Gothenburg to Oslo
The Gateway to the North..but it's better open than shut. Trance dancing, Bronze Age porn and a broken windshield.
It turned out that we’d arrived in Göteborg during its 400th anniversary festival. The free electric ferries from Stenpiren were working overtime to take hordes of people over the water to Frihamnen where bananas used to be imported and now people were going bananas. Ralph and I were very tempted to go to see the legendary band Suede in concert but we decided more fruitful ideas were quiet beers and a bite to eat.
We stood on the pier watching a large and happy crowd dancing to some Caribbean music being played on enormous speakers attached to a sack truck. There was an infectiously joyful vibe about the whole place and we weren’t even in Party Central. The sheer mass of parked up bicycles gave some idea of the crowds on the other side of the river.
Gothenburg is an industrial place, transitioning to a new urban environment. As well as the huge number of roadworks, there were an ultra-modern tram system and many very avant-garde high-rise buildings, both residential and office, all under development. The heart of the city was solidly red brick-built, with arched windows and verdigris garret roofs in classic Scandinavian style. It all had a sense of wealth, history and self-assurance. The centre was spookily tranquil, even for a Sunday evening. Most of the city had decamped to the festival. We wondered if we might be resorting to another street sausage when we came across the Steampunk Bar. They’d taken the Goth theme seriously and the bar staff all sported welder’s dark glasses, which, in an already subdued interior, made it as hard to see as a black cat in a coalmine.
We were able to decipher the gothic Swedish menu courtesy of Google translate and soon two burgare and Pilsner Urquells were on the table and down the hatches. Feeling the need to refresh ourselves further we wandered up the road to the local BrewDog pub, which was devoid of customers. They were all at the party. We felt distinctly out of the action, so after a couple of the Dog’s finest we sauntered back through the weirdly deserted streets back towards Stenpiren. The golden sun was beginning to set, something we would soon not see for a while.
Silhouetted against the industrial background was a middle-aged woman dancing on the end of the pier. She had grey-silver hair, wore a light-coloured top and dark cargo pants. As the electric ferries slid silently behind her she moved with grace in effortlessly inventive ways to the sack truck trance music, her mobile phone in hand her only connection to the real world. Ralph and I watched from a discreet distance. It was a transfixing moment: she, lost in music, almost an apparition; us, vicariously enjoying her rapture. Unexpected and extraordinary, as the best moments of any road trip always are.
The next morning brought us back to earth, as I had an urgent appointment at the Ahlqvist Honda Motorcycle Centre. We headed to the south side of the city, retracing our inward route of yesterday. This time we didn’t get lost.
True confessions here. My Honda NT1100 is a DCT model (double clutch transmission). It has an automatic gearbox, though it can be ridden in manual mode, too. Bikes are usually parked in gear to stop them moving, the equivalent of a handbrake in a car. Because mine is always in neutral when switched off, it needs a parking brake which is situated on the right side of the handlebars by the throttle. It’s very effective when not buggered up by the operator - me. Leaving Rotterdam I’d somehow managed to ride off with the brake on. No wonder the engine was revving hard. By the time I spotted the red warning light flashing on the dashboard and seen that the lever was in the wrong place, it was too late and I’d gone a couple of kilometres. It doesn’t take long to wear down the brake pads in this way. I was worried that having no parking brake would be risky, especially on the many ferries we would be taking. Any jolt would potentially knock the bike over, an expensive and possibly dangerous outcome. In Bremen I’d rung the Gothenburg dealership to see if they could fit me in.
“We’re fully booked but come anyway and we’ll see what we can do”.
While Ralph wandered happily round the showroom, looking at a MV Agusta Brutale 800, a Honda Goldwing and other large exotics (he would do well on Mastermind with big bikes as his specialist subject), I trundled the Honda round the back and into the crowded service bay. Axel took it from me as though it were feather-light and flipped it up onto its centre-stand with ease. As this is something I find hard to do since I had the suspension lowered, I was suitably impressed.
A few deft turns with a couple of spanners (12 mm ring and 4 mm Allen, if you’re keen to know) later and the job was done. I filmed the whole procedure so that if I repeated my muppetry I’d have an idea what to do. This prompted the comment “he’s a spy” from one of Axel’s workshop colleagues. They wouldn’t accept any payment. Once again, it confirmed to me that the world of motorcycling is a fraternity really, one in which help is freely offered to fellow two-wheelers and equally gratefully received.
Ralph was just moving on to study an Africa Twin when I reappeared, rather more quickly than expected.
“Let’s go. We’ve Oslo to make today; another day, another country.”
“Fast work there. Did you not wreck the brakes too badly?”
“Ouch.”
Back we went onto the E6 northbound but only for a short way as I’d a detour in mind. The coastal town of Lysekil lies 132 km from Gothenburg. It’s on the southern tip of the Stångenas peninsula. Originally a fishing village it’s now a spa and bathing resort with two important nature reserves. It would make an attractive fika stop. In Swedish fika means coffee and cake; in practice, it’s more a state of mind, an opportunity to pause, to relax. If cake is involved, so much the better. To reach Lysekil we left the E6 near Uddevalla and took the beautiful 161, an undulating rural road, with woods stretching out each side beyond the high earth banks. The road was straight as a die but as it was lined with many speed cameras we rode at a modest pace. We came to our first road ferry, Finnsbro Scores, a surprise to Ralph who’d not studied my route closely and was wondering which team Finnsbro played for.
This is one of Sweden’s busiest maritime routes; it’s a 1.8 km wide crossing of the Gullsmarsleden waterway. The bright yellow Tellus ferry is electric-hybrid and there was barely a vibration or jolt as we boarded and within moments slipped away from the quayside for our first of many passages. It’s free, too, which was a bonus. In Scandinavia many of the ferries, though not all, are simply part of the road system and are not charged. We barely had time to take off our helmets to cool down in the heat before we were on the bikes again and rolling off the front end.
Lysekil was pretty, once we’d negotiated the roadworks on the single road in and out of the town.We stopped at the Hamn, the harbour full of small pleasure craft and fishing boats. Nearby was a wooden cabin, an ice-cream parlour/cafe bedecked by Swedish flags. We stuck with the glass, thus dodging the dish about which a TripAdvisor commenter wrote: “fried, pickled and cold herring with potatojam was disgusting.”
Fully fika’d we were back on the bikes with over 200 clicks to go to Oslo and a date with Bronze Age pornography to make en route.
The Vitlycke Museum at Tanum, Bohuslan, just south of the border with Norway is an astonishing place. It’s a World Heritage Site. It’s spread over a large area and there are 600 rock carving sites with tens of thousands of images. Only four of the sites have the full Visitor Centre experience, so it’s still largely in a natural state. As well as the 8,000 year-old carvings there’s a Bronze Age farm. The girl in the reception area spoke great English. She’d studied at Portsmouth and was keen to point out the various sexual positions depicted in many of the rock carvings and in the guidebook. We headed outside on her advice, feeling quite hot under the collar, although that may have been because it was 24 degrees and we were clad in heavy biker gear. Sure enough, they were quite inventive back then and beat the Kama Sutra by several thousand years. But it does get quite dark in Tanum in the winter months and there’s not much else to do.
Clomping around outside in oppressive heat wasn’t quite what we’d envisaged on this trip and we were feeling distinctly overdressed. Normally I’d just have fastened the jacket to my bike, as I’ve done many times before in Spain, where it’s even hotter. Our Bremen experience (below) had made me much more
cautious about leaving gear on the bike. We ducked into the cafe for ostfralla & skinka and Red Bull. My Swedish menu vocabulary is pretty limited so we were stuck with cheese and ham rolls.
As we’d entered Sweden we’d done the “famous things and people quiz” again. Amongst obvious Swedish nominees were ABBA, Bjorn Borg, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and IKEA. On cue, just as we left the Bronze Age we rode past the icon of the Consumer Age, with an enormous IKEA just off the E6. Our first and, oddly, the only one we saw in Sweden. The roads changed once we crossed over into Norway. The previously pristine surface was a little less billiard-table, the lupins lining the road began to morph into beautiful little yellow flowers which carpeted the verges. The flatlands of northern Sweden gave way to gentle hills which grew more rugged; the terrain undulated and large vistas opened up as we began to climb.There were many big bridges over inlets which gave us an inkling of the fjords to come. The speed limits also came down, a little at first and then as we neared Oslo, to 80 kmh and less.
We did our usual trick as we drew close to the hotel in the centre of Oslo, the Cochs Pensjonat. Ralph inevitably went one way and me, the other. I was following TomTom’s GPS instructions which had me going round in circles for a while until I zeroed in on the Cochs. They’d said there was a courtyard where we could park up. A van was obstructing the entrance to it and had blocked the dropped kerb. Being tired, hot and bothered I snuck round the front of the van to ride up the kerb anyway. At this very moment, just as I was mid-air with no way of getting my feet down a woman with a big dog appeared to my right, just feet away. I opened the throttle to make it up the hump ahead of her before I dropped the bike. It shot forward and came to a crashing halt wedged in the wrought-iron gate that led to the courtyard. I was pinned against the wall at a drunken angle to the right, with only the screen stopping the bike from going over completely.
This was unhelpful. As were any passers-by who merely stared at this idiot struggling to right his bike and remove it from the ironwork. I killed the engine and took several long, deep breaths.
“Oh, fuck!”
As I recalled from my crash in Spain (more of which in a later blog), when things happen on a bike they happen very quickly. I took some moments to process what had gone wrong, what the state of play was: a) was I hurt, b) was the bike damaged, c) what to do now?
The answers were: a) no, fortunately, but my right wrist ached, b) the screen was smashed and as for the rest of it, don’t know yet, c) get it upright and stop looking like a dick.
By the time it was on its side stand, Ralph appeared, none the wiser. It was with much greater care and with two of us on the job that his bike mounted the kerb safely. I tried to open the gate but it was wedged solidly into the brick wall opening. No amount of pulling would ease it. After a while, the manager, who must have seen us on CCTV came down. He couldn’t open it from the inside either, at least not until he’d fetched a big hammer and smacked it hard with me and Ralph tugging.
“Funny, I don’t remember the gate being stuck like that before.”
I kept quiet.
The broken screen dropped off completely as soon as I parked it. We’d started the day at a Honda dealership. It looked like we were going to be visiting another tomorrow morning as well.
