Travel: Part Two – Will This Story Never End?

And so, the phenomenally successful Partway-Round-The-World jaunt took place, happily using up ten months of 2006, into 2007, and sending me wandering through twelve countries and several sets of islands. As it turned out, most of my travel was in Northern Europe, and I was quite pleased to end the trip by visiting many of my friends around the US and Canada.

Travelling by foot, bicycle, public bus, car, train and boat, I slept in bunkhouses, B & Bs, hostels, hotels, on the decks of ferries, and in private homes. I exchanged dollars for Euros for pounds for kroner for krooni for lati for litai, shopping at street stalls, fish piers, covered Victorian markets, supermarkets, town square open markets, and Ikea. I went to an Estonian play, a Latvian opera, a Lithuanian symphony, Norwegian seaports, Irish pubs, Scottish islands, Swedish beaches, and Finnish saunas, and I tossed old, worn, beat-up American travelling clothes right and left, and bought bright, new Euro togs in every country.

I took no laptop, no camera, no iPod, no MP3 player, no cell phone, no flash drive, no wheelie-bag, no musical instrument, no nothing except 8-1/2 kilos of clothing in a rather small and lightweight backpack, a very short haircut, and a very full debit card. Though I wrote almost-daily travel journals, I have never had the time to transcribe them to the computer, so this page is mostly devoted to maps of where I went, and a few relevant photos collected from the Internet.

Let us begin!

I spent about three months in the British Isles – April in Ireland, May in Wales and England, and June in England, Scotland, and the northern isles. Despite their closeness and common heritage, these are really four distinctive countries, with dozens of distinctive regions. I tramped across peat hills in Connemara and onto Snowdon in Wales, across Dartmoor and into the Malvern Hills, rambled throughout the Dingle Peninsula and walked the length of Papa Westray. I ate bannock and haggis, rissoles and laverbread, cockles, bakestone, custard tarts, fish and chips, and beer, beer, beer. I came in with the winter and went out with the summer, and experienced a wide range of temperature, climate, weather, and landscape. It is a truly beautiful part of the world, to which I will someday return. But would I ever move to these sceptred isles? No way in hell. If I ever find time to write up my travel notes on this region, they will be found here, and you may find out what I mean!

Just after Midsummer, I arrived in Scandinavia. I had hoped to view the bonfires and festivities that they still celebrate there, but a grave miscalculation in the ferry schedule from Shetland landed me there a week late. Norway is a stunning land, just as grandiose as it is always claimed to be. I was thrilled with Bergen, the medieval Hanseatic city at the head of a fjord, with houses built up on what look like almost vertical rock walls. In Oslo, I lolled around the many public parks, surrounded by sculpture, fountains, lovely gardens, and thousands of picnicking families and friends. I took trips to the village and fjord at Hardanger, an old whaling port at Tønsberg, the college town of Trondheim, and some really cold and remote places in the Sami lands. I definitely made the most out of my ScanRail pass, by travelling to the most northerly point on the tracks, and then taking a bus from there to Tromsø, high above the Arctic Circle, where I fulfilled a long-time dream of watching the midnight sun. Yes, Norway was spectacular, all right... but it was Sweden that really caught my fancy.

How can two places right next to each other be so different? For every rock in Norway, there is a blade of grass in Sweden. For every salted herring in Norway, there is a plate of international cuisine in Sweden. After the magnificence of Norway's landscape, I was a bit bored by Sweden at first, but man! Did I undergo an attitude adjustment!!

Oh, darling Sweden! My favorite of all my newly discovered countries! Yeah, Sweden and Wales and Estonia. And Vilnius, Lithuania. Which is not a country. Sweden is not grand looking, but it does have miles and miles of gentle beauty, with fertile fields, clean beaches, and remote islands. It's not enough to say that the people are good-looking, too – more to the point, they are attentive to their looks. I noticed so many interesting clothing choices, interesting hair styles, beautiful houseware designs, and surprising architecture in Sweden, that I simply did not see elsewhere. The interest in, and public funding for the arts was noticably high. Swedish folk culture and traditions are not disdained, but embraced. And believe it or not, the food I ate and saw in Sweden was the best of my entire trip. If the threatened travel notes ever appear, you may read more of my Swedish love affair here.

Wow! Look at Finland, would you?! It looks like a bazillion islands trapped inside a ring of rocks! And when you start walking around – it's pretty much just that. From the train window, I saw trees and rocks and rocks and trees and trees and rocks and water. Sounds like western Ontario. In Finland, they specialize in birch and fir. Also Nokia. And heavy drinking, Art Deco, shawls, high-tech, and a particular brooding kind of reserve. I never experienced any unfriendliness, but I sure didn't feel any social warmth, either. I won't beat around the bush here – Finland was my least favorite place. That said, let us discuss saunas!

For whatever reason, I never found any saunas in Norway. I began to run across them in Sweden, and loved them right away. By the time I hit Finland, I was actively seeking them out, and jumping in every one I found. And in Finland, there is a sauna in every apartment! I'm not even a heat-worshiper, but there are so many calming and relaxing parts about taking a sauna, that in a matter of a few weeks, I became the self-appointed US Ambassador to the Finnish Council of Saunas. Or, that's what I've been telling everyone, anyway. Concerning the mythical travel notes, should they ever appear, a gigantic write-up on saunas will be posted here.

I only spent about 2 weeks in Finland, as my ScanRail pass was about to expire. The ferry ride over from Stockholm to Turku had been a lovely long day on a giant ferry, complete with duty-free and gambling. On the way out, I took another ferry, only a few hours this time, over to Tallinn, Estonia – where I entered a completely foreign world.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (helpfully placed in alphabetical order) share a terrible history of having the squeeze put on them. Between Russia and Germany, Sweden and Poland, somebody is always making a grab for their land and their position on the Baltic Sea. These are fascinating crossroads places, always on some frontier or other, and their cultural influences come from all around Eastern Europe.

In two months here, I went to many museum exhibits on the troubles these countries have gone through, and their endless struggles for autonomy and self-expression, yet always, I met friendly, curious people, saw clean beaches and city streets, and watched people celebrate and enjoy life as if they were the top country in the world. The whole area should have collectively put its head in an oven a long, long time ago – instead, they sing, party, gather mushrooms, go swimming, support fine arts and folkloric groups, and generally make sweet lemonade out of all the rotten lemons they've been handed.

The Baltics are where I began to derail, though. I could no longer understand anything spoken or written. All the summer travellers had gone home, and a good many of the points of interest were open only during tourist season. It got colder and colder, and the low-end hostelries I slept in did not turn on the heat! So, I found cheap airfare to the States, via Prague, and flew away from Europe, seven months almost to the day after I arrived.

Ten weeks of Western Hemisphere travels took me from NYC to SW Virginia, NC, Iowa, Kansas, upstate NY, western Mass, Burlington VT and Ottawa, before a last-blast 2500-mile Christmas trip to southern NC, Tennessee, Asheville, Durham, one more pass through NYC, and back to Portsmouth, NH on Martin Luther King weekend of 2007. Though I returned “home,” I can't seem to stay put, and spring, summer and autumn of this year have taken me far and wide, to the Southern Tier of NY, back to VT and Ottawa again, all over New England, including numerous visits to the Boston area, and on my first trip to Oregon and Washington, taking in some of BC, too. I have many more things to say about these bits of travel, however, all of that is for another day. If there's any sense of right and order in my world, someday, my ponderings may appear here.

If you missed Part One of Babz Travel, click here.