleep tonight.

Just south of Trondheim

Tuesday 20th June: That date makes tomorrow the Summer Solstice, the longest day. I heard somebody ask on the radio ‘what are you going to do to celebrate?’ What I’m going to do is be in the Arctic Circle where the sun won’t set at all but I am not going to stay up all night just to make sure that it doesn’t.

Today started off in that campsite just south of Trondheim. I woke at 6.45 and got going, packed things up which was so easy because everything was dry. I made a coffee, had a couple of cereal bars and left at 8.45. It always takes two hours to break camp – surprising. Then I was on the road. I put Mo I Rana into the GPS and it said that I’d be there by 4.30. This seems a reasonable time compared to when you first read that a trip will take 7 hours which seems very long, too long. There was though a bit too much traffic. I stopped for petrol and wasn’t sure whether to stop again. In the end I did stop at a scenic layby. I talked to an older German man there travelling with his partner on a motorcycle (or was it two?). They were taking a much more leisurely approach. He showed me his map of Norway. He’d drawn circles of every place he was going to stay, every few inches, whereas I’m travelling at least twice as far as them every day. So I headed off.

Eventually I decided I needed some food and drink so stopped at a little town and went to a supermarket where I bought a kind of cappuccino milk carton and a roll and that helped and then I headed off again. It was a long, long way, endlessly on this road, though it was beautiful but I was a bit tired I think. But then the heavens opened. I could see it coming. Beautiful mountainous views on either side and lakes and snow up on the peaks.  But the rain just fell down. I was wearing my waterproof gear already. It was so heavy and made visibility so poor that some people pulled off the road. I did for a moment or two but it was pointless. I kept going and then it stopped which felt so good. All the time the petrol was going down but I just don’t trust the petrol gauge. I had ridden 230 miles but the gauge was showing just under half a tank and telling me I could ride for another 120 miles. One day I will have to test it with some spare petrol.

At this place where I am now – which I will explain later – its not as far as Mo I Rana, maybe 30 miles south of there. I was wet and tired so stopped. I rode past this big campsite in the town which had a few tents but lots of cabins and a lot of them had motorbikes parked outside them and I thought ‘OK this is possibly a place to stay, in a cabin, like other people on bikes are doing’. I searched for a petrol station, found it then thought that I would stay in a hotel. I promised myself I would if it was wet – and it was raining again and I was wet.  I found the hotel that I am in now. Its called the Fru Haugens hotel in Mosjøen. Its £112 for a room but I had no hesitation. The bike was wet, I was wet. I came up into this economy single room. I took all these wet clothes off, had a shower, dried my clothes on the radiator, dried my helmet. Plugged everything in. Ah – it was such a relief, so welcome. The only downside is that they are remaking all the roads in this town and right outside my window was a man with a mechanical whacker and a digger, this incredible racket just outside my room.

I ventured off through this small town to a brand new supermarket in a shopping centre that’s open till midnight and bought food for dinner in my room. I thought having spent £112 on a room I am not going to spend more money on an expensive dinner here. The guy on the digger stopped and I felt my spirits lift – but then he started again and my anxiety wound up again. Finally, he stopped and went home and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I put in the Arctic Circle Centre into the GPS. It will take just over two hours to get there so its not very far. That’s fantastic and that will be Wednesday. The downside is that Thursday morning it will start raining – all day. But the app on my phone has a little symbol for rain which is perhaps psychologically misleading because it looks really dark. Now I have got, for the rest of my time here, to do these manoeuvres to avoid the rain. I even thought of going across the border to Sweden where there is not as much rain but when you look in more detail the amount of rain is much greater so I won’t do that but I do want to figure out some strategy. Maybe its just riding in the rain and staying in hotels. It makes the trip more expensive but maybe it’s the way to go. Anyway, it’s the Arctic Circle tomorrow on the summer solstice which is fantastic and then head back down south. Tomorrow is the 21st and my boat sails on 28th so I have 7 days to wind my way, perhaps down the coast.

Jupiter’s Travels review at last

Caption: that’s a pretty good cover photo (so many books seem to have an endorsement from Ewan McGreggor on them)

Ted Simon is generally credited as starting off the whole adventure motorcycling industry and certainly the making a record of it. Jupiter’s Travels was published in 1979 by Penguin. As it says on the cover, Ted Simon spent four years travelling the world on a Triumph motorcycle. He was a journalist employed and supported on the trip by the Sunday Times newspaper. He left London on 6th October 1973 for what turned out to be a journey of 63,000 miles. This was the same day, he notes, that the Yom Kippur war started, inauspicious but signalling the way his journey and the book criss-crosses with world politics of the period. Ted Simon writes with interest and insight into the cultures and lives that he comes across and becomes involved in across Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Asia. He is politically and personally astute and inquiring. He also writes movingly about the inner life. Its my opinion that though very many books have subsequently been written about this kind of world-encompassing adventure, no one has come near to Ted Simon’s account.

The group of people who have become known as adventure riders come in many orientations I now realise. There is a spectrum from the athletes at one end who’s ride is all about endurance and technical matters to do with the bike and its preparation and at the other end are travel writers, people endlessly curious about the world, its culture and its people who have chosen to ride a motorcycle, maybe because it gives a unique access coupled with vulnerability and openness to people. There are some riders who are somewhere in the middle of course. There are some who seem more focussed on the non-human (landscapes, vistas, wild animals) than human culture.

Ted has written a number of books since this, Riding Home (or Riding High as it is sometimes called) includes further reflections on the same journey. But he has written about other travels, notably his ‘re-run’ of the original trip done 28 years later, starting in 2001 when Ted was 69. All the details can be found on his website and its possible to order his books and video from there too.

Ted turned 90 years old earlier this year. I like him because he makes me feel young.

Lone Rider by Eslpeth Beard: 2018, Michael O’Mara Books

There is one thing that makes Lone Rider by Elspeth Beard an unusual travel book – it was written, or at least published, more than 30 years after Elspeth returned from the travel described. And, now that I think about it, there is another thing that makes it unusual, though by no means unique – it is written by and about the travels of a woman. And you are reading this review, and I am writing it, because we are interested in travel by motorcycle, and this particular journey took the rider around the globe – quite an achievement.

Elspeth left London in 1982 for a journey, in a Westerly direction, around the world. (Most UK based adventurers head off east nowadays). She was 23. Unlike many other motorcycle travel writers she gives a detailed back-story to her growing involvement with motorcycles, her faltering architecture studies, her family, and her love life. In a nutshell most people, including the narrow minded and sexist motorcycle press at the time did not believe she could do it or were simply uninterested. I hope it is not unkind to describe her family as eccentric, in that classic English eccentricity. She writes about her psychiatrist father’s eye for a bargain – one example is the hundreds of tins of canned food from which the labels unfortunately parted company, causing family suppers, as she says, to be rather pot-luck affairs. They lived in Wimpole Street in the west end of London – unimaginable that a family would live on that opulent street of private medical practice and corporations today.

I can’t help myself compare every motorcycle travel book I read to Ted Simon’s iconic Jupiter’s Travels which was first published (unbelievably) in 1979. Ted is considered, interested and engaged in the places and with the people that he meets and their politics large and small and also writes with insight about the inner life. A tall order to match. Lone Rider, fascinating though it is, started off feeling like a series of anecdotes stitched together. But quickly, alongside the enjoyment of reading about motorcycling, came another not so easy theme that recurred throughout the book and most of the travels – what today we’d call sexual harassment by men in practically every continent, some more persistent than others, and all distasteful and scary to hear about. Another well-known woman motorcyclist Lois Pryce also writes about this but I’d say generally got off lightly compared with Elspeth Beard, as far as we can tell from her books (maybe what writers chose to include and what to be silent about varies).

Elspeth also writes with honesty. She writes about the series of must-see destinations that turn out to be disappointments or spoiled by the behaviour of locals. In fact there are quite a few countries that she has actively put me off ever visiting. Then, early on in the journey, in a hostel in New Zealand, she describes going to bed with what she believes is bad indigestion and waking up in hospital having had a miscarriage. So, if these are anecdotes, they have an awe-inspiring seriousness. Later, in Asia, after two serious road accidents, she teams up with a Dutch man and a romance develops, though the man in question turns out to have what, again, we might call today, fragile mental health. At the same time and, it seems, all the way from India across many countries, her trusty BMW R60/6 is disintegrating, continually breaking down and fixed up more and more precariously. It seems unbelievable that she – and it – made it home to London, arriving outside her parents’ house in the middle of the night in November 1984. Any further details would risk spoiling the, I have to say, rather sad and moving post script to the travel.

Do I recommend this book? Unreservedly. Why did the author wait 30 years to publish this? I have no idea. I expect she has been asked this many times as she is a regular speaker at motorcycle travel – ‘adventure’ – events. Perhaps to lay some ghosts.

A trip of two parts: sun and Baxby Manor

Monday 

I think this has to be a holiday of two parts. Things have opened out. It was good to get away from my last site. It was fine but it was austere in a way that was partly to do with the wild almost constantly wet weather but also to do with the atmosphere on the site. The owners were friendly enough and a young very hard working couple but there was some thing tough and minimal about the way the place was run and about the anecdotes they told about previous campers who underestimated the harshness of the environment.

My Bluetooth stopped working yesterday – it suddenly spat out some instructions in European languages and then died. But riding away this morning in cool and brightening skies felt liberating. The weather definitely helped. It seeps into the spirit – whether good or bad. And then the route I chose through the North Yorkshire Dales was amazing (see the GPX file below), first south and then to the east. It was almost the best I have ever ridden. Up there with the road alongside the Mosel. There were sheep on the road, at one point a great flock of them driven from one field to another by a farmer. And when you see a sign saying that 22 motorcyclists have been killed on that stretch of road you know it must be good. And the bike rode so well today. Movable across the road and into corners so easily just by shifting the weight of my thighs on the seat. 

I must get rid of my BMW brands

The route became lass spectacular as it got closer to the dividing line of the A1, but still enjoyable and by the time I reached Tesco in Thirsk, about 10 miles from the campsite I was staying at, it was warm, very warm. But morale raising treat number three (1 was the lovely route; 2 was the change of weather and 3…) is arriving at Baxby hideaway campsite. It is everything that the last two were not. So what were the other two like? The first was municipal, part of a national park, run by young employees; the second was a small family run business and campsites like this always reflect the personality of the owner – relaxed or fastidious or points in between. Baxby Manor was, I suppose a corporate run site, a well-invested business. But with very clear values about the environment and, on this occasion, about Covid-safeness. Using the washing space has a specific protocol involving changing into indoor shoes, hand washing and carrying around a piece of tissue to wipe down anything you touch. The reception person clearly shared those values and seemed genuinely welcoming. Its a large site divided up by thick (beautifully planted) borders and bushes into amazing spaces.

I had booked ‘The Sanctuary’ which was reached by a footpath around a small field, then through a gate into a dark wood of silver birches and another walk to my own small field, surrounded also by trees so that the nearest other tents are just about invisible.

Oh and one side of the space is made up by a babbling brook. So there are fantastic private spaces. I have a whole stream side clearing in a wood to myself. Camping is usually exposing but here there is privacy. The facilities, as I mention before, are also amazingly clean and newly refurbished I would say large too, in fact a pleasure to use unlike first site where I often kept my eyes closed while using them.

I have hung my huge jacket and helmet on a tree feeling confident about the weather for the first time on this trip. It’s just gone six in the evening and there is no cloud in the sky. I have a log to sit on by a fire pit with flat rocks to prop up my gas stove.

What would make it perfect would be having my bike here by the tent to admire and tinker with.

They even have a kiosk that serves pizza and breakfast.