camping | WheatyPete's World

“You’re brave,” a colleague told me, when she learnt what I was doing over the summer, “I would never just travel to a country with nowhere to stay.”

A Turkish proverb popped into my head for some reason: ‘You are as old as your worries and as young as your hopes’. I didn’t feel particularly brave. Having nowhere booked for a road trip gave more freedom. You can drive as much as you want on any particular day and we live in the era of mobile phones anyway so you can just search for ‘campsite near me’. In fact, it causes more stress if you have to be at a certain place at a certain time. The only places we had to be at a certain time on this road trip were the ferries to and from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and Denmark to Sweden. If you book stops, then you can’t just see somewhere that looks interesting and think, “Oh, let’s stay here”.

And then there is the fact that in Scandinavia, ‘Allemannsretten’ (the right to roam law) means that you can wild camp for two nights, if you follow certain rules. So, we had a toilet tent, a garden trunk full of food (although this was more because we had been advised to do this as it is so expensive in Norway) and a head full of hopes. The freedom we had by not booking ahead gave a feeling of youthful, bright-eyed enthusiasm to the whole trip rather than worries. Perhaps this form of naïve optimism would actually start to roll back the years and end up making us feel younger. But it was certainly not a case of bravery.

“Not really,” I answer.

Our heads full of hopes, we crossed to Holland and set off towards northern Germany. The aim was to get as close to Denmark as possible today and so we found ourselves about 80km south of Hamburg, near the town of Ottersburg, where we searched out somewhere to stay. We ended up on a quiet country avenue with smart, rambling houses set in well-kept gardens on one side, fields of crops on the other and a shady canopy of trees above. The campsite was set under silver birch trees and Mattheus, who ran the place, told us that through a gate in the hedge, there was a path to a lake with a pub next to it about 100m away. As we are setting up, he walks past heading purposefully for the gate, wearing his swimmers, a towel around his shoulders and a broad, friendly smile on his face, engulfed in a fog of fragrant weed smoke.

Aalborg, on the north-eastern tip of Jutland, is a harbour that is in the process of shaking off the marine industries of its past and smartening up the elegant but dilapidated architecture, so is a mixture of eery, but somehow beautiful, melancholy warehouses or shipwrights’ workshops and buzzing waterside bars, gyms or cafes. You can camp in the carpark next to the harbour where Peaches provides a splash of bright orange amongst the two rows of uniformly white motorhomes. It’s all automated and you pay for a keycard to the shower block which refunds unused credit when you leave. In the early morning, a large hare is hopping down the road between the shower block and the carpark. Peaches had enjoyed some dub-love from a few people on the drive up. As one car overtook, the passenger actually held up an orange toy VW campervan, which she waved about in our general direction, grinning manically.

The ferry was interesting. People were stacking crates upon crates of beer onto sack trucks and the duty-free shop was more like a wholesale warehouse with pallets piled high with flatpack beers. As we had been advised, we had brought all the beers we needed squashed into the further reaches of Peaches so we wouldn’t face any annoying customs questions. It was a mark of the difference in prices between mainland Europe and Scandinavia. After crossing from Frederikshavn (Denmark) to Gothenburg in Sweden, we made it into Norway in the early afternoon, finding a campsite next to a fjord about 100km to the south of Oslo. We didn’t get to see much of Oslo as the route is mostly tunnels under the capital. Norway is not in the EU, but we got in within the timeframe needed because the dog’s worming stamp in his pet passport had to be dated within a week of issue for entry into the country from the EU. In the event, no-one checked anyway. There were no officials at the border between Sweden and Norway.

After one night in a site overlooking a fjord, it was an unattended self-service site in forested mountains. You had to drive up a steep, narrow, winding road through the pines to get to it. There wasn’t any need to wild camp; the camping fees were not expensive, and I bonded with the notion of not having to empty the chemical toilet and being able to get a hot shower. We took a walk in the forest around the site and were surprised to hear what sounded like a mosque call coming from the trees. What on earth would an imam be doing up here calling from the wilderness on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere? We even asked a woman who was getting out of her car outside her idyllic chalet. But she had no idea either. The mystery was solved back at the near-empty campsite where I got chatting to the only other people there. They were in a German-registered car and were Iranian Kurds. What we had mistaken for a mosque call to worship was in fact a Kurdish folk song. One of them was a singer and had belted out a song from deep in the woods.

The most popular car in Norway seems to be the Tesler. This is a little surprising for a country whose wealth is built on the revenue from North Sea oil which saw it grow from a small economy based on fishing and shipping to one of the richest in the world. But it is a mark of the high standard of living people enjoy here. The houses reflect this too: the picture postcard chalet architecture in pastel shades set in stunning mountainscapes. The ones I liked the best were the ones with traditional turf roofs. We had to drive back down the same windy road to get back onto our route to Aurlandsvangen. Although a main road, it’s closed in wintertime and winds its way up and down the mountains, sometimes flanked by 3m high snow poles in the high passes.

Iona had, surprisingly for a teenager, become enamoured of the spectacular bridges and tunnels we had driven along the route since Germany and neither of us could blame her really. Who wouldn’t be awestruck by such pomp and engineering prowess manifested with such humbling beauty? So, when we found out that we could drive through the second longest road tunnel in the world, well who could resist that? When it was built, it meant that you could finally travel between Oslo and Bergen with no ferry connections and no difficult mountain crossings during winter. Opened in 2000, the 24.51km (15.23 mile) Lærdalstunnelen is quite a surreal experience to drive. The tunnel doesn’t have emergency exits. However, there are many safety precautions in case of accident, fire, or other emergency. Emergency phones marked ‘SOS’ are installed every 250 metres for contacting police, fire departments, and hospitals. Fire extinguishers are placed every 125 metres. Wiring is installed so that radios and mobile phones do not lose service while inside the tunnel. Every so often, to break the monotony, there are cavernous cathedral-like chambers hollowed out of the rock and lit with neon lights of green or blue or pink. You can see the glows of these brightly-coloured fluorescent pinprick lights way ahead as you approach them thinking ‘What the…?’ Iona was beside herself with glee.