Travel Reference
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had nothing that anyone outside a famine zone would want to eat. The driver and his mate were given
heaped and steaming platters of eggs, potatoes and ham, but there appeared to be nothing like that on
offer for the rest of us. I took a bottle of mineral water and slice of crispbread with a piece of last year's
cheese on it, for which I was charged an astonishing twenty-five kroner, and retired to a corner booth.
Afterwards, while the driver and his mate lingered over coffees and suppressed contented burps, the other
passengers and I milled around in the shop part of the complex, looking at fan belts and snow shovels, and
stood in the perishing cold out by the bus and smoked more fistfuls of cigarettes.
We hit the road again at seven-thirty. Only another whole day of this, I thought cheerfully. The landscape
was inexpressibly bleak, just mile after tedious mile of snowy waste and scraggly birch forest. Reindeer
grazed along the roadside and often on it itself, coming out to lick the salt scattered on the ice. We passed
through a couple of Lapp villages, looking frigid and lifeless. There were no Christmas lights in the windows
here. In the distance, the sun just peeked over the low hills, lingered uncertainly, and then sank back. It was
the last I would see of it for three weeks.
Just after five o'clock we crossed a long, lonely toll bridge on to the island of Kvalya, home of
Hammerfest. We were now as far north as you can get in the world by public transport. Hammerfest is
almost unimaginably remote - 1,000 miles north of the Shetlands, 800 miles beyond the Faroes, 150 miles
north even of my lonely professor friend at the northernmost university in the world at Troms. I was closer
now to the North Pole than to London. The thought of it roused me and I pressed my nose to the cold glass.
We approached Hammerfest from above, on a winding coast road, and when at last it pivoted into view
it looked simply wonderful - a fairyland of golden lights stretching up into the hills and around an expansive
bay. I had pictured it in my mind as a village - a few houses around a small harbour, a church perhaps, a
general store, a bar if I was lucky - but this was a little city. A golden little city. Things were looking up.
