Day 1 and 2 (I’ll do days 3,4,5 if I ever feel this bored again)
So, we set off from Manchester at 8am and had made it as far as Torp airport in Norway by around 3pm or 4pm. After walking around the fairly emptyish streets, we found a shopping centre and purchased the cheapest tent they had, at around £80. Dear god, you can get cheap tents in Manc for like £20. We realised very quickly that Norway was going to take our debit cards down a dark alleyway, and rape them good and hard.
We ate bread, cheese and ham for the two days we were in Sandefjord, Norway. We also decided that £8 a pint was ridiculous, and we struggled to find any young people to meet or hang out with. I don’t know where they were all hiding, but the only people we saw at the pub made it look like a car and a mortgage were requirements for going out drinking.
The city we were in was also apparently very densely populated, we hiked around the area for about 5 miles until giving up and pitching our tent in the best place we could find up a bit of a mountain. It made no difference; we still woke up to a group of 10 year olds building a tree house. Speaking of sleeping in a tent, the sun never really set in Norway, which made it really feckin hard to guess the time. We ended up using the time stamp on the camera I had brought to measure the flow of time in the endless days.
After visiting the tourist information centre, we discovered that many people do not go out drinking in Sandefjord, but instead take a 2.5 hour ferry to Stromstad, Sweden, where the alcohol was much cheaper (but still a lot more expensive than we were used to!) After popping down to the ferry office we were delighted to see that it was a grand total of £0.00 to travel to Sweden due to some offer running the last few weeks of June. We originally planned a return trip for the next day, but ended up extended it until the last day of our trip.
Shortly after getting off the ferry in Sweden, while we were eating our expensive bread in the park, we bumped into another backpacker called Ibby. He had walked around 100 miles and was going to continue heading south in the next day or so. We suggested that we find a campsite together, but not before we had went to a bar and had a few reasonably priced pints. Ibby would introduce himself to people in Swedish with something along the lines of “Hey, I’ve walked here from Oslo.” That really got peoples’ attention. Alex and I ended up chatting with some randomers he talked to; after the pub closed they offered to walk us to a forest near where they lived where we would be able to camp. This was a lot of help; as if we had walked where we planned we would have had to hike for a few hours before getting somewhere to pitch up.
The girl was called Vanessa, she walked us to the campsite and pointed out where she would be working the next day so that we could pop in and grab a free beer. Her friends, Jesper and Martina caught up with us as we were entering the forest area and they all waited while we pitched up the tent. We went to sleep at around 3am, in our incredibly expensive tent. It was impossible to tell it was 3am, where Noggin the Nog went to, the land of the midnight sun.
