Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'At least.'
A month. A month in the coldest, darkest, bleakest, remotest place in Europe. Everyone I told this to
thought it was most amusing. And now here I was heading north on a bouncing bus, inescapably committed.
* * *
Not long after leaving Oslo I became aware with a sense of unease that no one on the bus was
smoking. I couldn't see any
NO SMOKING
signs, but I wasn't going to be the first person to light up and then
have everyone clucking at me in Norwegian. I was pretty certain that the man in the seat across the aisle
was a smoker - he looked suitably out of sorts - and even more sure that the young man ahead of me must
be. I have yet to meet a grown-up reader of comic books who does not also have an affection for tobacco
and tattoos. I consulted the Express 2000 leaflet that came with each seat and read with horror the words
'tilsammen 2,000 km non-stop i 30 timer'.
Now I don't know Norwegian from alphabet soup, but even I could translate that. Two thousand
kilometres! Non-stop! Thirty hours without a cigarette! Suddenly all the discomfort came flooding back. My
neck ached, my left leg sizzled like bacon in a skillet, the young man ahead of me had his head closer to my
crotch than any man had ever had before, I had less space to call my own than if I had climbed into my
suitcase and mailed myself to Hammerfest, and now I was going to go thirty hours without an infusion of
nicotine. This was just too much.
Fortunately it wasn't quite as desperate as that. At the Swedish border, some two hours after leaving
Oslo, the bus stopped at a customs post in the woods, and while the driver went into the hut to sort out the
paperwork most of the passengers, including me and the two I'd forecast, clattered down the steps and
stood stamping our feet in the cold snow and smoking cigarettes by the fistful. Who could tell when we
would get this chance again? Actually, after I returned to the bus and earned the undying enmity of the lady
beside me by stepping on her foot for the second time in five minutes, I discovered from further careful study
of the Express 2000 leaflet that three rest stops appeared to be built into the itinerary.
The first of these came in the evening at a roadside cafeteria in Skellefte￥, Sweden. It was a strange
place. On the wall at the start of the food line was an outsized menu and beside each item was a red button,
which when pushed alerted the people in the kitchen to start preparing that dish. Having done this, you slid
your empty tray along to the check-out, pausing to select a drink, and then waited with the cashier for twenty
minutes until your food was brought out. Rather defeats the purpose of a cafeteria, don't you think? As I was
the last in the line and the line was going nowhere, I went outside and smoked many cigarettes in the bitter
cold and then returned. The line was only fractionally depleted, but I took a tray and regarded the menu. I had
no idea what any of the foods were and as I have a dread of ever inadvertently ordering liver, which I so
much detest that I am going to have to leave you here for a minute and go throw up in the wastebasket from
just thinking about it, I elected to choose nothing (though I thought hard about pressing
all
the buttons just to
see what would happen).
Instead I selected a bottle of Pepsi and some little pastries, but when I arrived at the check-out the
cashier told me that my Norwegian money was no good, that I needed Swedish money. This surprised me. I
had always thought the Nordic peoples were all pals and freely exchanged their money, as they do between
Belgium and Luxembourg. Under the cashier's heartless gaze I replaced the cakes and Pepsi and took
instead a free glass of iced water and went to a table. Fumbling in my jacket pocket, I discovered a Dan-Air
biscuit left over from the flight from England and dined on that.
When we returned to the bus, sated on our lamb cutlets and vegetables and/or biscuit and iced water,
the driver extinguished the interior lights and we had no choice but to try to sleep. It was endlessly
uncomfortable. I finally discovered, after trying every possibility, that the best position was to lie down on the
seat more or less upside-down with my legs dangling above me. In this manner, I fell into a deep, and
surprisingly restful, sleep. Ten minutes later, Norwegian coins began slipping one by one from my pocket
and dropping onto the floor behind me, where (one supposes) they were furtively scooped up by the little old
lady sitting there. And so the night passed.
We were woken early for another rest stop, this one in Where The Fuck, Finland. Actually it was called
Muonio and it was the most desolate place I had ever seen: a filling station and lean-to caf￩ in the middle of
a tundra plain. The good news was that the caf￩ accepted Norwegian currency; the bad news was that it
