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02: GALLERY : Sculptures and Journeys :
N69 30' 00'' E17 59' 55'' : Hillesoya Beach

The first step of a long journey starts at your own back door, and with high anticipation in a summer of bright grey skies and weak warm sun we leave our home for Newcastle. On our ship, whose funnel emblem describes the fjords we are making for, there is an atmosphere like a party in a garden, and on our stern deck a crew member serves drinks as we slide down the Tyne, past buildings, quays, slipways and waving people that I have not seen for over thirty years……………….

Bergen is a city of dazzling brittle northern sunshine, bracketed by breath-snatching hammering showers that set off dancing rainbows like sparks from iron-soled clogs on cobbled streets. Caught in this green basin of hills are parks and fountains, art galleries and cafes, Edvard Grieg and blues singers, sculpture that acknowledges water and water that acknowledges colours – the crimson, wooden buildings and the quayside stalls of bright red strawberries, shrimps and crabs, and the armada of mountains and tall-masted ships stretching away to the horizon.

............And also Sam Jorgen; Viking in manner and stature in his nineteenth-century farm guesthouse, and who, through the informality of the Internet, already seems like an old friend. But, home as this rambling settlement of red wooden buildings already feels, we can't stay long at No 17 Gronnestolen Gaard.............

We find the quay for the Hurtigruten - ‘the fast route’ - and continue north on the ‘Polarlys’; one of the fleet of eleven ships that embark daily and serve as local ferry, cargo vessel and 'Norwegian Coastal Cruise' liner up and down this coast between Bergen and Kirkennes in the far north on the Russian border. The car is driven into the hold, more like a bright, clean warehouse than any vehicle deck that I have seen before, and is parked amongst palettes of coffee, oranges, and other mixed grocery supplies for the communities in the north. With little ceremony, our immaculate12,000 tons eases away from the bustle of Bergen, and the Norwegian land and seascape soon slides by at a steady15 knots.

Five days of travel lie ahead, calling in at cities, towns and villages: places likeTorvik, Alesund, Trondheim, Ornes, Bodo, and Finnsness. Some are big, bustling, vibrant communities, and others are small, isolated settlements that serve the occasional farms that seem to stretch the whole 5-day way on the narrow coastal strip of intermittent cultivated green, wedged between the subtler-coloured layers of sea, mountains and sky.

In Trondheim, for centuries a destination for pilgrims from all over Europe, fork-lift trucks work furiously in and out of the ship as we stroll up through the city to the cathedral in the early morning sunshine of St Olaf's Day, while other passengers prefer to be whisked off in coaches to the city's museums. By contrast in tiny Svolvaer, the quayside activity is marked by a solitary deck-hand carrying out a box of bananas and a mail bag for the shop up the hill. A taxi waits in the evening gloom for the sole traveller who disembarks here with her small suitcase; words and laughter are exchanged with the driver - they know each other - and the red rear lights wind skywards up the narrow road and into another life beyond the bright cocoon of the lounge windows, bars and restaurants of this floating community of travellers. For those few who ventured out and remain on deck, the now-familiar routine of the crew is observed as dripping ropes are winched back on board, and the ship turns away from this tiny village, its quiet evening and harbour life-line, barely touched by our passing......

Bodo is busy and feels hot in the mid-morning sun. A pavement cafe entices us for dark strong coffee, fresh pastries and, such are the bizarre economics of international trade, a chocolate muffin that turns out to have been baked in Bristol! The quay-side is a theatre of fishing boats whose roles have changed into floating market stalls as fish and seafood are exchanged in transactions with shoppers that involve hard bargaining, animated gestures, and energetic discussion. The juices of fresh cooked prawns are still running down my chin as we stumble across a majestic line of Tony Cragg sculptures along the harbour wall. The excitement of this discovery is cut short however, as twenty-five minutes away across the harbour, 'Polarlys' sirens its intention to leave in fifteen minutes, and we torpedo back through the narrow streets like gasping fish leaving ripples of shoppers in our wake. The last to board, a cold Norwegian beer on deck slows the pulse, and the Tony Craggs line up for us like a string of beads as we pass, and then separate and unthread as we move on, and churn out of the harbour and swing north - the closest a ship may ever come to leaving rubber on tarmac.............

Crossing the Artic Circle, daylight never leaves us; cliffs are so close we can nearly touch them, waterfalls so high we can feel their spray, and the sea so calm it is like passing through liquid basalt. Far away and rarely seen in their entirety like this, the ragged wall of the Lofoten Islands stretches like a string of broken teeth across the horizon from west to east, violet against a cream-grey sky. We are on deck at every opportunity now, watching their approach, alternately frozen by the midnight sunset, and warmed by the northern wind. They call this the world's most beautiful voyage. It also has to be the world’s most beautiful walk as we stroll arm in arm round and round the deck and drift into yet another unfolding land- and seascape ………….

Then Tromso is approached along a wide water-filled valley backed by snow-covered mountains. The weather is grey, cold, and wet; the city friendly and welcoming. Tromso’s long island-ridge is linked to mainland Norway and the other outer islands by sweeping bridges east and west, and is drilled beneath by burrowing, cavernous roadways. We are leaving ‘Polarlys’ here, so a few tins of English beer from our supplies for the hold crew who – a little enviously - wish us luck on our trip through the northern mountains, and I manoeuvre the car from the hold. The oranges and coffee have long gone, and have been replaced by other vehicles also sailing the direct route north to avoid the tortuous inlets of the fjord-etched coast. I fancy some of our fellow passengers also envy us our adventure as we drive down the access ramp and pass their waiting tour buses.

Later, as we stand in the drizzle, with a real five-day-familiarity sense of loss, we watch as ‘Polarlys’ leaves us behind, and we turn our back on the harbour and look up to our new home for these next few days. Tromso rises in terraces up the mountainside. The museums, art galleries and street sculpture, churches and cathedrals, brewery, football stadium, good bars and restaurants, university, and fine wooden houses with their secluded gardens are all discovered as we walk the streets and footpaths of this compact and vibrant northern city…………..

We are now skirting a remote coast, driving further north and west on the island of Kvaloy, passing sites of ancient rock paintings, villages with tiny harbours, and bright farms that pull their small, tight fields around and into themselves. The road, like a line drawing that is reaching the edge of its paper, gradually narrows and loses confidence as we swing northwards. The landscape, though warm and sunlit and supporting wandering birds, tethered cattle, grazing reindeer and single-minded insects, gradually becomes bleak, and is scoured of any standing vegetation by the dark Arctic winter winds of a different season to this, and whose memory resides in the scatterings of snow on the surrounding mountains.

Still the road narrows and scrapes round outcrops of rock, rattles over bridges, and whistles by white sand beaches until, at Sommaroy, a huddle of houses at the end of the world that grip into the shelter of the lea of a hill, it finally gives out altogether. It drifts into a track towards the old red fishing huts of this remote village on its bay of dazzling sand and azure sea. It is hard to reconcile this vision of normality - children playing, lunch cooking, gardens being weeded, nets repaired, outboards serviced - with the perpetual dark, frozen silences and ferocious storms of what must be the mid-winter reality for these cheerful people in a few months time.

And now even the four-wheel-drive is defeated as this evidence of passage contracts into a footpath, sinuous and gristly, a meandering line up the hills towards the west, to finally expire where the well-picked blueberry bushes themselves give out. Now, only the one hill remains. We climb, pushing through low scrub, and then descend across the surprised deep, flower-filled turf to the quartz ribbon of the last beach below.

And, where I physically can go no further north or west on this land without giving myself up to the blue-green glass-water, I am drawn to a rock at the very edge of this continent. It stands in the water, a pillar bleached by gull shit and blazing white like a beckoning beacon.

This last rock becomes the reason for this journey.

And on the rock lie three gifts, collected by a bird and left,

waiting for this meeting.

I pick them up

turn

and then we retrace the road slowly back to Tromso, and eventually Britain,

carrying these worthless and yet priceless things.

Hillesoya Beach Hillesoya Beach Detail

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