Next stop: Svolvaer

August of 2007. Three friends carrying backpacks and an interrail pass. Everything perfectly planned: Barcelona-Copenhagen, south Sweden, Norwegian coast, north Finland and down until Helsinki to get the plane back home. No time to improvise. Almost no time to breathe. But, suddenly, a setback changes the schedule.

It is on an old wooden train that joins the cities of Myrdal and Fläm where we met the person who was about to deviate our journey. She was a Spanish journalist who had to write about Norway for the magazine she worked for. She was the one who almost obligated us to go to the Lofoten Islands. We felt that we had to go there even if it meant spending some days less in other cities. But the Islands were quite far North; we had to cross the Polar Circle. So, it wasn’t until we arrived in Bodo when we could take a ferry in the direction of Svolvaer, capital of Lofoten Islands.
The breeze of the sea caressing our faces, the codfish smell, the looks of the other travelers wandering nervously up and down the ship trying to guess what they were going to find at the islands… There were signs everywhere telling us that we had taken the right decision.
We arrived just in time to catch the only bus in the city, which was also the only way of getting to the camp (besides hitchhiking). Finally we got there and I cannot describe the feeling when we saw the wooden bungalows by the fjords. It was an impressive image with the best soundtrack: absolute silence. We felt really small surrounded by huge mountains, a blue cloudless sky, and two endless fiords. The next morning, the campground owner suggested we go with him to sail around one of the fiords (Trollfjord) in his boat. We were the only human existence around the place. After a while he challenged us to jump to the sea… and we jumped! Twice! The water was freezing, so much that I couldn’t breathe until I got up to the boat. Nevertheless, I knew that this was the only chance to do it and I wasn’t going to miss it. I just wanted to live every second we were spending on that island.

After this experience, I learnt that even if one has everything perfectly planned, it is really important to save some space for improvisation.

The essence of travelling

Travelling is a way of life. Someone who enjoys every trip tries to always have the next one written down in the agenda.
To me, knowing that I have something prepared in advance, for some days or even months, makes me feel deliriously happy. Even if it is a quick escape that won’t last longer than a weekend. It is not a matter of time. It is a matter of predisposition to submerge oneself as much as possible in the foreign culture and traditions. One can live in a foreign country for years and know very little about the place one’s living in. More often than not, people tend to form ghettos when they are abroad. I guess they feel a bit more at home. Nevertheless, in my opinion, feeling at home is understanding the new environment and trying to fit into it. The day one achieves this is when one can say out loud: This is home! And the feeling of considering different places around the world as one’s own home is something simply amazing.
Moreover, travelling makes one forget one’s problems or worries. Because not only the body but also the mind travels. From the moment one starts to plan the trip the mind starts fantasizing about the experience of what that journey will mean. Every trip makes us change in some way.
When I arrive back to my bedroom in Barcelona I usually go over the whole experience in my head and think about what it has meant to me. It is a great exercise that helps me understand in which ways the journey was worth it. I consider that even if I didn’t enjoy the experience very much, every cloud has a silver lining and there will be a great moral hidden somewhere. It is just a matter of reading between the lines.