Fjord water is cold...Flam-ing cold!

OK, so Flam is pronounced Flom, and the neighbouring town we went to, Aurlundsvangen, is really Orlundsvengen in English phonetic terms.
Again it’s idyllic, it’s nestled between mountains and waterfalls, and the wooden buildings are just stunning. Check out this micro-brewery, these are the chairs trolls would have, if indeed trolls have chairs.
I’m in grave danger of actually buying a troll. It’s like you keep seeing them everywhere, and eventually it wears you down and you start to fall for them. Look. Ah….
Anyway, we took a bus to Aurlundsvangen, eventually, which was a gorgeous bus-ride, 10 minutes in duration and 25 krone each (that’s $5...on a bus, yes really) where I discovered my dream fjord-view house. Cool huh?
We discovered there was a man-made basin in the town where bathers could bathe in crystal clear fjord water. I guess because it was shallower (although the basin was deep for a public swimming area) the water was supposed to be warmer.
IT WAS FREEZING! I swam three strokes in, and three out, and my English goose was cooked...er, frozen. Then I ran back in to get this picture (that IS me on the right) thus proving I did swim in the fjords, and scurried right back out again. There were some beautiful blonde Norwegian children playing in the water for ages, I guess you just get used to it, or maybe you’re biologically programmed to have a higher tolerance to cold if you’re Norwegian. I’m sure it did wonders for my metabolism, my whole body stung when I got out.
We stretched a while and talked in the sun. We chatted to a local lady whose child was a young future dancer and whose mum just got back together with her first ever boyfriend. Her mum’s 77 now, he’s 83 and she was first with him when she was 18 and he was 24...there's SO a short story right there! He runs the only grocery store in the town. As I’ve said before these are romantic people, the Norwegians.
We headed back to Flam, where Eric left me to go hike up the mountain to visit a big waterfall. My achilles is playing up (typical dancer injury) so I regretfully left him to it, but as I know someone who loves waterfalls, I made him take pictures for me to post. He said it was awesome in it's power up close.

Northernmost North-Cape Northness

So, this was a crew tour day, to the north cape. Northerly Northernmost Northness! Well, actually there’s another spot that’s 200 metres MORE north than the north cape, here it is, taken from the North Cape, but hey.

We stopped first at a Sami Indian Village, complete with teepees and reindeer. These reindeer are not wild, our guide told us, they are owned by farmers. To ask a farmer how many reindeer he has is apparently as rude as asking him how much money he has in his bank account. OK then!
Reindeer are exactly as real in the flesh as the Christmas-grotto plush versions I saw as a child. They have furry antlers, even the females when they’re pregnant and nursing, which apparently they can feel, and they experience pain if you touch them.
Eric jumped in a teepee, which had a good fire going inside it. I took this one which had clothes hanging inside. Then there was this souvenir shop selling handicrafts and an interesting "witch drum." I couldn’t believe people lived like this still, it seemed staged somehow.

Then it was on to the North Cape, via some breathtaking scenery. This is the globe that marks the northernmost point, and here’s a sculpture signifying peace, solidarity etc.etc.etc consisting of seven disks replicating drawings done by children from various parts of the world who stayed at the cape for a week.
But I found something far better, the Northernmost European public toilet!

And I love these rock formations, a bit "Blair Witch" but they suit the setting. Apparently it's all to do with leaving something distinctive so you know where you've been on walking trails etc.

Then there’s a centre with a souvenir shop and a ridiculously overpriced café, and a video showing every 30 minutes which I didn’t watch. I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow I was expecting more.
In the souvenir shop, I found Reindeer sausage and powdered reindeer horn which apparently has Viagra-like qualities (whether you eat it, make tea from it or just wear it around your neck during the er, act I don’t know)
Eric took this opportunity to photograph his torso, and a troll’s nose. I wonder what he was trying to show me…. My friend Matthew found some jewellery too.
Eric and I bought wine, and we decided to set up camp in the car-park, next to a bunch of caravans and occasional tour-buses, for the remainder of our time at the cape. See, true trailer-park trash.

I mused on the ladies working in the centre. I mean, what must it be like to wake up every morning on a small, remote Norwegian island and go to work in the Northernmost shop in all of Europe?
I thought later about our young tour guide. She was more worried about the security guard on the dock seeing her, as it was her ex-boyfriend, than any misshaps on the tour and I felt slightly sorry for her as she told her stories about swimming in the fjords with the local policemen who “have nothing else to do”. We even saw them on our route.

And the sun NEVER set that night. Here's a poster, available at the North Cape, showing exactly the way it happened.

Spitzbergen, kinda creepy...

Spitzbergen Island is remote, and when we first got on the shuttle bus into town (check it out! 1960s Volvo) it’s also slightly foreboding, as the mountainscape on one side is dominated by a derelict coal-mining plant. The chair-lift, with brown carts (as seen in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) is there still but eerily motionless, and some of the structures have fallen into desrepair. You can just see it, on the right side of the mountain in this picture. It’s like it was just abandoned, and for some reason nobody dismantled anything.

In fact, even in town, the place has the feel of a movie-set, where perhaps something beyond the quaintness of small-town life is crucial to the movie. Look at this car, another old Volvo, no plates….then there’s this house, one of many with antlers or stuffed snow-foxes proudly out on the porch: the sign of a successful hunter? Or perhaps something more ominous?
There are now 2000 inhabitants of Longyearbyen, Spitzbergen, but it feels smaller.

I did love these multi-coloured houses, all interlinked for the water and drainage systems -the town is easy to map out in this respect- they remind me of Cabanas native to Argentina, only a winter version where instead of tango-dancing on the porch, there are snow-ploughs. It was crisp and sunny, and the super-fresh air was a beautiful break from the recycled, air-conditioned, dry-til-you-cough breathing kit we are subjecting our lungs to on the ship.

In Spitzbergen, when people talk about what you drive, they’re not talking about your car. It’s all about the snow-plough you ride, or as Eric says, your Ski-doo (although I think that may be a brand name.)
Apparently this is also a good snow-travel machine, and my man is Canadian, he knows about this stuff.

I was thrilled to see your actual, authentic husky-sled.

There are a lot of climbing frames in Spitzbergen, some are the excellent old wooden kind with boats, wendy houses and everything, but we saw no children. We jumped on a spring see-saw, but realised we are now too heavy for it to be fun any more.
Instead, we chased around this poor field mouse, until it ducked under some decking, as field-mice do.

When you get to the end of town, it feels like the end of the earth and all civilisation.

This is clearly a part of the world where the “We’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign never made much of an impression. Gloves, hats, coats, boots all come in a variety of furs, as well as these rugs. It’s the grizzly bear on the bottom shelf that gets me, see, being British these bears are about as exotic as they come and I have a strange fascination with meeting one, alive, in the wild (not dancing and chained as I had the horror of seeing in St. Petersburg, it was heart-breaking to see the cubs) and obviously at a safe distance, and this rug upset me slightly, sheltered Englishwoman that I am.

We were issued notices onboard not to venture out of town unless on an organised wildlife-observation excursion, because this is polar-bear territory. There was even a caption on the guest channel that read “A fight between a polar bear and a human usually ends in death either for the bear or the human, whichever happens first”. I wanted to get a picture of a sign warning for bears (I KNOW they exist!) but didn’t see any. I did see signs telling you not to bring your guns or firearms into stores, which was new to me, but I felt silly photographing them.
This was the only polar bear we saw, and like so much of the wildlife we saw here (the mouse aside) it was dead, stuffed, and on display.
There is however a shop that excited me, not only is it a store of my namesake, but the weirdest spelling of my name I’ve ever seen!