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In Which I Come Home
August 7, 2006 by Mike
Berlevåg
I should start with a disclaimer. I haven't come home home. The trip isn't over already. Promise. I'm not sitting in Norwich pretending to be in the Arctic. Here.. wait a second.......... there, I just stuck my head out of the door and smelled reindeer spore. You don't get that in Norwich.
By 'home' I mean that I'm sitting in a very friendly, homely little place; and one that, hundreds of miles from anyone I have ever known or met, had a couple of real surprises in store.
Berlevåg sits at the northern tip of the Varanger peninsula (in Norwegian - 'halvoya', or 'half-island', which sounds about right.) Another wonderful ride to get here - 80 miles of all sorts of road, over the kind of blasted heath that Macbeth had nightmares about. (I think I spotted Greymalkin at one stage.) All the way from Tana Bru there's only one road junction - right to Båtsfjord or left to Berlevåg. I got that right, by turning left. Down to the sea again at a gorgeous hamlet called Kongsfjord and then hugging the coast of the Barents Sea...
More on Berlevåg tomorrow. One thing: there are no trees up here, so the hammock is temporarily redundant. (I would be in it if I could.. honest.) Instead I'm sleeping for a couple of nights in a hut beneath the Kjølnes lighthouse. How cute is that??
Lars, who booked me in, had to be driven out here by his mum because at 17 he's too young to drive. I thought she was his rather foxy girlfriend at first. Either the rugged Arctic air does wonders for your complexion (unlikely) or she was about Lars' age when she had him. Too young to drive, so they have babies instead!
Lars is a Man Yoo fan.. sadly, no surprises there.. and plays Third Division football. Football is regional at that level, of course, but it still means a 180km round trip to Båtsfjord for home games. One of the grounds he plays at involves a 500km drive to Alta followed by a two hour boat trip. Not even his mum comes along to cheer him on there.
---
Earlier today I rode to Vadsø, Vardø and Kiberg.
Vadsø, capital of Finnmark, Norway's northernmost county, was starting point for polar airship expeditions led by Roald Amundsen and the Italian Nobile. It's home to a Finnish-speaking community, the Kven, who migrated here 300 years ago. More recent arrivals, refugees from east Africa, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, were conspicuous during a very short stay. I wonder what they make of the long, white winters? And I wonder what their new neighbours, Norwegians, Finns, Saami, make of them?
I had to plough on to Vardø for one (very good) reason. To be able to leave the town, in order to say (to myself):
Var det Vardø?
Ja, det var det!
It's not so much what's said -- "Was that Vardø?" "Yes, it was" -- as how it sounds. Life's too short to try and spell it out honetically but believe it all rhymes this way and that when said in Norwegian. or even -- and this is how it will always sound to me -- when said with my Dad's strong English accent. "Vaar derr Vaardurr? Yaa derr vaar derr."
Well, it made me smile.
Vardø, it turns out, is lovely: an island community now connected to the mainland by a 3km tunnel (unheated, I discovered the hard way) under the Arctic sea. Brrrrrrr. The houses up here are colourful - reds and yellows and greens and blues. That must help during the long winters; in bright summer sun the whole town was charming.
Vardø also has its place in the history of polar exploration. Fridtjof Nansen, a truly heroic man who would later save millions of lives leading the relief effort from famine and disease in southern Russia, set off from Vardo on his search for the North West Passage in a converted fishing boat called 'Fram'. I've seen the boat, now housed in Oslo. It's the size of a matchbox. To leave this tiny island clinging on to the very edge of Europe... and head north... into the unknown... in such conditions... the bravery of the men of 'Fram' is of a degree that we can only wonder at.
In different circumstances and from a different age, the bravery of the men and women of Kiberg who defied the Nazi occupation is every bit as great. Many lost their lives, in the most horrific circumstances.
Kiberg, just south of Vardø, faces the Russian coast. By 1940, there had been no contact between the countries for a generation following the November Revolution, but it was natural for many of Kiberg's inhabitants to sail across when the Germans invaded. Not only was the Soviet Union then at peace (a shameful pact having been signed with the Nazis which was yet to be broken) but many people in tough, wild, desolate Kiberg were communists. This aspect of the partisans is still glossed over by the books and museums of the region. But it's the truth: the far left fought the far right.
Anyhoo. Amongst the Kiberg partisans who fought and died in the struggle for freedom were those selfsame Soderstroms, Mikkelsens, Halvaris and Eriksens whose melancholy memorial I came across by accident just outside Murmansk. There's a Partisan Museum in Kiberg, and a memorial with the same names on. Eerie. They are remembered in both countries for giving up their lives in a just cause.
A reminder of how much the people and places have in common up here, regardless of such fripperies as national borders, Cold Wars and the like.
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By Cousin Sue | August 12, 2006 2:29 AM
Great website, lots to explore.....I like the map and satellite to help acquaint us WITH the area. I'm enjoying your trip vicariously.
Sue