The Road to Hell
In his 1989 fulmination against the frustrations of living in Thatcherite Britain and pithy comment on prevailing macro-economic policy, Chris Rea lamented that “The roads jam up with credit, and there’s nothing you can do” and so spoke for millions staring into the gloom of nose-to-tail UK motorways. Fast forward a quarter of a century to famously debt-free Norway and their traffic-free road to Hell, part of the E6 that starts just north of the harbour town of Trondheim and ends inside the Arctic Circle at Fauske. Here you will find something quite different...
It’s taken us ten years to get here. Our first ‘tour’ being a 7-day blast round France, Belgium, Germany, Austria in 2004 that become an annual habit to the extent that a change of scene really was needed. The ‘us’ in this context are West Lancashire’s very own Mother Theresa and patron saint of the regions’ wine shippers who, when he is not caring for the elderly and infirm at his award-winning care home, is a devotee of the GS. He has owned pretty much every model of the ‘Adventurer’ variant and is an authority on why this is so much more beautiful and capable than the standard model...
My tastes run to K-series and currently have a K1600GT having had the old 1200RS, the current format across-the-frame-four 1200S and GT. All very clinical which is just how I like it. I run a small financial technology company as my day job and also have a fetish for Italian motorcycles. Given their tendency to get stolen, break down or cost a fortune to run (and sometimes all of the above), this is quite enough stress for me, thank you.
First impressions of Norway are not promising. After a jolly, mildly drunken overnight ferry from Harwich to Esjberg on the west coast of Jutland, it’s an easy four hours across Denmark to Frederickshavn and another overnight crossing. The ferry disgorges us into the zinc dawn of a Norwegian May morning and the grim, Soviet-style architecture of Oslo.
Lillehammer beckons a few hours up the road and like Albertville in France, another Winter Olympics venue of a few years ago, it is a dour featureless town trading on past glories and a metaphor for the athletes that went home empty-handed rather than a symbol of national pride and excellence. Apart from the five Olympic rings attractively rendered in block-paving gracing a shopping arcade and a threadbare sports center with an abandoned ski-jump, there’s little to see and nothing to hang around for before getting on to Dombås.
The road opens up to a series of majestic, desolate plains surrounded by colossal hunks of granite landscape. It’s like a Norsk God had looked at Scotland and said: “I think I’ll make one like that, only bigger”. This is supremely easy, confidence-building motorcycling. The 80 KM/h speed limit coupled with the undulations, twists and turns of unknown roads makes going much faster pointless and the complete absence of any other traffic makes for swift progress. So swift that soon - too soon - we are checking into the Trolltun Hotel.
This is a simple hotel amidst some big looking hills but no mountains to speak of so I can’t imagine the skiing is up to much. The resort itself certainly isn’t. To me ‘ski region’ conjures up images of healthy eating and drinking in an atmosphere of sparkly clean frivolity and so was looking forward to Dombås. Put it this way: the hoteliers of Obergurgl and Val D’Isere can rest peacefully secure in the knowledge that the Norwegians will not be able to replace the oil bonanza of the last forty-years with the winter sports Dollar, Pound, Euro or Rubel. The dining options in the town are limited: pizza’s at about £30 each, washed down by cans of tepid, weak, local beer costing £9. Instead, I opted for a Doner Kebab which was actually OK but then again should be for £18.
So with a heavy heart and grumbling like the pair of bitter old queens we increasingly resemble, we set out for Steinkjer the following morning. More deserted roads and past a ghost town near Gløsen across eerily impressive landscape, we skirt Trondheim to the start of where the E6 becomes interesting.
For a country with the highest per-capita income in the world, Norway can do a very good impression of being totally skint and nowhere is this more evident that Steinkjar. A bit of research here would have paid dividends as it turns out the Luftwaffe significantly remodeled much of the town in 1942 and although it’s been rebuilt, it has a cheap, prefab feel about it with drab, uniform architecture and gardens that need a bit of TLC. A branch of Onkel Oskar’s, a sort of hyper-inflated JD Wetherspoon’s for the clinically insane and blow-in tourists, offered the only light relief for the evening.
Brønnøysund starts to look more the part. Like most of rural Norway, it’s slightly ramshackle with the exception of a soaring arch of a bridge so designed to allow cruise liners that plow in and out the fjords laden with tourists to get to it’s quay. The bridge connects the mainland with a low-lying spit and offers spectacular views of snow-capped mountains through the crystal air. The Galeasen Hotel is charming, staffed by wholesome bright-eyed Nordic Goddesses and bless us with our first proper meal in four days.
In a bid to see as many perspectives of Norway that ten days allow, our route along the Western seaboard means ferries. Lots of them. Sporadic and expensive ones. Waiting for two hours in the town of Horn (aptly named, as it turns out) sheltering from the howling rain, we again rued the lack of research. Cowering in a wooden hut, the only available entertainment is to read the musings of sexually-ambiguous Norwegian truck drivers who have whiled away the hours scrawling retarded, physically-challenging fantasies on the walls. That said, Norway’s famously egalitarian education system deserves a passing nod as the written English is better than most who work for London advertising agencies can manage. So the 120 miles to Mo I Rana takes all day and sustained by a local version of Bouillabaisse and Ox steak at the excellent No. 3 restaurant, the next day it’s onward to Fauske on the E6 and into the Arctic Circle.
There is nothing polite to say about Fauske so if you are interested, you will have to go yourself but on the road there, I was suddenly really pleased we had come all this way. It’s 220 miles there and back from Mo I Rana and for large sections, a transcendental experience more akin to flying than riding a motorcycle. Utterly deserted, it’s possible to set your cruise control to 65 MPH and for mile after mile, soar up and down wide valleys surrounded by vast skies and cloudscapes. On a K1600GT, the sensation is as smugly self-satisfied as sitting in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class with a large G&T in your hand as the pilot effortlessly banks the 747 towards an unseen destination. Utterly restful with the occasional waft of burning fresh pine from unseen farmsteads a reminder that this is not a dream.
It's Saturday night in Mo I Rana and our collective sixth-sense manages to suss out the scuzziest pub in town, a 'brown bar' in the local parlance. It's full of lost souls and serving a beer from the world's northern-most brewery. We negotiate to buy two beer glasses inscribed as such and wander back to the hotel at about 01:00 AM in broad daylight.
Next day, back on the E6 to Trondheim is yet more biking nirvana. Unchallenging yet supremely enjoyable roads under a clear blue sky surrounded by perfectly reflective lakes. We stop at one and take a load of postcard photographs. More follow, each more expansive and impressive than the last but we are now inured to this embarrassment of riches and don't stop again.
Trondheim is a university town where the pleasantly scruffy thirty and forty-year olds all manage to still look like students. Wincing over a £10 pint served by a very pretty and friendly barmaid straight out of central casting for Scandi-blondes, I suggested to her boss (who looked about twelve years old) that the high price of drink was probably a good way for Norwegian towns to avoid resembling Booze Britain’s vomit-lashed conurbations. “Oh no” he assured me “In Norway, people buy spirits and go to each others houses.
He went on: If you’ve a bottle and there’s a third left, you finish it. And then go out”. So there you have it, the secret of everlasting youth Norwegian-style: drink a bottle of Vodka before going to the pub. You heard it here first.
Which brings me to the locals. The Norwegians we met were unfailingly polite, helpful but a bit remote. There is certainly non of the false friendliness or theatricality you get in the USA that irritates some but I lap up. As a nation, they resemble the lottery winners that, in a way they are. They don’t brag about their good fortune with the usual baubles of flash cars and exterior decorating, they just carry on doing what they do. This appears to involve getting up early, turning up on time for meetings, NOT having a sly pint on the way home but coming home early to spend time with family before - judging by the birth-rate of a proud 1.8 children per adult couple (the UK’s is a flaccid 1.2 by comparison) - retiring early to bed to go and make more Norwegians.
From Trondheim, we head again for the dreary Dombås but only as this is the gateway to the fjords and mountains that lie to the west. Very soon the landscape begins to take on an a Tolkein other-worldliness but without the silly storylines. Waterfalls team down towering slate grey cliffs whose scale makes them look close enough to touch; luminous green meadows studded with iridescent wild flowers vie for your attention with Toblerone-perfect snow-capped mountains in the far distance.
Trollstigen is Norway’s highest pass and provides us with a few hairpins up to stupendous views over a gorged out valley. The visitors centre at the top is an architects fantasy: a masterpiece of minimalist good taste fashioned out of slate, stone, and rusted steel so artfully rendered it resembles the finest suede to the touch. The clean lines and attention to detail are so obsessive, they extend to the gentlemen’s toilet where a communal stainless steel washbasin is denuded of all apparently extraneous detail (like taps…) such that it resembles a trough urinal. This impressive visual effect is marred only by a hastily scrawled sign (in English, predictably…) requesting people don’t piss in it.
Two nights in two harbour towns feel like like closer to home. Alesund attracts a yachty, moneyed clientele and with it decent restaurants while in Bergen our ‘sleep-cheap/eat-well’ policy lands us in a youth hostel of sorts but what the hell. After a traditional Norwegian meal of whale-carpaccio (don’t bother: really nasty; trust me) and a local, weird bouillabaisse of Portuguese provenance we sit at midnight under a pink sky while the locals parade their very shiny Harleys and 1950’s open-top American cars. This appears to be something of a contradiction to the national preference for modesty and in a country with such faultless environmental credentials. Despite petrol at nearly £9 per gallon, the number of 4 MPG monstrosities we saw beggared belief. Cheaper than drinking beer, I suppose, as a leisure activity.
The fjords are as spectacular as all the travel supplement photos you have seen, the largest and most famous of which is Gestiegen.
The place to see these incredible crevices from is not from the gigantic liners that ferry equally gargantuan American tourists on cruises but from the roads that top the vertiginous cliffs that surround them. From this vantage point, the same vessels are reduced to mere toy boats in a colossal granite bathtub. After a lunch stop at Flåm, the starting point for the Olden railway - one of the world's steepest - we metaphorically drag our heels for the rest of the day as we sense the end of our trip is close. Along the way, a spectacular arctic landscape and frozen lake rendered in white and grey against an indigo blue sky. Emerging from a long wending climb, we chance upon a scene of almost apocalyptic beauty: a scattering of abandoned fisherman's huts and de-commissioned telegraph poles juxtaposed with a thawing winter lake, the tessellated ice flows glinting in the late-afternoon spring sun.
Geilo is another dull out-of-season ski resort leavened only by a really good pizza cooked and served by a highly articulate Swede with reactionary but well-reasoned political views. Returning to the hotel, we are swept aside by a low-tide of Japanese tourists eager to catch the limited photographic opportunities offered by a dismal, sodden Geilo in fading light. Soon, I am accosted in the bar by one of their number who, through the medium of mime, persuades me to plug a USB stick into my laptop to view his holiday snaps. Your groans were my groans but the images he showed us were of such technical perfection, beauty and compositional simplicity, we were rendered speechless. It turned out he was a professional photographer and was so thrilled we liked his work, insisted I take copies of our favourites and here they are.
Nothing to do with Norway per se but a timely reminder that travel should and does broaden the mind and how imperative it is to ignore the old Texan saying of “If you always keep an open mind, somebody will only come along and fill it full of s**t”
Back to Jutland and across Denmark I conclude that it’s the Belgium of the Nordic region. Nothing wrong with that and both countries produce some of my favourite things (Belgium for Leffe beer and Denmark for Bang & Olufsen) but it’s really only a place to travel through to get somewhere else rather than a destination in it’s own right. That said, the uniform Legoland towns have a certain comforting appeal. We are heading for Sylt and our final night. It’s a strange German-owned holiday island accessible only by ferry from Denmark or train from the Fatherland. It’s popular and affordable with the merchant classes of Hamburg, with property prices inexplicably comparable with Central London and the Cote D’Azur.
If you’ve ever found yourself trapped in Welwyn Garden City, Hampstead Garden Suburb or Letchworth and wondered what inspired the strange brick and bread-loaf roof architecture of these Ebenezer Howard new towns, it appears to be this barren, windswept corner of Germany. Featureless, bleak, cold and rainy only two words are needed to explain why it’s worth a visit: Jorg Muller
Herr Muller is a one-man Teutonic equivalent of the Roux Brothers having trained a whole generation of German über-chefs. He is revered by the average Mann-auf-der-Strasse as the finest chef in Germany and now runs his superb, eponymous restaurant in Tinnum, the largest town on Sylt. It’s not exactly a bargain and sort-of follows the rule-of-thumb of £100 per Michelin Star per head in that it has one star, is priced at two but is three star food no question.
There are three set menus with one of them being a sort of ‘Jorg’s Greatest Hits’ and what a back catalogue he has. Every luxury ingredient you can think is plundered. The preparation, presentation and flavouring is meticulous. English is not widely spoken here (they have trouble making us out from Danish visitors apparently who tend to use English over German) so the best we could work out from the man himself, charming wife and excellent staff is this restaurant is really just to keep his hand in as he has nothing left to prove. As we left, he was jovially quaffing back red with some regulars on the terrace, enjoying his acclaim and very much the man in form.
The principal reason for this tour was to see Norway and so prompts the question: would we go back? Certainly, but with a completely re-calibrated set of expectations. This is not the sort of trip for a couple of card-carrying bon viveurs with a taste for fine food and wine. It’s a very decent modest and peaceful society that shuns ostentation and relies instead on a bounty of natural beauty coupled with a solitude and tranquility unavailable in most of Western Europe.
Your choice of steed for the trip is almost irrelevant as anything that can do 70 MPH is adequate. We had heard tales of Norwegian police waiting like trolls to trap unsuspecting bikers but this, like the trolls of the local folklore is fantasy. Neither do you need the power of a K1600 for blindingly fast overtaking as traffic is so light. I would even suggest it’s a good place to take a classic but only on the assumption that it is faultlessly maintained. The country only has 5.5M inhabitants and few, I suspect, are experts in late 1970’s Beemers offering their services at 1950’s labour rates, an enduring fantasy amongst many owners of such venerable mounts...
True to character, the Norwegians appear to have invested the good fortune afforded by the Black Gold in important things that will last a hundred years. The road and tunnels across this vast country are all in good order but rarely reaches Swiss/German/Austrian levels of civil engineering perfection. Regardless, maintaining this from a tax-base only half as populous as London is a tall order so Norway is expensive. Very, very expensive. That said, viewed as a two-week meditation on two-wheels, it starts to make sense and ultimately boils down to a simple truth which is this: it’s the best time I have had riding a motorcycle.
I first clambered off the back of my mate’s Dad’s Norton Commando on a freezing afternoon in March 1979 and from that point I was hooked. Hopelessly addicted. Sitting in a 3-Series BMW on a stationary M25 listening to a Chris Rea CD has never filled the void nor ever could it hope to. A few years ago, after twenty miles pillion on my K1200S, my son fixed me with a cross-eyed vacant stare and said simply: “I have to have one”.
It’s the same point; if motorcycles grab you, you will be forever in their thrall. Cast your mind back to the time of your first biking experience and I make you two promises. After two weeks in Norway you will be poorer financially to the point that it might hurt but preciously, you will have been transported back to a place in time many years ago and held at this point, spinning still, for the duration. Money can’t normally buy this and it’s worth more than that. It’s who we are and what we do.
