Words

On Saturday morning, Sarah and I took a regional train (my favourite kind, really) from Madrid to Segovia and checked into the Pension Ferri, a guesthouse in a tiny alleyway off the town’s central plaza. Being an old stone building, the guesthouse was surprisingly cool, despite the heat outside. The owner gave us a price that was almost double what he’d said on the phone. After making some protests in Lonely Planet Spanish, he relented with an “O.K., you got me,” kind of expression, and gave us the right price. It was quite a difference.

Segovia itself is a beautiful town. The old part of town sits upon a hill, and is entirely enclosed by tall walls. At one end of town is a fairy-tale castle, built in the early 19th century to replace the ancient (and probably more practical) fortress which had burnt down. The town centre is the Plaza Mayor, on the edge of which sits a gigantic cathedral in pale granite. The rest of the old town is filled with beautiful, formal gardens, narrow cobbled streets, hidden plazas and stone houses with amazingly intricate facades. At the other end of the walls from the castle begins the Roman aqueduct, nine hundred metres of arches that form part of a fourteen-kilometre system for carrying water to the city from a nearby mountain. It is also built of local granite, without mortar. It is in amazingly good condition – the fine lines on the stone have worn a little, but the whole thing is intact. I’ve seen other aqueducts, but nothing quite as grand and beautiful. Sarah and I took a lot of photos.

Unlike Italy, it seems that most Spanish churches charge for admission, so I didn’t see the inside of any. Instead, we walked along almost every street in the town, and to a few churches outside the walls. I spent one pleasant afternoon asleep on the perfectly manicured lawn of some lord’s house, now converted into the Segovia Museum.

Yesterday afternoon I discovered the delight that is chocolate con churros. Basically, a warm bowl of melted chocolate, served with sticks of fried pastry for dipping. Bliss. Staying at a guesthouse rather than a hostel meant that we had no cooking facilities, and Segovia is the kind of town that seems to shut down on afternoons and Sundays (covering all of the time we spent there), so other than the chocolate, we ate a lot of bread and cheese. One night we made a pretty good salad from entirely tinned ingredients.

This morning I take a train from Segovia and leave Sarah on it as she continues to Madrid while I make a change at Villalba. Another change at Miranda de Ebro, and some time this afternoon I’ll arrive in Bilbao.

I’ve finally had the chance to upload a backlog of photos. The entire Segovia photoset is here. Barcelona, here. Rome, here. I haven’t had time to rotate or label much, so far.

After four nights in Rome I decided that I should perhaps move on before my rail pass is entirely spent. Barcelona is my destination, although my plan involved crossing the south of France by rail in order to get there. Unfortunately, however, the rail routes between northern Italy and Barcelona are entirely booked for the next few days, and the rather unhelpful Italian woman at the ticket desk was unable to offer me any alternatives, although I’m sure a route could have be found using regional trains (which allow standing passengers) instead of high-speed ones (which don’t).

My plan was to take a train to Torino, and find onward transport from there – bus, local rail, or hitchhiking. However, I missed the train (that’s a €15 booking fee I’ll never see again), and started seeking an alternative.

Thus it is that I find myself lounging in the saloon of the Eurostar Barcelona of the Grimaldi Line. The sea crossing takes about twenty hours, although we’re running a little early. Almost every other passenger has a cabin, meaning the deck passage areas are rather empty. I slept better than most of the other backpackers I can see – nobody else seems to have camping gear, and slept (or not) sitting, while I rolled out my mattress and sleeping bag, both of which have been unused since I reached Italy. I slept for ten hours on the gently rolling deck. There isn’t much else to do, to tell the truth, although I have made some progress on my books – Zastrozzi by Percy Bysshe Shelley and The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, a neo-Gothic thriller by G.W. Dahlquist.

This is my second overnight sea voyage of this trip, and this one is much more comfortable than the first, on the Aegean. There are far fewer passengers, they’re not smoking, and my mattress, though punctured, is soft. A while ago, we passed between Corsica and Sardinia, both islands I plan to visit one day.

Barcelona and reunions in less than an hour. Yay!

Today Jen and I drove first to Montefalco, the town that produces Umbria’s finest wine, and then to Bavagna, a little medieval town with a monastery wherein Jen spent a few days earlier in the week. Lunch was at a wine bar in Montefalco’s central piazza: primi, a rustic polenta with Gorgonzola and sausage, and for the secondi, an amazing stew of beef, pork, tomatoes and rosemary.

On the way home we passed through Maria degli Angeli, stopping to take in the spectacular Duomo and to do a little grocery shopping. Dinner was a Caprese salad and bread, eaten on the balcony of Jen’s hotel room.

Everywhere is photogenic. The light and weather themselves make fine subjects. This is Assisi:

Our daytrip adventures:

The Umbria set, so far, is here.

Good food, friendly locals speaking a language that I almost understand, sunshine, vistas over patchwork fields, cobbled streets filled with nuns. This is Assisi, Umbria. It’s hot. I love it. I’ve spent the afternoon wandering up and down the hill gathering picnic ingredients for tonight’s dinner with Jen and Jo. I have baby tomatoes, fresh bread, old cheese, prosciutto and oil.

I didn’t get to say goodbye to anybody in Trondheim (too busy running for the train, as always). It’s a strange feeling, not sharing a tent with anybody.

From Kiruna, we took one of Scandinavia’s prettiest train routes across northern Sweden and into Narvik, Norway. Narvik would actually be a cute town, bounded on one side by a fjord and on the others by snow-capped mountains, were it not for the fact that it has an industrial estate instead of a centre. We found the perhaps the only attractive vista in Narvik and pitched our tent just above the high tide line. I spent a fruitless three hours seaching for wifi or even an internet cafe, and managed to spend the the equivalent of about €35 on a bottle of Powerade and a SIM for my phone, which didn’t work anyway. Somewhere along the line we spent €8 on an onion and a can of sweetcorn. Norway is not for budget travellers. We could not do this without our tent.

Stefan set about exploring the town instead of sleeping, and fortunately discovered that only one bus per day runs to Svolvær, our first destination on the Lofoten Islands. We (just) made the bus, and spent the next four hours gaping at the scenery as we crossed over fjords on fairy-floss suspension bridges, and occasionally under them in long, steep tunnels. After a few hours of brainstorming in Svolvær, we settled on a hostel in Stamsund, only a few hours away by boat.

The Stamsund HI Hostel was run by Roar, whom I can only describe as the stereotypical salty sea dog. He is everything you’d expect from an Arctic, Norwegian fisherman – gruff, stoic, bearded, capped. He has converted an old fisherman’s home and surrounding buildings into the most characterful hostel in which I’ve ever slept. It was the first time we’d had a bed in more than two weeks. Earlier in the day, Stefan had befriended a pair of boating retirees, who donated a few cod that they’d caught. After a dinner of fish and rice, we retired ourselves.

The midnight sun plays havoc with our biorhythms – there’s no particular reason to sleep or wake at traditional times, so we don’t. After a rather late start the next day, we acquired a Swede and a Frenchman – Matthias, the CEO of a Swedish IT company, and Greg, an English teacher from Marseilles, with an accent so perfect that I actually mistook him as English, to start with. Together, we borrowed one of Roar’s rowboats, left Stamsund’s harbour and rowed out into the Norwegian Sea in an attempt to catch dinner. Despite using fishing gear a step more primitive than what I’m used to (we had line wrapped around sticks), I caught two cod, Catrina one, and Matthias two. Eventually the cold forced us home to the hostel. Greg baked a lasagne, I made some roasted potatoes, and with one fried cod each, we ate rather well.

We’ve spent the two days since camping at the very southern end of the Lofoten, on the cliffs near the village of Å, famous for its yearly cod harvest, its monosyllabic name, and Norway’s best (only?) cod fishing museum. Did you know that in April, up to 400 000m² of the Lofoten are covered in drying stockfish? I didn’t.

Today I’m on the ferry from Moskenes to Bodø, where I’ll catch a train to Trondheim to catch a train to Oslo to catch a train to Sondefjord to catch a bus to Torp to catch a flight to Pisa to catch a train to Firenze to catch a train to Assisi. I’ll probably get to sleep, somewhere.

I’ve stolen Stefan’s Kebnekaise photos, and will upload them when I get a chance.