Sweden Road Trip #10: Ytterhogdal, Sveg, and back home again

Our plan after leaving Norrland for Halmstad was to travel the 1000km (approximately) in two days, stopping over about halfway overnight. Of course, this didn’t happen at all. The first day we got going quite slow, and after only an hour or two of driving we were all quite hungry. We kept our eyes peeled for a McDonald’s, on the rather foolish assumption that everywhere has a McDonald’s eventually. But alas, we were so much in the middle of nowhere that there was no such place to be found. We eventually stopped in the tiny town of Ytterhogdal, and were going to go into a restaurant nearby that was probably going to be expensive when I found a Thai food place hiding on the side of a building. I thought it was too good to be true – real and good Thai food is a rarity anywhere in Sweden (especially coming from Australia where every third building is a Thai restaurant). But when I looked at the menu, it looked like legitimate, real Thai cuisine, so we ate what turned out to be an amazing lunch that will always be what I remember about Ytterhogdal (sorry any Ytterhogdalites who read my page…all three of you). My other half jumped in the water for a quick swim to get some respite from the heat, and then we got back in the car again.

We didn’t get much further though, and decided that evening to pull up in the town of Sveg and settle in for the night. This was a double edged sword – it was nice to rest but it may have extended the travelling by another day. We just didn’t know at this point. We didn’t even set up the tent we were so exhausted, but it barely got dark at all that night so sleeping outside was fun if a touch on the dewy side. Stopping to relax was something we oddly needed – the last few days of the road trip had taken it out of us more than we realised, so sitting down with a good book, coffee, and a simple pesto pasta meal was the perfect way to unwind. After a while, we decided to go exploring around the campsite. We found a little walking bridge to a tiny island, with a nice water fountain in the water nearby. But what we found on the island was actually quite interesting.

It turned out that there were a lot of beavers in the area who would often come up the river at night and run riot on this little island. They were almost never seen during the day, sadly, although there was an awesome statue in the middle of the island of a beaver chomping away on a tree. But what was visible if you looked closely was the damage to the island caused by the beavers – tree stumps that had clearly been gnawed away at over time. A part of me wanted to go and see if I could see any beavers later that night but then I was overwhelmed by a fairly excusable desire to sleep during the night instead. Oh well.

The next day we shot off again, but after only a couple of hours we were already struggling. About halfway through the afternoon we decided to do something drastic and unexpected – we stopped. The driver of our group decided to sleep for a couple of hours, while the rest of us chilled out by the side of this mountain with an amazing view of the lake and forests in front of us. The reasoning behind this was so that we could drive at night, when it was cooler, and just push on through until we got home in the early hours of the next day, which is exactly what happened – we did get home just as the sun began to come up.

It had been a long trip home, and I would guess the road trip itself was somewhere around the 3000km mark, but it had been an amazing two weeks that I’ll never forget. Sweden is an amazingly beautiful country and I am incredibly lucky to have seen so much of it with my own eyes. If you ever visit Sweden in your life, I urge you to go and see more than just the obvious places like Stockholm. I love cities, but the real Sweden is up north, with the trees and the lakes and even the moose. Go on, go visit it there. You won’t regret it, I promise you.