Sweden Road Trip #7: The Village You Could Only Enter By Foot

I’m not 100% sure where this village is, but Bönhamn is somewhere along The High Coast of Sweden and we discovered it while out adventuring one day. It’s one of the most unforgettable days of the entire trip for me, which is why I feel like it deserved its own post even if I don’t have as much to say about these pictures (so I’m mostly just going to list them with captions – sorry). One of them is the art experiment to do with the land rising as I promised in the last post, though. Enjoy!

This seaside village, which I assume is mostly occupied in Summer (as it would freeze over in Winter) is blocked at the entrance by a sign which says “Welcome By Foot”. In other words, you have to park outside the village and walk in (unless you live there, I guess).

As you can see a lot of the houses here have their own jetties or boats, and the people who do stay here in Winter would use snowmobiles to go across the water to the other side of town, or even to nearby islands. I suspect a lot of the houses are rented each Summer to tourists who feel like getting away from the big cities for a while.

There’s a lot of boats in this village. I daresay almost as many boats as people.

As I said in my last post, the land around here is rising by about 8mm a year (or a third of an inch). So a century ago, these rocks here would have been mostly underwater, and all the nearby islands would have been substantially smaller. Amazing when you think about it. I wonder how far back you’d have to go before these islands just weren’t here at all? I suspect not very…

This is the art project I was telling you about. These steps go into the water a fair bit as you can see, and the idea is that each step is measured with regard to the land rising speed so that each new generation will have a new step above the water. Really cool way to illustrate this geological phenomena!

This back yard rocks! Get it? …moving on.
But seriously though a lot of the houses around here had great gardens too, built around some of the nature such as giant boulders. I like this a lot.

This sign roughly translates as the following:
“If you want to be happy for a day, drink wine. If you want to be happy for a month, read a book. If you want to be happy for life, grow a garden.”

That’s it for now. In the next post we’ll head inland through the north of Sweden before beginning our trek back home in the South. I’m not 100% sure right now but I think I have three posts left in this little series, and I’m working to try and get them up quickly because I have other things to blog about too (like my trip to England this coming week, and of course, as always at this time of year, NaNoWriMo).

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.

Sweden Road Trip #5: The Road To Höga Kusten

A map, courtesy of Lonely Planet, with drawings on it courtesy of me. This stretch of drive was from Stockholm up to Höga Kusten. The key on the map is, oddly, quite wrong – this part of the road trip looks to be 300km according to the key but I can tell you for a fact it’s more like 500km – we had to split it up into two days. Also they’ve misspelled Gävle. Anyway, on with the blog post.

After a few days hanging in and around Stockholm (kind of), we finally headed up north to Gävle and then Höga Kusten (The High Coast), over the course of a couple of days. The High Coast may not look high compared to a lot of Scandinavia – it’s only halfway up the country, after all – but I should remind you that the top part of Sweden (and Finland and Norway) is actually in the Arctic Circle – even Southern Sweden is quite north. So if you see any maps telling you Norrland (Northern Sweden) is only the top quarter of the country, ignore those maps – Norrland begins at around Sundsvall, a bit south of The High Coast. Also, I think The High Coast may have its name due to certain geological features that I shall discuss in the next blog post (yes, it’s to do with land rising).

Anyway, enough geography (that’s a lie, I just couldn’t think of a good transition to a new paragraph, for which I deeply apologise). The drive to Gävle was only a few hours but it was already getting late, so we decided to rest up and shoot off early the next day instead. We stopped at a place called Rullsands Camping nearby and set up tent, before running off to the beach which was mostly deserted as it had already become fairly cold as the sun began to set. But this didn’t bother us. Well actually I lie, I whinged and moaned about the water not being warm enough, but that’s what happens when you get an Aussie in Swedish ocean, regardless of the time of year. What does continue to amaze me with Swedish beaches though is the total lack of waves. I have barely seen a wave since I moved here, and I’ve been to at least half a dozen beaches now. Not that I’m much of a surfer, but it’s just something I’ve noticed I guess. What fascinated me with this particular beach was the really quite large stones sticking out of the water, noticeable quite a long way into the water as it remains shallow a long way out too. I can’t help but think that at winter, when this would be frozen over, you could make some sort of sports game on the ice using the rocks as goals or something. Or not. I don’t know.

That night, as we failed to go to bed early to rest like we intended, I came across a small frog or two hopping around the place. It was cool to see them, but I did sort of freak out that I would step on one because my eyesight in the darkness is pretty terrible. But I don’t think I did and in the end the bigger concern of the night was, sadly, some noisy drunken campers nearby who eventually got yelled at by everybody to shut up and finally did a little while before the sun came back up (I hate sounding like the fun police, but there were a lot of families and young kids around, and you can literally and legally camp ANYWHERE in Sweden if you want, meaning there’s a lot of other places you can go if you want to have a big party and not annoy a couple of hundred other campers. End rant). Before leaving we went back to the beach one last time. The others swam again but I just sunbathed for a little while, as the sun was out and shining in full which led to a surprisingly busier beach (I didn’t think that many people were actually staying near here but there you go). Eventually we packed up and got back on the road.

As we found ourselves ever further north, Sweden showed its true natural face – lots of trees, lots of lakes, some more trees and even more lakes. Sweden has just under 100 000 lakes, and just under 9% of the landmass is covered in lakes which is quite staggering (although Finland next door, despite much debate, has nearly double this many lakes (and Canada has several million but then Canada is just enormous so that goes without saying)). Still, it makes for stunning scenery, especially on blue sky Summer days like almost every day we drove (the car had no air conditioning so we kept sweltering in the heat while driving and then catching up to the rain at each new campsite…typical). I would love to go back to this area during Winter and see everything frozen over and covered in ice – many of the lakes up this high you can drive on safely for a couple of months each year. Eventually, at around the same point as Sundsvall, we crossed Högakustenbron (The High Coast Bridge – the “The” is in this word too, as it’s the “en” in the middle. But don’t get me started on Swedish language, at least not until I feel more confident with it) which really is quite a huge and magnificent bridge. At the other end of this was…ta-da, Höga Kusten!

We were greeted with a beautiful afternoon and evening, and the last clear-sky day on which we would set up the tent for the rest of the road trip as the weather was finally about to wreak a bit of havoc. Finally, the main part of our holiday had begun! But I’ll cover the details of the few days we spent in this beautiful part of the world next time!