Around the World with Hardy(T)Around the World with Hardy(T)
This is it! 71º 10'
21'' N. Fourteen hours through snow and fog by bus and ferry from Tromsø. 150 kr to get into the tourist trap 'visitor's
centre' and we couldn't even see the (apparently) spectacular 307m cliffs
for the fog and freezing drizzle. And we got there so late we missed the
last ferry back to Honingsvåg and had to sleep in the world's most
northerly (and cold) bus shelter. So this is Nordkapp, the climax of my
Norwegian adventure!
The journey from Tromsø wasn't entirely without incident. The 90 minute wait to change bus on a freezing exposed industrial estate in Alta wouldn't have been the same without the company of the Norwegian nutter who insisted on reciting bus timetables to me the whole time. This experience was offset, however, by the altogether more pleasant company on the Alta-Skaidi leg of Jordi, a self-confessed reindeer and whale eater, who not only explained to me the intricate rules of handball - apparently huge in Norway - but also tried to convince me that Geordie (not Jordi) is actually just a dialect of Norwegian. For instance, the Norwegian word for "home" is hjem, not wildly dissimilar to the Geordie equivalent, as in "Am gannin yame to see wor lass". Similarly, when our Novocastrian chum gets yame, no doubt he'll be keen to see not only "wor lass", but also the bairn (child). His Norwegian counterpart would be left holding the barn. Hmmm, maybe she had a point...
After a "good" night's sleep in the bus shelter, interrupted only by a busload of German (naturally) tourists who wanted to use our toilet, the nerve, a drunken local tearing a strip off me, as a Brit, for the decline in the Norwegian fishing industry, and a couple of bemused gypsies from the nearby circus, I made my way across to the mainland and down to Karasjok, capital of the Same (Lapp) people and home to surely the world worst youth hostel.