Taxi drivers and their newer counterparts are good interviewees, even though the tendency of journalists to interview them is derided by some observers of the press.
But paid drivers tend to get around. So though I am no longer a “working professional journalist or “WPJ” to use the endearing phrase of a former fellow staff writer at The Virginian-Pilot, I still tend to talk to taxi, Uber, Bolt and Lyft drivers because they know stuff. And it’s fun.
Traveling to Norway for the first time, I talked to a half dozen or so drivers. Usually due to my super long legs and height, I would sit in the front which makes for easy chatting. K and EC sat in the back. We were in Norway for 10 days in late January. I formed many impressions, even though the trip was overall a mess because of bad weather. Hurricane-level winds and waves tossed the ship we were on around, as well as planes we were on or tried to be on. Much of the trip simply didn’t happen.
We spent two nights in Oslo, took a train straight across the country to the second city of Bergen on the west coast, spent a night there, and then took a comfortable ferry up the western coast of the country, stopping at towns and cities along the way. That was when the bad weather started, when we boarded the boat.
The coastal express ferry, run by Hurtigruten, started in 1893 as a mail ferry servicing 34 towns along the western coast of Norway. It still serves as a mail ferry as well as a ferry for people. The route goes up and over the top of Norway, ending at Kirkenes, a city on the Russian border. I had not fully realized that Russia as well as Sweden and Finland occupy the peninsula that juts above the continent of Europe. And this part of Norway actually sits above both Sweden and Finland, so Kirkenes sits to the east of Finland. How did Norway manage to grab the entire western and northern coasts when it separated peacefully from Sweden in 1905? I’m not sure how exactly it managed it, but it sure got a good deal. Norway is to Sweden, as Croatia is to Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Chile is to Argentina and Bolivia.
For the entire trip and particularly the final days, we were amazingly far north. Given this, we had prepared for extreme cold. But in Oslo it was in the 40s, and the rest of the trip it was in the 30s, even above the Arctic Circle. Locals told us this was warmer than average, but not unusual. I was told currents from the Gulf Stream keep the coastal land not so cold.
So Pittsburgh, where our son is in college and I just was, has winters a bit colder on average than Tromso, which sits above the Arctic circle in Norway. Pittsburgh sits at a latitude of about 40, while Tromso is almost 70 degrees of latitude. That’s about 3,000 kilometers or 2000 miles difference.
These not-so-cold temperatures no doubt are a big reason why the cities along the Norwegian coast can be substantial. I had expected lonely villages. Instead I found metropolises, small but bustling. Trondheim, which is just a bit below the Arctic circle, has 200,000 inhabitants, including 40,000 university students. It’s the biggest college town in Norway, we were told. Tromso, right above the Arctic Circle, had 80,000 people and felt very vital. Only Kirkenes (the first syllable pronounced like “sh”), felt lonely and end-of-the-earthish. It has a population of 3,500. I was told a mining company created much of the town, but the company went out of business about 10 years ago after it invested in expensive equipment that did not pay off. (I found this article.)
The extreme weather cancelled many of our stops and planned shore activities. But you needed only to look out the window, essentially at random, and see how beautiful the country is. Basically anywhere you look, you saw snow covered mountains and wide blue waters of fjords cutting between them. Walking on the outskirts of Bergen, we saw a surprisingly green country, even in late January.
The train ride showed that much of the country looks this way, not just the coasts. Zoom in on Google Maps or the app of your choice and you can see these fjords go everywhere, even deep in the interior. On the train, we passed by well-tended farms, homes and towns. This contrasts with the rural area of the United States that I pass through, which often have falling apart homes and crumbling roads.
Happy People
What looking out the window can’t give you is some knowledge of how the country is functioning now and why, and why virtually all the people we encountered seemed healthy and happy. I know that Norway is rich. In addition to fish and talented, smart people, it has good government and oil wealth, which it doesn’t spend but invests into what is currently the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. But most people I saw and talked to just looked pleasantly middle class. They also had a self-deprecating humor about themselves and the country, which I found appealing. What was going on here?
The pleasant cities I saw in the far North weren’t just due to a not-as-bad-as-expected climate. A taxi driver told me - (yes I am finally getting back to that theme) - that the government taxed him and others who lived in Kirkenes at a lower rate, gave them electricity at much lower rate, and did not charge various fees on cars and driving. Because of all this, he said, you basically could drive a fancy car and live in a huge house if you chose to live way up north.
In my outside reading, I know Norway has committed to several huge infrastructure projects that connect the Northern areas even better to the more populous and warmer southern lands. This project includes the E39 highway which will run up the western coast, the same one we traveled by ferry, using tunnels to go under all these fjords and give people easier access by car. It will certainly prompt people to use ferries such as our less, I would think. The roadway will also connect to Denmark. It is said by some to be the largest infrastructure underway right now.
Here is a very cool video that shows the whole thing, with English voice over and words. I really suggest watching the animated video, because you get a sense of the scale of the thing and how ambitious it is. It’s clearly an amazing project and you can feel the excitement of it. It crosses countless fjords with tunnels and bridges. It solves the problem of how do you cross so many fjords by having deep tunnels that go underneath everything, land and water, and only emerge above ground at key points. Here is an article about it in English from 2019. Although these articles are old, contracts for the project have already been granted and construction is underway. I wish we had such steady progress for the ambitious projects of the United States, like the high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
More service personnel interviews, this time a baggage handler in Kirkenes. He said after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, thousands of young Russian men fled over the frontier, seeking to avoid the draft. Hundreds of them slept on the floor of the airport, waiting and seeking flights out to some country that would have them.
Finally about the trip, we did in the end see the Northern Lights, which was the top desire of Ms K and impetus for our trip. It looked as if we wouldn’t, because the storms were putting clouds in the skies continuously. You need at least semi-clear skies to see them. But on the very last night on the ship, around 10 pm, it was announced that The Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, were to be seen from the port side of the ship, breaking through the clouds.
They were amazingly cool, even if I’m sure they would have been stronger with clearer skies. A few beams that cut across the top of the sky looked like spooky green searchlights.
Tummy Time in Norway
A big appeal of this Hurtigruten mail ferry was that they served 80 percent Norwegian fare, even though probably more than half of their clients were from somewhere else. Daily I would survey the many offerings at the buffets presented for breakfast and lunch, or choose from the menus at dinner. I ate a lot of fish, both fresh and preserved, as well as roast pork.
Not so dissimilar in content really, from food in Portugal, although the taste and style are different.
Like the Portuguese, the Norwegians eat a lot of fish, but - and this pleases me for some reason - not as much as the Portuguese. The dwellers on the west coast of the Iberian peninsula eat about 60 kilos of seafood per person and rank sixth, while Norwegians eat about 50 kilos and rank 11th in the world. Both countries eat more fish than the Japanese, who rank 13th.
Portugal though does not have the dozen or so smoked and pickled fish routinely presented on the boat. Such strong flavors are a shock to the system at 8 am, but not unpleasant.
On the meat side, I enjoyed all the lamb that was served, both on the boat and restaurants we found on shore. One good dish new to me was Fenalår. The Norwegians do to a leg of lamb what the Italians, Spanish and Portuguese do to a leg of pig, which is smoke and preserve it, and then cut it in paper thin slices.
Although I love the meals here in Portugal, I would have no problem spending more time in Norway, if all I was considering was what I could eat.