Books of Birmingham

And the travelogue marches on, less sporadically than one originally intended, due to stroke of good fortune. Am right now in my mother’s sixth form classmate’s house (in Coventry), sans said classmate (working in London), after surprising his wife by showing up at the doorstep, bag, dirty laundry, and sundry all in hand.

I was, of course, long overdue a surprise of my own; not least the fact that I was now sharing a 2 bedroom house with five other children. (Or at least that’s what it seemed to me, in my permanent state of vegetative sleep deprivation.)

A good Malaysian curry and tofu meal later, with another in the works right now (what with the scent wafting from the kitchen directly next to me), I am in perfect shape for an update.

Literally, given the amount of walking, bags of books in tow, that I’ve done today.

In respect to the one-city-a-day travelling schedule I’ve been maintaining in the UK, Hizami, ever-patient travelling partner, and I hopped on what felt like the first bus out of Coventry to Birmingham. Birm IS the 2nd largest city in the UK, a promising fact indeed; in a flash of lucidity, though, I idly scanned my Rough Guide to England, discovering, to my horror, that it had only 1 tourist site of known importance.

With that fateful thought in mind, but having already boasted to enough people who cared to listen that I WOULD do 1 town a day, come rain come shine, I was raring to go. Pulling into Birm, the grimy industrial moonscape just confirmed my gloom, that this would have been a day far better spent huddled in a room studying medicine.

It was, naturally, to my great chagrin that I hopped off the bus, almost directly into the waiting arms of a 2nd hand bookseller. Naturally, Hizami had the time of his life squandering his untold riches, while I had to remain content with another addition to my growing Wodehouse collection, and an utterly, utterly fascinating looking tome, about a man travelling from Egypt to South Africa.

Expect to, in a few years, see hurriedly scribbled updates here, from a cybercafe in Sudan or Dijibouti or somewhere equally unpleasurable as bullets whiz happily by.

To add insult to injury, this bookstand, in the “World Famous Rag Market” (at least that’s what their signboard claims, in more than a hint of narcissism), was a BRANCH of a bookshop.

Where Hizami added a new degree of superlative to the time of his life.

2 hours later, we walked away with 20 books, while the shopkeeper walked away with £30. All Hizami’s doing; that bookshop has my vote as the God of all 2nd Hand Sci-Fi Bookshops. There is NO WAY else you can grip a known sci-fi nut for 2 hours, frantically combing musty shelf after musty shelf, to look for gems.

Soon – Scouring Birm for more gems, we stumble upon South Africa. Untapped.

Vienna – Day 1

welcome back, readers of my sporadic travelogue! After 2 weeks solid travelling, have ended up in Vienna, with a view of getting a good mugshot of famous composers today.

All dead, mind you.

Mozart, Strauss and Beethoven are all buried here, according to the friendly Vienna map I have been frantically attempting to read. If anything, this map wins the “impossible to navigate” award hands down. Its bad enough that German street names typically include, oh, say, 15 letters, a noun, a verb complete with inflexion, and a few squiggly letters that wouldn´t look out of place on the Rosetta Stone.

Couple that with a tendency to abbreviate street names to their lowest common denominators, leaving 1-Freuhaggen-strasse as “Freu.” on maps, and you have a recipe for thorough mystification.

Any organic chemistry student worth their salt in sodium chloride will, of course, notice the uncanny resemblance between German street names and compound nomenclature. Sometimes, the higher level thought processes involved in understanding said names are uncannily similar. Which, naturally, does not bode well for a holidaymaker for whom “girls just wanna have fun.”

Speaking of girls. Austrian soft toys are cute to a fault. Until you cuddle their tummies.

Without fail, each one emits a slightly different yodel. Or tries its best to. The common outcome sounds suspiciously, in locus_standi_86´s enduring epithet, like a murderous doll from the Child´s Play movie franchise. In response to his rather overanimated shudders at the thought of even buying one of these Medusas, I suggested he repeatedly press it till the battery wound out.

Naturally, he was not amenable to the idea of silencing anything forever. All hail the Constant Democrat.

Vienna becomes sensory overload, after what seems like moments, if you love grandiose buildings; it becomes a different kind of overload if you happen to be the poor sod who´s expected to take pictures of everyone ELSE on the trip modelling said buildings, in the vein of F1 cars and exotic resort islands. An excellent selection of columns, spires, towers, and stately parks is yours for the taking.

And Parliament House simply restores your faith in the government again.

Even if it´s just faith in its capabilities in siphoning off enough money to build megalomanical buildings that, fortunately, stand the test of time and become major tourist attractions and camera-whore magnets 500 years later, long after the architects responsible for it have been pushed off balconies in revolts.

That´s one thing you learn in Prague. The Czechs certainly have no compunctions in punishing the reviled. One of the more gory attractions of Prague is the chance to visit the spots in Prague Castle and Karlovo Namesty where officials were twice pushed off balconies in popular revolts.

I take great pleasure in announcing that the second batch DID survive the fall. Rumour has it they fell into a pit of muck.

They even have a name for this rather unusual form of murder. It´s called defenestration.

Back to Prague today, to cover any of the sights yet to be ticked off in an increasingly battered Lonely Planet book, and to wish our hosts, the Malaysian students of the First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, good luck for (another) exam!

Day 2 – John O Groats to Glasgow

Today was the designated travelling day; and travel we certainly did. From JoG back to Glasgow, there was barely enough time for us to grab our grub, grub being a good trip to the breakfast table, loading up on 5 varieties of cornflake, enough rounds of cooked breakfast to give us a particularly nasty form of heart disease (we tried all the types of cooked egg), and by the time the bus pulled up at the Seaview Hotel entrance, we had, certainly, made the most of our 16-pound hotel stay. (A VERY good deal, we all concurred.)

The Seaview – the other one was so shack-like in comparison, I don’t even remember its name

Out of JoG, one thing struck me on the way back – Wick has a Tescos. Funny how one company, given a relentless consumer culture in the UK, can take over the country this way. To its defense, Wick IS an oil town, of sorts, and new money has been rushing in.

In Wick, all that was left for us was to alight the Rapson’s Coach (a name you will spot a lot in the Highlands), and pop into the adjacent hotel for a leak, while awaiting the coach to Inverness. The hotel was surprisingly posh – except for the odd newspaper sales counter on the reception desk, which somewhat detracts from its exclusivity, unfortunately (one would expect free papers, no?)

Stocking up on food at SOmerfield, we were soon on our way to Inverness, on THAT bus again; this time, we had 3 hours to while away, and we took turns visiting the Inverness Victorian Market, where, I am proud to say, I contributed to the Scottish economic miracle by purchasing a Highlands Coo beanbag doll for 3 quid.

The real thing – far more Japanese-looking than THIS one

The resemblance is far from uncanny, unfortunately. Blame those British factory workers with actual human rights.

The Inverness Victorian market is fairly representative of the Real Thing, one must admit

3 hours later, the bus arrived, and we glumly got on it, knowing our weekend sojourn to the Highlands was over. As the bus chugged out of Inverness, little did we know how much of the Highlands we were yet to experience.

We had entered Inverness in the dark; this time, we were reversing the journey in broad daylight. And passing through the highlands, memories of the previous week’s cold front still fresh, we gave out inward whoops of joy.

For each mountain was still snowcapped, each rivulet was still raring to go, and each village, perched on precipitous slopes in fading daylight, was more romantic than words could ever say.

We arrived in Glasgow after a rather annoying detour to that great interchange of Scottish folklore – Perth Park and Ride, where Megabuses swap passengers with incredulous alacrity. This Megabus ejected all its passengers, let them freeze on a kerb for the best part of half and hour, then offered no sullen apology when they managed to successfully lose our luggage for a frantic half hour.

Arriving in Glasgow, bathed in the last vestiges of daylight, our first enduring memory of Glasgow was the imposing library demarcating the entrance to our hostel.

The Mitchell Hotel by night – exactly how we first saw it.

Leaving Hizami and Gan at the bus stop on Renfrew Street, I gingerly hailed the bus to my cousin’s house for the last time, acutely aware that I would be forced, by my potentially precarious financial situation, to walk to town the next day. And given that Port Dundas was a mean distance away on the woefully inaccurate tourist maps, I wasn’t relishing it one little bit.

Day 1 – John O’Groats

Arrival in Wick was 1 hour ahead of our biological clocks.

None of us had noted that daylights saving time was to begin the night before; none of us had bothered to reset our watches, and the totally inebriated staff at the Inverness Student Hostel were certainly in no timekeeping mood. Fortunately, as is always the case, church came to the rescue; I was due to attend a church service at the local church. Finding it desolate upon arrival, a quick inquest soon revealed that I was an hour late.

Finding nothing possibly wrong with the signboards, it was a matter of seconds before the sinking feeling that daylight savings time had finally come around hit us.

Dashing back to our hostel, unpacking, grabbing breakfast (as much of it as we could, given that most of it was on the house), making hurried coffees, took us the best part of the 1 hour we now knew we had left – dragging our worldly possessions to the bus station, once again, inconveniently far away, we jumped on that bus, and silently cursed the travel sites that had neglected to inform us that the return fare to Wick was a whopping 20 QUID.

Unfortunately, getting on the bus, we found a far more curseworthy scenario – the roads we were about to take.

Let it be on the record that, unless you have ample anti-shock padding and motion sickness pills, you are not going to make it out of the Highlands with your shirt clean. Less so if the juddering bus you happen to be just HAPPENS to be the only one with failing suspension. Any form of productive reading was completely ruled out; resigning myself to my fate, I stared out of the window, queasily, and awaited Wick.

A 2-hour wait later, we had, thankfully, seen the best of the Highlands; unfortunately, there was still the minor issue of getting OUT of Wick to JoG. A taxi driver at Somerfield (the de facto bus station) came to our rescue, offering us a cheap (comparatively) ride to JoG. All the way, he justified his fare, pointing out ruined castles and other local trivia; we absorb like a sponge, naturally, partly explaining why I cannot remember any castle names at press time.

At JoG, we noted, with interest, TWO hostels; our hostel seemed, by far, the more impressive of the lot, with actual whitewashed building, as opposed to the other hotel looking like it was surreptitiously tucked in a residential house. Upon check-in, finding out we had free buffet breakfast, all our doubts about our choice vanished immeediately. Seaview Hotel, you have our continued allegiance.

Depositing our provisions in our 3-man room – with TV to boot! – off we headed to the tourist trap part of JoG.

The famous octagonal shop was there; picking up souvenir postcards there was almost instinctive, as was buying tea-towels. Fortunately, the main souvenir shop gave it a certain modicum of competition, effectively creating a duopoly; prices there were no better.

Of course, the views we were about to experience more than made up for any injustices in spending.

JoG proper was a good 2-mile walk down a winding road; we, being boys, elected to take the path of most resistance, and ended up on a little path on the cliffs, commanding views of JoG artists and photographers would die for.

We spotted coves, bays, nooks and crannies where the water lapped against the wildest shores of mainland Britain; we mounted futile hunts for dolphins (after Inverness, naturally we were a bit wary of such claims), stared at cows in reproachful disdain, and generally, stared the wildest scenery of Britain squarely in the face.

We enjoyed this route, yes we did, but there was no compensation, no comparison, for what we eventually DID see, at the end of the line.

The scenery at JoG takes your breath away; certainly, words do not suffice to describe, both the elation of actually making it there, and the rising feeling that the view is genuinely worth the trek.

Heading back to base camp (after getting a lift from a kindly old lady and her daughter), we feasted on fresh produce from the jetty we had just perused, and went to bed to the sight of, first, Wife Swap, a truly repulsive programme if there is one; and then, Northanger Abbey, commemorating Austen-month.

End to End – Day 1 – Inverness

Departing Newcastle Bus Station for Inverness, all the signs told us that something was BOUND to go wrong.

After our farewell meal at Lau Buffet, strolling to the bus station, I realised I had forgotten to take Gan’s booking number along.

A few frantic calls to Doreen, safely ensconced in her flat, safe from the perils of Daylight Savings (which began that very night, to our consternation, as you will soon realise) and uncharacteristically morbid (read: quintessentially British) weather, yielded the number. On the dark side, however, she DOES know my password now, and due to sheer indolence, any CIA operative worth their salt armed with truth serum can access sites as diverse as my email account and most of my blogs

Inverness – a few islands perched with impunity on the River Ness

Having handed over 5 quid to a cybercafe owner (who had the temerity to witness the entire exchange without a knowing smile), he refunded my money, I muttered a prayer of thanks, and zipped off to the Megabus, which had loaded all customers sans the three Asian-looking people.

Setting aside my flustered look for one of easy nonchalance, I shepherded the 3 of us on the bus, and declared our Roadtrip Open.

This roadtrip would be our first attempt (of many, naturally) to conquer John O Groats to Lands End; this one had been planned way in advance, with the assistance of everyone’s favourite scrooging device, Megabus/Megatrain. A few detours to Exeter, Bristol and Bath were in the works; but otherwise, it was a direct assault from John O Groats, through Glasgow, London, Plymouth, Penzance, and finally, Lands End, with our pockets considerably lightened, we were promised.

Arriving in Inverness, that promise was almost made good instantly – we stepped off the Megabus at 10pm to the biting Highlands wind. Unfortunately, armed with very specific directions on how to get to our hostel, we did just that – and got REALLY warm inside, not least because of the sheer distance. Anyone in an emergency can safely give this hostel a miss – it’s as far from the bus/railway station as far can be. Perched on top of a little hill, way past the castle, it takes gumption to live there.

We soon found out just how much. Gingerly opening the door, it was almost as if we’d stumbled upon a vice den. Groups of ladies were smooching on the settees with men of indeterminate origin; the most unnerving thing was, probably, when one of those men of indeterminate origin sauntered up to us, when he realised we were actual guests.

Signing into the Inverness Student Hostel was comparatively drama-free; he seemed rather intent on getting back to his life of scandal with the ladies.

The next morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed at 6, having told ourselves the night before we HAD to get up early for our Loch Ness walking trip.

Unfortunately, we decided to head in the opposite direction; but on the way, we certainly discovered

The Ness River Islands on the River Ness

The bridge across the Firth in Inverness

The view across the Town of Inverness, from the hill adjacent to the Castle

We completed a rather long (and circuitous) walk of Inverness instead – heading down the river to the islands, exploring the islands individually (let it be said that each island has magical woods that would not look out of place in a fantasy novel), then strolled back up the river to its source. Little did we know it would take 2 hours to do so.

Walking through Inverness’s sooty industrial past, on our way to the Firth where the river began, we were lured further by the prospect of seeing dolphins. Each Inverness brochure had trumpeted the Dolphin Viewpoint, near the entrance to the Firth of Moray – taking liberties, certainly, with the definition of dolphin sighting occurences.

Anyhow, this is all we ended up seeing at the dolphin viewpoint:

The view from the rivermouth, no doubt, is astounding. On your right, the bridge spanning the Firth, taking the dreams of the Highlands along with it; on your left, panoramic sights of the hills surrounding Inverness, it is reminiscent of a Swiss village without the chilly Swiss sense of cleanliness. The villages all look warm, all look sufficiently cluttered, welcoming the visitor to drop in and have a cuppa.

We walked back via the Inverness canal, through a wasteland of sorts – poorly signposted. Which, as we belatedly realised, would be the entire theme of the Scotland trip – poor signposting. Anyhow, the amble along the canal was, if anything, soothing – to observe ducks on the water, oblivious to the road running parallel by, and to see Invernessians getting on with their daily life, oblivious to tittering Asian tourists such as us.

It was magical.

Sadly, the music died at 10pm, when we boarded that bus to Wick, the End of the World, a bus ride that would take us through hills that would send any fainter souls into violent projectile motion.

Oslo – Day 2

ext morning, waking up in the lovely Cochs Pensiojat, in a heated room that had evidently seen better days, I mulled over how much I was willing to let my 40 pounds burn. (Literally, given the heating was purring like a champion steed.)

My vague memories of the night before – stumbling from one menacing-looking white man to another, and getting equally menacing 15-letter words in return: “Turn right on Tollbugata and take the left down Universitigata, passing Munchhausengate on the…” finally led me to the hotel, at 1.15am, where, by then, I was compliant as a whip. The biting cold had long worn away any remaining vestiges of mystique at seeing snow, and once it begins to return to its roots (melting into slosh that has an annoying habit of leaking into one’s shoe on holiday, where you know perfectly well that washing and drying one’s clothes is not an option), the urge to stop moving can be compelling.

At any rate, I stumbled into the Pensiojat (here I’m making an unqualified assumption that the “Pensiojat” bit of the nomenclature means “hotel” – a VERY un-ecumenical thing to do, considering most European languages adopt a subject preceding modifier pattern) at 1.15; and was promptly reminded by the counter that I hadn’t paid. Repeated remonstrations later, all involving the threat of departing the place that very instant and setting fire to anything I encountered on the way out, were futile, once the steely stares she was giving me assured me that there was NO WAY whatsoever that I was going to get another room cheaper in Oslo.

The same principle, I was to observe this morning, would apply to nearly everything in Oslo.

First off – a local SIM card, to stave off loneliness and ensure there was a written record of the high points of the trip. A few enquiries in a 7-Eleven outside the bus station (mark my words, there’s a 7-Eleven OR a Narvesen on every Oslo street. If ever there was an oligopoly law firms could salivate copiously over this would be it) indicated that Lebara Mobile was the Way to Go; and after popping my new SIM in and dashing texts off with my 2 kroner, I dozed off, the perfect picture of domestic bliss.

Lebara, the Scandinavian syndicate, in cahoots with human trafficking agencies to convince would-be immigrants that these countries are cheaper to call your loved ones from than, say, *gulp* the UK.

Unfortunately, next morning, when I tried to pump a reload down Lebara’s throats, they read me a prerecorded Norwegian voice message, which, loosely translated, sounds something like “We thought we told you to register your mobile number last night, while there was still 2 kroner on it. As it is, since each text is 0.7 kroner, and you’ve wasted two on people who don’t work in this company, rendering them less important than us, you don’t have enough credit to register your mobile with us; thus you won’t be able to top-up your mobile number because it’s not registered.”

Whoaa. Taking a logical step back, one would assume that registration texts to your OWN mobile network (I had, after all, sold my soul to Lebara for a whopping 100 kroner) would be FREE.

And the most infuriating thing? If you make a mistake in your FIRST registration text (a texting Freudian slip, perhaps?), you’re still billed 0.7 kroners, AND Lebara sends you a patronising text telling you to “try again, and this time, come armed with a spellcheck.”.

Anyone who doesn’t perform mathematical operations in the hexadecimal system would immediately realise that, IF you somehow managed to muff it all up again, you would be left with 0.6 kroner. WHICH would mean your 100 kroner SIM card was worthless, one not having enough money to register a third time.

AND if that wasn’t bad enough, having to read that patronising text again, which I presumed no Norwegian would ever have to read, given that Lebara is designed specifically for international users to text cheap.

That, my friends, is how my first Lebara SIM card self-imploded. I couldn’t register it; and Miss Prissy 7-Eleven, probably working there after school to fund her – legalised in Norway – marijuana habit, evidently hadn’t learnt enough IT savvy to help me register my SIM card online (which, funnily enough, did NOT cost 0.7 kroner.) OR tell me I could do just that for free.

Thus, explaining why I am in the fairly unique position of owning 2 Lebara SIM cards, all topped up and nowhere to use them on.

In a rather infuriating prologue, once registration was ACTUALLY completed…the SIM card would then cease to function for (in theory) a good 24 hours. That would have been 3 hours BEFORE I left Norway; I was left fuming for around 3 hours, when, miracle of all miracles, it activated itself. 1200 hours Norway time.

And boy, was I ready to roll.

Oslo – Day 2 – IV. Holmenkollen

We leave off our narrative as I alighted the precocious Tram No. 18; one heck of a long-distance runner. On its way to Majorstuen, one of those places of ubiquity that shoots to fame on the spurious grounds of being an accidental public transport nexus, it passes Gronland (easily the only run-down part of Oslo, and for good cause, harbouring a burgeoning immigrant population), the relocated Oslo Hospital (which, despite being in sodding Gronland, is far more alluring than any of the NHS sweatshops I’ve been visiting with alarming regularity – and I mean alarming), and Vigeland Park, a place of surreal beauty.

In the winter. In summer, it becomes a nondescript grassy backdrop for a host of fascinating statues, a draw for the Lonely Planet-toting archetype; in winter, there really is no fun statue-hunting when, devoid of leafy objects of reasonable height, the “hunting” bit doesn’t exactly work too well.

Dashing into Majorstuen T-Bane station (yes, that IS what they call their Metro stations. Sounds like a WWF moniker, doesn’t it?), awaiting the train to Holmenkollen ski jump, I was once again mildly astounded by the lack of ticket turnstiles. Ticket machines are aplenty; but no one seems particularly hung up on checking your tickets, either physically or electronically, once again confirming my latent suspicions that this country IS deemed fit to host the Nobel Peace Prize.

Just in case you didn’t know, yes, they do.

As the Metro pulls in, the amount of contraptions that are allowed access is amazing; I jostled for space with a few bicycles, a good number of dogs, and skis. To lessening degrees of surprise, THIS Metro line, again, alights a steep mountain ridge, uncannily resembling a tourist cable car; and at one stop, smack in the middle of the jungle, I swear, there were at least FIFTY pairs of skis attempting to board. With their hapless owners in tow, naturally.

Quietly patting myself on the back for grabbing a seat far from the madding crowd, that feeling of triumph dissipated remarkably quickly as Metro Train 1 pulled into Holmenkollen. Now I was somewhere near the bottom in the pecking order to get OUT.

Getting out of said Metro train was by far the least of the Twelve Labours I was subjected to on my way to that vague shimmering object in the distance that was the famed Winter Olympics ski jump. First, in a familiar theme, an uphill trek. Given my entire life’s meagre possessions were on my back, becoming an even heavier load, proportional to body mass, as I shed more and more weight on this exclusively walking holiday, it was painful.

But traipsing in the snow, pretty wooden board cottages flanking either side, there was no doubt I was strolling in a backpacker’s wettest dream.

Well, assuming the snow doesn’t melt till then.

Ascending THAT hill, many photo-ops of Oslo abound; on the flip side, anyone without anything remotely approaching optical zoom would be better off buying a postcard. The higher you climb, the higher the ski jump looms before you, feeding an ample dose of adrenaline back to the system. Given I was, at that point, subsisting on a piece of chocolate bread consumed 4 hours ago, I must have been simply out of my mind. Only having 8 kroners left was certainly a major contributor to said austerity measures; as was the thought of the massive Norwegian cookout awaiting me after 6pm, when I showed up at my friend’s house, begging for mercy.

In the meantime, my fat stores were being suitably punished as I straggled up that hill.

At the top, I finally understood why you HAVE to climb this hill to feel it.

From the top of Holmenkollen ski jump, you get an AMAZING view of the almost 100-m long chute, descending precipitously into a Roman ampitheatre, encircled by seats that convert subtly in summer into an outdoors performance venue. A glorious, trigger-happy half hour ensued, as I temporarily excised all previous thoughts of huddling in the first souvenir shop at the top, and gazed at a brilliant Oslo skyline. From the sky.

Even the souvenir shop begs (ma)lingering. Loitering around, I saw a rather audacious bunch try on the Viking horns; naturally, I was in no position to refuse, and begged them to take a picture of me, in the ultimate of all tourist sins. Posing as a Viking, clad in (borrowed) outfits from the store, who, till this day, may never discover our subterfuge, even if they review the CCTV footage; we made pains to do The Deed behind a well-positioned pillar.

The souvenir shop comes with trolls in all shapes and sizes. Failing to see the connection with the Vikings – I fail to see how a race that, for Pete’s (or, to be more culturally sensitive, Olaf’s) sake, discovered America before the Americans, could all look so uniformly ugly – I headed out of the shop; and suddenly realising how little time I had left, zipped down the hill, back to a rather desolate Metro station.

With clockwork precision, our favourite Metro train pulled up just as the electronic boards indicated, once again restoring my faith that public transport system CAN be more transport than public.

Next up – Aker Bryyge and the MASSIVE Akershus Fehling complex!

Oslo – Day 2 – III. On Snow-Capped Hills

Knowing Oslo, I was intent on a ski lift to call my own; and by Jove did I get more than I bargained for. Wielding my transport pass, I hopped off Bus 30 at the Nationaltheatret, in the process convincing myself that I did NOT need another Lebara SIM; my rock-solid constitution, naturally, crumbled, when, upon alighting from the bus, another evil 7-Eleven made indiscreet advances to my purchasing power.

15 minutes later, I was on the Number 18, on my way to a place-name I am still far from being able to pronounce, with the tantalising prospect of a Walk in the Woods not too far away.

One should never underestimate the power of perspective in reducing the apparent height of hills.

As the tram wound its way up a hill, snow strewn all over like a fresh coat of paint, there’s no need for an array of stats to convince me how livable this place is. Barely 10 minutes from the city centre, and already, the landscape is transformed beyond beautiful.

Alighting at the station (with the help of a Norwegian woman with a slight stutter, but who more than made up for it by teaching me how to pronouce all those dastardly names), I am, once again, simply stunned. Stepping off the city tram into a patch of pure, unadulterated forest was far more than I had bargained for.

Subsequently, however, ascending a steep hill path was DEFINITELY more than I had bargained for.

There’s a cafe at the “apparent” top of the hill; “apparent” as the road ends there. Any traveller with more than a Port Dickson visit below his belt would, naturally, know that the best bits of a country are often further afield. And, in the wake of an old couple (moot point. ALL jungle trekkers you encounter are invariably old couples. If our parents outlive our generation, no surprises there.), I headed beyond the chintz and art deco of the cafe, and submitted myself to what the wild outdoors had in store for me.

…And I was aptly rewarded by, surprisingly enough, more old couples.

These old sprightly perversions of nature are everywhere. Teeming. Old people and nursing homes seems to be the prevailing Norwegian oxymoron; granted, most of them are hobbling along on canes that have evidently taken a battering, but they’re out here, while their fat grandchildren are at home gorging on McChristiansen or Olafssen Fried Reindeer, hooked up to their PSes. (And no, I don’t mean Personal Statement, all you lifeless KYUEM students.) They say we have a global public health epidemic; I reckon a malnutrition problem is far pressing than an overnutrition problem, and Norway seems to be be taking a step (if you’ll pardon the pun) in the right direction.

Now, on to the rest of the world!

Up that hill, it’s a shimmery trek; time after time, you lose track of how far you’ve walked; you start defaulting to time units in measuring distances, and at one point, you stop counting, and start swooning.

All through the Viking forests, you are alone, and oddly enough, there’s no one else you’d rather be with in this cold, crisp morning.

Portents of an even further journey abounded; from where i was, the west hills of Oslo, equally snow-strewn and good for a slalom or two, loomed languidly over the city bustle. After a good hours’ trek through more forest, marvelling at how few people actually knew this place existed (which no doubt was a plus point in maintaining its allure), I finally stumbled, headlong, back into civilization.

This time, it was a rather incongruous farmhuose; the sight of Norwegian children petting work horses is enough to melt your heart.

Wandering down a path with virtually no signboards, I finally found the tram line; THIS time, I sat down. For real.

And headed in the general direction of the city, still far from knowing where my penchant for random behaviour would take me.

Oslo – Day 2 – II. Aker Brygge to Line 18

We leave the narrative in a shady 7-Eleven, manned by a girl with roughly equivalent eptitude (if that is what remains when you remove the “in” from “ineptitude”. But if English was that simple, how does one account for the proliferation of summer schools in Kent and Surrey?) as some of the glitzier Formica tabletops on-site. With a lovely snowfall beckoning, I was ready to hit the streets running.

Well, not exactly “running”, considering I had made what potentially was the most strategic move of a Scandinavian travel career – the Oslo Day Pass.

For 60 kroner (around 6 pounds; division by 12 can be insidiously painful, though I do not doubt its use in staving off neurodegenerative illness), an Oslo Day Pass affords you transport on ALL buses, trams, Metros and ferries in the city limits.

Considering the end of Metro Line 1 is a ski jump, literally a void patch in a thicket of trees; Metro Line 1 is as good as any tourist funicular railway worth its salt, slowly trundling up a snow-capped hill, leaving the shutter-happy Japanese tourist furiously at work; and tram line 18 goes up the corresponding hill on the east end of Oslo, passing through many picturesque little villages with nothing more than a Narvesen and a bar for skiiers to grab some grub, Oslo public transport completely redefines quality of life.

Any public transport line you take is:

a) bound to take you up a hill of sorts that, in paint the numbers fashion, will have a ski village, a view worth dying for, and a stop smack in the wilderness where an Inuit boarding, daily catch slung round his shoulder, would simply not look out of place.

b) definitely running like clockwork. Heck, this city is SO confident about its public transport that it has digital boards telling you when the next bus/tram will pull up.

In short, a dream for the environmentalist.

But first, it was time to embark on some grossly carbon-free tour itinerary. I had to walk back to town to the Nationaltheatre, where All Buses Arise. It’s located at the Palace end of Karl Johans Gate, the main throughfare in Oslo; a bit like Oxford Street, Times Square, and the Seven Wonders of the World all rolled into one neat package. Stick to that street, and the tour books on my shelf claim, you won’t have missed much of Oslo.

Waiting at Nationaltheatre to board Bus 30 to the Byggdoy Peninsula, a few minutes later, I wondered how much of that statement would prove to be true.

As it is, it turned out my only foray down Karl Johans would be the next day, right before I went back to Torp.

The buses are immaculate; I fumbled for my bus pass while boarding it, the driver impatiently waved me on.

Turns out all of Oslo’s public transport has secondary doors, where you can literally saunter in at free will, with or without a bus pass. A Norwegian chap I struck up a chat with claimed that Oslo dwellers never freeload; and given that this was the same country that hands out the Peace Prize, I’m prepared to take his word further than face value.

…Once the bus leaves city centre limits, and turns the sharp corner into the Bygddoy Peninsula, you are acutely reminded as to how intimate with nature this country; no, this CITY actually is.

The peninsula is almost like a city park; 10 minutes away was the bustling sound of traders sleepily opening their shutters. But it’s an urban holidaymaker’s dream; the bus moves, trance-like, down tiny streets that look too small for it, and each house is an exquisitely designed holiday home. Think IKEA designing homes. That’s what you get – a smorgasbord (though, strictly speaking, THIS word has Swedish origins) of little homes, all exhibiting the best of Norse architecture, all sporting Christmas trees in their frontyards. The Norway that previously was the stuff of dreams.

The bus passes through a Who’s Who list of Norwegian tourist attractions; the Norwegian Folk Centre, the Maritime Museum, the Viking Ship Museum (a must-see if ever there was one), and the high point of exploration, the Kon-Tiki Museum. The Kon-Tiki, for the uninitiated, was that seminal vessel Thor Heyderhahl sailed across the Pacific Ocean in, proving his theory that Polynesians could have been of South American rather than Southeast Asian origin as had been conventionally accepted. The bus has all the elements of a plot; it travels right outside their gates, on an elevated road, giving would-be tourists tantalising views of what lies within.

It’s worth mentioning, also, that Bygdoy also has Oslo’s only naturist beach and that topless sunbathing is allowed, and widely practised, on all beaches in Norway.

To end up on that beach in the thick of winter is, frankly, one of the most depressing experiences known to man.

But the snow enveloping the beach more than made up for it.

Zigzagging my way through what could only be a residential neighbourhood (the nudist beach isn’t as well signposted as one would imagine, for perhaps patently obvious reasons), one has to sidestep snowed-in cars, fences, shrubs, and the like. I swear, if my city council had a tourist beach, I would put huge signboards up every hundred metres; and I would make SOME effort to put them up in English.

As it is, this nudist beach is, by far, the worst signposted in living memory; and, knowing the atmosphere at nudist beaches, I’d expect them to be a tourist draw beyond belief. But no, Oslo decides to signpost its littering laws better than its nudist beaches.

Having successfully ran out of money in the past 3 hours (thanks to the Lebara debacle), I stared at my map, forlornly, and decided there was roughly one free thing on the island I wanted to visit. Which I was standing on.

Thus, explaining my dash back to Oslo on the next Number 30, hoping, to God, I’d be able to pronounce the name of the next place I wanted to visit on Line 18.

Oslo – Day 1

In a rather interesting shift in focus, I will post, daily, a record of my travels to many foreign lands, all populated exclusively by the big-boned white man, or woman, and staffed almost exclusively by the Chinese takeaway and Indian corner shop, before, I belatedly realise, it all slips my mind in the blink of a rather weary eye.

Am hoping my collection of articles will one day turn themselves into a book. If not, one simply hopes they are preserved here for posterity, forever, obviating me of the need to relate them to my kids painstakingly, and also, fulfilling the unintended double effect of preventing me from overly exaggerating any of said tales.

Oslo on a Shoestring

Going to Oslo was probably one of my less well-informed decisions. Frankly, zipping off on the basis of a Ryanair Spamalot email (think “Penis Enlargement” and “Forward This Email and Raise 1 Cent for Charity”) offering free tickets till Thursday night, with scant regard for any timetabling issues that might inevitably arise (this, after all, being a medical school) was, in retrospect, potentially lethal. You see, I promised myself that this would be a nice, relaxing budget holiday in a foreign land.

Disembarking the Airbus A320, and examining prices at Narvesen, the local equivalent of a 7-Eleven, the emphasis on “budget” was not lost on me. Boy, oh boy, was this going to be the Big Kahuna of belt tightening.

Pah. Either way, flying Newcastle to Oslo is a bit of a grim prospect. After the little luxury of being able to get to Newcastle Airport by public transport:

Note the Airport on the Metro train

Oslo is a bit of a patch of rabid green. And I mean both the trees and the tree huggers. The main Gardamoen airport is 48 km north of Oslo. (To put things into perspective, there are fifteen countries in the world which could fit into that wide expanse of forest, highway, and occasional wolf/fox/reindeer carcass on road.) Ryanair fares no better in behaving lucidly, claiming right of abode at Oslo Torp airport, a whopping 96 km away. If Wikipedia were any better at furnishing prospective authors with distances between capital cities, I daresay I could produce another list for those slavishly devoted to rule by numbers; Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Congo come to mind, Brazzaville and Kinshasa separated by a river and 10 km. Jordan (Amman) and Israel (Jerusalem, though that of course is still hotly disputed) are a staggering 70 km apart.

With that sobering thought in mind – at 2130 hours at that – and a bus journey giving that sobering thought form, form that was generally plastic, hard, Muzak plagued, and with a wad of chewing gum right beneath the armrest – I nodded off to sleep.

Or tried. Valiantly, I swear. But the reflected light of snow can, sometimes, be just too much to bear.

The entire country was enveloped in a warm layer of snow. The kind of snow that wars were fought over and heroic ballads penned. The kind of snow that, barring a sudden asteroid crashing into the White House, where the heroic efforts of the Scientist in Chief in refuting the scientific evidence for global warming do not go unnoticed, will soon be the kind of thing children are expected to believe exist, despite not having seen before.

I’m not sure how many economists have examined the actual effect on the national GDP of countries that ply on skiiers as an actual source of income, not a novelty breed getting knowing winks from immigration officials; but if the cold hard figures are what it takes to jar the world into action in preventing it from becoming a great clambake, then, I say, bring on the stat attack.

As the bus trundled into Oslo, no doubt slowed down by overly cautious bus driver on snow syndrome, I peered out the window, and revelled in the beauty of a country that bled snow.

The Torpexpresscoach (there seems to be national Mininum Word Length Legislation, the minimum cap being 15 letters and 4 umlauts. Umlauts. You know, those two dots above a vowel, ensuring said vowel bears an uncanny resemblance to a Viking smiley.) takes a LONG time to get into Oslo; but you are, time after time, reminded that there is simply no fobbing off the fact that Norway is a prime example of a country where cities, buildings, and any development beyond a pyre of firewood in a cave in general, seem to be part of the Great Outdoors, not a diversion from it.

In fact, it’s almost as if cities are theme parks built in the jungle where people (who, for all intents and purposes, are living in the wilderness) can occasionally dash off for a bit more grub than just the doggy bags from last night’s reindeer hunt.

Walking out of Oslo bus station (another 22-letter whopper which I will not even attempt to embarass myself by trying to spell), two things instantly hit me in a flash – my paucity of Norwegian words, and a rather chilly wind.

I suddenly realised that if I couldn’t work out what those signboards in front of me meant, I would be saddled with both problems all night.

A booking, and what one assumed would be a hot room with full body Thai masseurs and a discerning selection of maps that were NOT in Old Norse , at the Cochs Pensiojat beckoned; now all I had to do was interpret the instructions on my online booking that I had hurriedly scribbled on a hapless bit of paper that looked like it’d gone to the moon and back in cattle class of a Russian spacecraft.

I was, soon, plesantly surprised upon discovering that nearly everyone I inquired after, was well schooled in the Beautiful Tongue. Ah, for a country where English is spoken better than the Englishman! I swear by the Norwegian lilt; it reminds one of a doting aunt, someone who buys you gifts you surreptitously pass on to Oxfam, but who always looks so sincere you can’t help but thank them every year without fail.

That, in essence, is Norwegian English; they don’t seem to be struggling with it as much as struggling to use it in a non-cooperative fashion. Gone is the sarcasm and bawdy wit of the average Englishman at 12am on a distant street; in comes the genuine concern of the Norwegian, responding, with schoolboy sincerity, to everything that may bedevil you on your quest to locate Karl Johans Gate, where all hurriedly scribbled (and hurriedly issued) directions in Norway inevitably begin.

Lord bless the Norwegian Education Ministry for having the unique foresight to showing the rabid nationalists who MUST work there that Norwegian would be of zero use in conducting any form of international trade that did not resemble their preferred 10th-century Viking plunders. That, coupled with an insistence on being polite except when drunk (as opposed to the British habit of being polite only when not drunk, which semantically means the same thing, but in real life…) no doubt explains the following statistics from UNESCO:

1. Netherlands
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Finland
5. Spain
6. Switzerland
7. Norway
……
20. United States
21. United Kingdom (just in case you were wondering, in last place.)

UNICEF Child Happiness Survey, 2007