Scandinavia is often in our consciousness these days, as we watch such a lot of Scandi TV.

Iceland -- assuming you classify Iceland as Scandinavian -- I've already recalled.

Otherwise, I've had brief -- very brief -- tastes of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Denmark -- that was way, way back. I think it was 1984. Before I kept a diary or had a camera, anyway. I travelled by car from Germany with two friends, who en route discovered insurmountable incompatibilities, and spent the holiday politely annoyed with each other. 

I recall going to Legoland, and finding it shut (some public holiday that we'd not been aware of). The surroundings were quiet, in a weird, abandoned kind of way, and one friend made a joke about the rapture, and the other took exception to this.

I recall Odense and Hans Andersen's House, and staying in a nice family guesthouse. I recall the quite smart Copenhagen hotel we'd chosen, where one friend went down to the bar to get to know people, and the other friend thought this was a really bad idea.

I can call to mind the Little Mermaid, which -- as everyone feels honour bound to point out -- is smaller than you probably imagined. I remember Kronborg Castle, aka Elsinore, the setting for Shakespeare's Hamlet. And I remember that you could get a good cheap meal at the railway stations. Lots of locals told us that, and it was right.

There was so much that remained unexplored, and now that I have so many televised Danish landscapes in my consciousness, it's a place I would love to go back to.

Norway. That was 1992. And the genesis of the trip was quite romantic. To celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, Nigel was charged with secretly booking a holiday. The only rule was that it had to be in a country neither of us had visited before.

He picked Norway, and it was a great trip.


Fifth wedding anniversary

The only fly in the ointment was that I wasn't very well (a state that would subsequently so often beset big wedding anniversaries that we took to celebrating them on the wrong date...) This particular year's ailment (which an array of doctors never quite got to the bottom of) involved utterly debilitating headaches, which quickly and mysteriously subsided if I lay down... So a lot of my memories of Norway involve being horizontal, in fields, parks, or wherever there was a quiet space.

We changed planes in Stavanger, and flew on to Bergen (a spectacular flight with views of sea, islands, mountains, and snowcaps). Bergen was gorgeous, with a busy harbour, a cool funicular, and an array of colourful houses. We didn't quite have a midnight sun, but at 11pm it was still quite light enough to read and write.



















From Bergen we headed to Balestrand, by train, bus, ferry, and another bus.







Balestrand has Viking burial mounds, and a monument donated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was a regular guest here. There are plenty of walking tracks in the vicinity. And if you borrow the hotel boat, you can go rowing on the fjord (which is a more enjoyable experience if you don't break one of the oars...)











One evening we went to the the little wooden church (a copy of a stave church) for a concert by the United Chorale of Bridgeport, Connecticut. They gave a good performance, but the star of the show had to be the pump organ, a non-too-subtle, congregation-drowning harmonium, which threatened to collapse in a clattering heap after the ensemble's spirited rendering of "From Sea to Shining Sea".

From Balestrand you can take the boat to Fjaerland, where you can see glaciers -- the Bøyabreen and the Supphellebreen.



You can also take the bus to the Sogndal Folk Museum. I was fascinated by the old houses, made of thick logs of wood. Originally they had no fancy clapboard cladding, and no chimneys, which were regarded as silly devices fit only to warm the crows. The site is lovely, up on the hills, surrounded by thick forest, overlooking the fjord. It is somehow moving to think how little it has changed since the people up there lived in houses like these. At Christmas, we learned, the family would sleep on the floor so that the family ghosts could sleep in the beds... Must have been a strange feeling in the dark of winter, as the fjord wind roared round your little house. Crosses were painted on the doors and bedposts of the guesthouses to protect the inmates from evil spirits.









At the end of our week, we took the express boat back to Bergen. This was quite an exciting trip, as we bounced along, leaving little boats yo-yoing in our wake. The coast is unbelievable -- a jumble of sea-cliffs, little rocky islands, bigger islands with trees and houses, and channels of all shapes and sizes between. How awesome to have a little house down by the water's edge, with a little boat and a boathouse, and a terrace that gets flooded every time the express boat goes past...



And finally, Sweden. September 1996. We bought one of those packages where you book places on a car ferry (24 hours, Harwich to Goteborg) and vouchers for camp sites. It seemed really good value, but we soon discovered why. No-one goes camping or indeed on any other kind of holiday in Sweden in September (we rapidly learned the word stangd, meaning closed). And why is that the case? Well, because it's absolutely freezing...

The flipside of the general desertedness, however, was that we often had campsite saunas to ourselves, and I learned to deal with cold nights by baking myself for a while, then encasing myself in floor-to-ceiling clothing inside my sleeping-bag, and drinking a hot chocolate nightcap (heroically supplied by Nigel).

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. We have no photos from that trip (quite why we decided on several European holidays that the camera was not a necessary item of baggage I can no longer fathom), so Sweden lives only in my memory and my diary.

What I recall a lot of is water, forest, and extraordinarily blue skies.

We camped first by massive Lake Vanern. Nearby were Husaby, and its church, which dates back to the 11th century, and apparently houses the oldest piece of furniture in Sweden; some bronze-age rock carvings; Lacko castle, with its fairytale courtyards, towers, and turrets (we couldn't visit the inside, which was stangd); a huge Iron-Age burial mound reputed to contain the remains of Beowulf; and Hindens Rev, part of a glacial end moraine that stretches from Norway to Finland and beyond.

Our second lake-to-camp-by was Orsasjon. Its next-door lake is Siljan, which we spent a day touring. Characteristic of the area are traditional-style log cabins, often with pretty flower gardens, carved porches, meticulously kept woodpiles, and fences made of tall pairs of vertical stakes with diagonal struts connecting them; maypoles, as it is THE area of midsummer festivities; and depictions of the red Dalarna horses, a kind of symbol of the region.

A highlight of the Orsa area is the Bear Park. Situated on the top of a hill, it offers spectacular views -- and spectacularly low temperatures... But the bears don't seem to mind, and quite happily play around in the freezing water. The enclosures were mostly extensive and interesting, with slopes, trees aplenty, and ponds. Bears seem gregarious, and team up with others to loll around (they give the impression of being good lollers), chase each other, and have little mock fights.

One of the most engaging scenes had to be an adult bear in a large enclosure. All by himself, he climbed into his pond, and started playing with the rocks. What exactly he was doing I suppose we can't know, but he looked for all the world as though he was trying to balance these stones on his nose. As each inevitably fell off, he'd find another -- often hopelessly large -- and, totally self-absorbed, renew the game.

In one of the enclosures, there were also wolves, who seem to get on fine with the bears, providing they don't creep up behind them (if they do, they provoke some fine bear growls). We also saw a lynx. Just briefly, but clearly enough to see the big cat face and the tufty ears.

We did a bit more sight-seeing in this very beautiful area, but the cold was establishing itself in earnest now, so we decided we would head south tor Stockholm.

Where it wasn't much warmer, frankly... I note in my diary on our first night there: "An older couple -- Swedish, I think -- looked at us preparing tea out in the open, and remarked, with a sympathetic shiver, that we must be very cold. Of course, one puts a brave face on it -- 'not so cold as in Orsa, we manage to keep warm...'. But they're right. Clearly, we're mad."

Stockholm is lovely. Big, imposing buildings contrast with areas of narrow alleys, gabled houses, flights of steps, and little squares, and it's all flanked by an impressive waterfront. We had bought tourist rover tickets, which entitled us to free entry to the Kaknas telecoms tower. This is a good way of orientating yourself, and appreciating the phenomenal amount of water and forest/parkland that goes to make up the city. The same invaluable tickets also got us into Skansen, billed as the first open-air museum. It covers large areas of forested park, and encompasses old buildings from various Swedish regions, as well as gardens and animal enclosures. Later, to experience Stockholm from the water, we forked out for two boat trip tickets. Expensive, but worth it.

Getting home (which was the UK in those days) involved returning to Goteborg, via a route that took us past Lake Vattern, another huge immensity of Swedish blue. Before catching the ferry the following afternoon, we had time to explore a bit of the city, which is very attractive.

Then another 24 hours at sea, and Scandinavia was behind us -- and has remained so to date. If we ever get the chance to travel again -- if, one day, a long way off -- we'll definitely try to head back in that direction.


A few more Norway photos to close with