Writing a travel blog is remarkably difficult to get started on when you are not in fact, travelling.
This one is going to be less about Norway and Oslo than about my thoughts and feelings at the end of the trip. As with most of mine, it may be quite a long one.
Having settled back into life at home; working every hour that I can, sleeping too little and eating too much, it’s strange. It’s like I’ve not been away, and that’s a feeling that shot back far, far sooner than I anticipated.
Without a doubt this trip has been the biggest, the most interesting and the most eye opening thing I have done to date. I’ve seen places I wanted to see, places I had no idea about, and along the way I’ve met wonderful people and had an awful lot of fun. I don’t know that I could travel indefinitely, but a good few months out seeing new places is definitely something that should be done every now and then. It’s given me something I didn’t really have before; a hunger to go. Before, I could see photographs of places, snatches of film of different countries I haven’t seen, and I’d probably not think any more of it. Now I see those things and I think ‘I…. want to go there. I want to see that.’
Some things are simply too bizarre for words. Pictures, even.
Right now for example, I have a window with SkyScanner open looking at flights to Prague. And Iceland, though that won’t be until next winter when the Borealis is really something to see and to photograph.
The right companions for the trip is a big thing to get right, and a very difficult one to actually choose. Think for a moment; think about those people you spend the most time with, see every day, love as family, trust, admire and when it comes to it, rely on. Even those people will probably get on your last nerve now and then if you spend three months trapped in a metal box with them, sleeping on camp beds, stressing about border crossings and foreign police and the ever present possibility that something may go drastically wrong and land you in a foreign prison cell (which is what I imagined in the instant I watched my passport fall into the Caspian Sea after I had already been stamped out of Azerbaijan…)
We definitely didn’t just tape over the Airbag warning light.
That said, it’s not really something I encountered. Somehow the three of us never really had a bust up, nor really any arguments, despite spending every waking hour with each other for nearly 90 solid days. Instead we have come back with a plethora of in-jokes that pretty much only we get.
Having Norway as the final country on my trip I think had to be one of the better points. Finishing the trip in such a beautiful country left me with less worry that I was missing out on more by having to fly back early. Even so I missed out on some things I would dearly love to have been able to see. A friend in Amstelveen near Amsterdam, another in Ihren in Germany. Quite apart from anything else, it saddened me to have embarked upon this trip, but not returned to the UK in the same vehicle in which I left three months before.
I’ve been to some wonderful places, and seen some wonderful things but overall far, far too briefly. I don’t think this is the last of my travelling; though debt prevents me from doing much too soon. Unless that is, I hear from the Dutch nutter who asked me if I’d be up for driving his Unimog East to West from Far Eastern Russia next summer…
Were I to do such a trip again, I have to say it would simply have to be a lot longer, or perhaps broken into sections much like some of those we met along the way, who were travelling for a few months and then finding somewhere to store the car or bike for a few months before returning to journey onwards. Seeing 24 countries in three months is fantastic fun; it’s a glimpse into so many different cultures and ways of living, landscapes and architectural spectacles, but it’s not enough to grow to understand them, to appreciate them and get into the minor differences that just seem baffling at a glance. For that you need longer to talk to the people, something we didn’t get quite as much opportunity to do as I had hoped.
Perhaps this is rehashing Myke’s last blog entry, but it is the one thing that gets asked more than anything else; my favourite country/place from the trip.
I have to say that for me, there are two that really stand out. Probably the pinnacle for me was Kyrgyzstan. It’s a country that prior to crossing the border from Uzbekistan I knew literally nothing about, barre the fact that when planning Jon had pointed out it was ‘very mountainous’. Going into the country knowing precious little about it simply means that Kyrgyzstan’s mind-boggling natural beauty hits you that much harder. Driving from one end of the country you simply do not know where to look – ALL the time. There is no such thing as an uninteresting horizon in Kyrgyzstan. Sweeping steppe plains juxtaposed with snow capped mountains. Huge, beautifully crisp blue lakes with thunder and lightning flaring off them, dramatic clouds clipping the tips off the peaks. Horses, wild and claimed alike roaming in herds through the windswept grass.
Also, it was pretty hot.
The hugely relaxed approach to life throughout the country was something that stuck with me too; much like most of rural Central Asia there does not seem to be any inkling most of the day that anybody NEEDS to be anywhere, NEEDS to do anything. There’s no such thing as being ‘too busy’ to help someone – even if there’s not a single shared word in either language between them. Life seems slower, calmer, easier.
The other country that stood out was again mainly because of the absolutely incredibly beautiful natural scenery; and that’s Norway. The fjords of Norway simply stunned me. Awesome winding roads along jutting headlands, perpetually heading towards the end of a near constant rainbow as the soft misty rain falls, and at the changing of the tides, porpoises playing in the water right in at the end of the fjord with the sun setting in the background. It didn’t hurt for me particularly that most of The Nordic Countries are muscle car mad, and every half hour or so we’d wind up following some interesting piece of Americana along these winding roads, huge V8 exhaust rumble echoing in the valleys.
If I’m honest, I could ramble about the trip for pages and pages here. So before I go any further I’ll stop.
I will say that without either Jon or Myke I wouldn’t have been doing this over summer (though I admit it took literally zero arm twisting to bring me around to the idea when Jon called) and that would’ve been a shame because it is a really great way to spend time (and money), with fantastic company in both the other Unwise Men and those we met along the way, and a lot of laughs.
Three Unwise Men 