Sweden Road Trip #6: Höga Kusten

We spent about five days in Höga Kusten, making it the longest stop of the whole road trip. I’m going to cover most of those few days in this post, but there was one day on which we ventured out and discovered an amazing little seaside town which will get a blog post of its own (and you’ll see why when we get to that, too). But our arrival to The High Coast was a nice one – the weather was perfect for setting up the tent in our incredibly awkward spot between a bunch of trees not designed for 4WD’s with caravans attached to them. By the time we set up everything, we had some dinner and wandered down by the lake as the sun was going down. The next morning, also clear and sunny, we could really appreciate our view from the tent (pictured on the left – I stood just outside on the deck as I took this photo. Not bad, eh?).

The next couple of days are a blur, and I think possibly the next day we went on our random adventure I’m covering in part 7 of this series before the rain settled in for the week. At some point in those first couple of days, anyway, we began to explore the place, from the little pub and the couple of restaurants, to wandering past the other parts of the camping site, the mini-golf, and various other attractions. The camping site had the lake on our side, but behind us was the ocean, and there we found a sauna which we decided to go to before leaving this site. We also found a beach with lots of trees. For some reason I found this endlessly fascinating.

One fairly big world event that happened while we were at Höga Kusten was the World Cup Grand Final between Germany and Argentina. The only place you could see the game on the camping site was on your phone (if you had decent coverage, which most of us didn’t have) or the pub, which was showing it on their televisions. So we went down to watch the game, but about halfway through an enormous storm passed over us, quickly killing the television reception as we were smashed by violent rain. We then spent the next hour or so running between a group of 20 or so people huddled around the one phone that could show the game and outside to watch the lightning lashing across the sky. After the game, when the rain slowed down, we made a run for our tent again and warmed up inside. When we awoke the next morning, the site was starting to flood – a problem that wouldn’t go away until just before we left. It also turned out that a lot of Southern Sweden, where we’re from, was also flooding after almost a solid week of rain.

On the last night before leaving Höga Kusten and heading inland, we finally went to the sauna. It was free for anybody to use, and wood was provided behind the sauna – or rather it was supposed to be. After a little bit of investigating the wood allocated for use in the sauna was sitting behind a truck out of sight, about maybe a kilometre away. I volunteered to carry the bulk of the wood, slinging it in a big bag over my shoulders so that my back could take the strain. Once inside though, the sauna was nice and relaxing and had a great view of the sea and the bits of peninsula jutting out in front of us. Saunas are very popular in Sweden, both in Summer and Winter months, but I guess for me my experiences are limited because in Australia Summer is a kind of sauna, with high temperatures and high humidity for around half of the year. So it was nice to do this in a country where the whole thing is a bit more, well, warranted I guess.

The last day, before leaving, we went wandering around the edge of the camp site along the water, through a bunch of rock fields. It was quite interesting to find places where forest and rocks sort of intertwined, and in these areas the rocks were covered in this light white and green mossy stuff. It added a sort of mystique to the area, but the reason behind these rock fields is fairly well known. Back in the ice age, this area of land was pushed down by the ice significantly. After the ice age the land began to rise back up again very quickly, and today it rises in places here at around 8mm (or a third of an inch) a year. So these rock fields, not too long ago, were underneath the water. The land is constantly going through dramatic changes, even in the space of a single human lifetime, and there’s a great art experiment about this that I’ll show in the next post.

I leave you at the end of this episode with my favourite picture from Höga Kusten – one evening, as the mist rolled over the hills surrounding the lake, a German ship floated in the middle of the water. For some reason this reminded me of a certain scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which long-time readers of my blog will know is one of my all-time favourite movies). Anyway, it was eerie but awesome and I took about a dozen photos that all look the same and I’m not really sure why. Next time, I show our random adventure beyond the campsite area before we head inland and then back south toward home.