2CanRide: Part 35 - Norkapp, Caribou and the Baltic Countries, 16 August 2019

Europe Blog Part 3 Nordkapp, Reindeer and the Baltic Countries

Beautiful Lofoten Archipelago sits well above the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian Sea. The chain of islands is interconnected by an elaborate series of bridges and causeways that eventually links it with the mainland further north. The air was chilly and windy, even during the warmest days of its brief summer. A ferry crossing beginning at Bodo was required to jump from mainland Norway to the southern tip of the island chain.

Before boarding in Bodo

Campite

Unknown Fjord

Lofoten Archipelago

Hiking on Lofoten Islands

Isabelle and I stopped just before opening time at the Viking Museum located somewhere in the middle of the Lofoten Archipelago. A full sized long house had been reconstructed on the hilltop where a modern farmer had uncovered numerous artefacts with the blade of his plough. The displays inside the long house reconstruction were literally brought to life by museum summer staff members, who role-played at various activities typical of Viking life a thousand years ago. On a previous motorcycle trip Isabelle and I had visited the reconstructed Viking long house at L’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. The two exhibits were remarkably similar. In Newfoundland too, animators in period costume added greatly to the impression made by the reconstructed long house. Clearly curators influence one another. Each reconstructed long house was in a remote place. I wonder how many people have actually visited both sites to note the similarities.

Elaborate bridges getting little use in remote areas

Tunnels everywhere, many multiple kilometers long, our average: 30 or more per day,

Animator in the Longhouse

Dining/Meeting Room

Wouldn't have lasted long as a Viking

Two days of riding even further north brought Isabelle and I to Nordkapp Camping where it was downright cold. The campground was 30 kilometers from our goal; Nordkapp Monument, the furthest point north you can reach by road. We saw many reindeer on the tundra in those final days of riding and had dodged some of them on the road. In Patagonia it had been guanacos that we had dodged on the way to Ushuaia, the furthest point south you can reach by road. The final push to Nordkapp involved driving under the Arctic Ocean in a 7 kilometer long tunnel to the Island of Magaroya.

Sunset on Snowy Waterfall

Somewhere in Northern Norway

Motorcycle Club Mascot

Reindeer on the Tundra

Our campground on the tundra was situated in a protective valley at 71 degrees latitude. Despite the surrounding hills it was windy, cold and rainy when we arrived. We assembled our little tent inside a concrete field kitchen the campground provided then squeezed it out the door again. The inner tent was protected by the attached fly. This made it possible to keep the tent’s floor dry while bringing the whole unit outside. We staked it down against the howling wind.

Campground on the Tundra

The wind was strong but soon began to diminish. The rain also slowed and the prediction was for clearing skies after midnight. We planned to look for the midnight sun if things were clear enough. It was exciting to have almost reached Nordkapp. Each year, there exists only a tiny window of opportunity in high summer for a motorcycle camping trip that far into the north. In the morning we hoped to reach our goal.

The Arctic Ocean

It was the 18^th of July when Isabelle and I arrived at Nordkapp, one month after setting out from England. An entrance ticket allowed 24 hours of access to the site. We saw some people with caravans, even a few with tents, who had camped there overnight. We paid the fee then rode into the huge parking lot, putting our kickstands out near two other motos. We started our visit viewing the introductory film in the theatre. Next we saw the underground Chapel, the Cave of Lights and the King’s View of the Barents Sea from the cliff. The first outdoor monuments we saw were the King Olaf Monolith and the Children’s Peace Medallions. Seven children chosen from every corner of the globe had been brought to the site for a week. Under the direction of a Norwegian artist, each child developed a design for a 3 meter high bronze medallion. The themes the children were given were cooperation, integration and sharing the planet.

Seen from Nordkapp

Display of indigenous birds near the Cave of Lights

Finally, we got to the Nordkapp Globe Monument. We couldn’t see a way to ride the motos to the monument from the parking lot so the bikes didn’t make it into the photo. People have been visiting that northern point since Norway’s King Olaf scratched his name into a rock face there in 1795. A visit to the souvenir shop completed our two hour stay at the site. On the way out of the area, we bought a necklace for Isabelle in a shop we had discovered at the roadside the previous day. The shop sold art made by Sami, local indigenous people. The necklace featured a large silver pendant in a stylized image of the midnight sun, a symbol that is often used to decorate Sami drums.

Globe Monument

We had set off from Nordkapp at 11 am riding south east, away from the effects of the Arctic Ocean. We pulled up at a rest stop for lunch, spotting several campervans already parked there. There was open tundra all around the place but high surrounding hills provided wind protection. We began to set things up at a free picnic table. It was cold but the sun felt warm and strong even through five layers of clothing. A Polish man came over from his camper with two large bowls of soup in his hands. The soup was for us! It was delicious.

Yummy Soup

Polish Generosity

A lucky day for Isa's bike

We stopped for the night a little before the border with Finland, the temperature having climbed to almost 17 degrees. Mosquitos, the first of our trip, greeted us at the campsite and we used repellent for the first time. Europeans had warned us about clouds of pesky insects up north but we found them to be only a minor problem. After a few more days of riding southward the flies disappeared altogether.

Art installation in the Forest, can you spot Isa?

Tent Ceiling

Finland felt different from Norway. The roads were straight in the absence of mountains and speed limits were higher. Gone were the elegant bridges and extravagant tunnels. We saw many settlements of Sami people in Lapland. My bike was getting low on oil so I topped it up with some synthetic oil found in a fuel station. This was the first time the bike had used oil.

Arctic Circle Monument/Tepee in Lapland

It took five more days riding due south to reach the capital city of Finland, Helsinki. Reindeer were plentiful much of the way. Graceful animals, they were about the size of a caribou. The deer were a serious hazard for a motorcyclist; Finland’s forests gave them cover. The guanacos had been easier to spot on Patagonia’s open steppe. In Finland, reindeer seemed to be around every corner and behind every tree. Traffic was regularly forced to slow down and to pick its way through a crowd of deer on the road. Each day Isa or I had to make an emergency stop, testing our anti-lock brakes. The closest I came to a collision didn’t even involve braking. A large male reindeer ran up the steep embankment of a culvert on my right as I passed. I just missed him. There had been no time for me to react; it was the reindeer’s reaction that saved both our lives. He dug his front hoofs into the gravel and veered away from his planned road crossing. Isabelle slowed rapidly and swerved around him too. It took a few minutes for us both to settle down again.

Helsinki Metro

Day-time high temperatures changed from 7 in the north to 27 degrees by the time we reached our campground on the Baltic Coast. Prices also climbed as Helsinki’s “highest quality of life in the world” replaced the hinterland experience. The history of Finland’s capital city was to be illuminated by our walking-tour guide, Michael. Unfortunately, Michael’s hesitant speech habits and constant tangents detracted from the tour, our first disappointment in many walking tours. We did learn that Finland had enjoyed about 200 years of independence. Before that hunter-gathering, forestry and small scale subsistence farming were Finland’s main land uses. Finns had historically been dominated by Sweden and tended to copy that society’s infrastructure designs, social ways and conventions. Finland also had a hot and cold relationship with its neighbor, Russia. Finland had sided with Nazi Germany against Russia in WWII in a, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of loose bond. Today, Finns see themselves today in a role as arbitrator between Russia and the west, pointing to the recent meeting in Helsinki between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Helsinki's Central Plaza

Church

A 3 hour ferry to Tallinn, Estonia was aboard a large and luxurious ship. There was a magic show for the kids in the ballroom and individual entertainments in each of the ship’s other lounges and outdoor areas. We rode away from the ship in warm sunshine and soon arrived at our campground, located in an open field surrounded by farms. There was an army truck abandoned in the field next to the campground. Farmyard animals were literally eating around it. Estonia seemed less sophisticated than what we had seen in Scandinavia but it was also a lot less expensive. We enjoyed the 15 Euro camping fee and hoped the most expensive part of our trip was over.

Abandoned Truck

We needed to manage the number of permitted days we used inside Europe’s “Schengen Zone.” We had completed the theme of our first Europe trip - visiting Scandinavia, especially Norway. We planned to simply transit the Baltic countries and northern Europe. The UK was not a member of the Schengen Agreement. Crossing the English Channel would end our use of allotted days inside the Schengen zone but we still needed to stop in Riga for a few days. The BMW dealership in Riga, Latvia had quoted fair prices for what we needed. Both bikes were overdue for servicing and each one had little things wrong outside the scope of a normal servicing. It would take two days of riding to get to Riga from Tallinn. We planned to stay in Riga’s biker hotel, “Two Wheels” while the motos were serviced. I had read about it during research for the trip.

At the Tallinn campground we met and had a great conversation with a salty old gentleman riding a Honda C90 scooter. He camped beside us in the open field. He had lived in Tallinn as a boy, during Soviet times. He was fulfilling a romantic desire to see Estonia’s capital again before he died. It was plain to see it was an important journey for him.

In Latvia we once again experienced lane sharing by cars on the highways. Isabelle called them, “Mexican passes” because we first encountered them in Mexico. As part of the manoeuvre, vehicles moving in both directions kept to their right, even putting a wheel onto the paved shoulder. Cars passed others while straddling the centre line of the road. It was a bit frightening at first but everyone’s cooperation made it a relatively safe practice.

Two Wheels was in a suburb of Riga, across the river from the beautiful and historic Old Town. Remnants of Soviet administration practices in Riga had resulted in a patchwork of urban renewal and decay. The trouble in “micro-districts”, we would call them suburbs, lay with ambiguity surrounding responsibility for and ownership of buildings and exterior areas. Soviet collectivised ownership and central planning ideas had been well intended but ambitious city plans were mostly left uncompleted. As a result, rows and rows of run-down bland and identical blocks of flats were surrounded by weedy open spaces punctuated by crumbling parking lots and walkways.

Zeppelin Hangars in Riga

Indoor Market in Riga

We enjoyed low prices in grocery stores and markets. Restaurant prices were low too, even in the tourist zones. There were lots of tourists in the old city the day we went. In addition to the city centre, we visited the huge market situated in five old Zeppelin hangars beside the river.

Church Ceiling in Riga

Chance Listening to dress rehearsal of Four Seasons for Violin and Organ

The Baltic nations had been rolled over first in an eastward direction by German tanks, trucks and troops. USSR reversed the flow a few years later as it pushed German forces westward, out of Russia’s homeland. Beside the market we visited the Jewish Ghetto from WWII. Displays in restored sections of the ghetto told us about the appalling conditions there and about Nazi mass exterminations of Riga’s Jews in the forests surrounding the city. When the Soviets arrived, liberating Latvia from the Germans, they never left. Latvians were not truly free until the breakup of the Soviet Union, forty-five years later.

Next was Lithuania where farms were of a larger scale and more mechanized than what we had seen in Latvia. Fields full of healthy crops alternated with extensive wood lots. We rode to the Hill of Crosses. Police officers directed us to parking areas in the open fields surrounding the site. Lithuania hadn’t figured out how to handle huge increases in visitors to the site since Pope John Paul II brought legitimacy to it by saying Mass there. The Hill of Crosses popped up in the late 1800’s as an unofficial, unregulated site for private memorials. The Soviets objected to any religious symbols and bulldozed the place twice but locals re-erected things overnight each time. Lithuanians were fervent Catholics who stubbornly wanted to preserve their culture.

Hill of Crosses

The first thing that impressed us in Poland was the proliferation of factories, large cities and huge, fully mechanized farms. Compared with the developing Baltic nations, Poland’s economy seemed on fire. Hurried people moved about on the roads. Many disobeyed speed limits and displayed impatience with slower drivers. Transport trucks filled the roads at high speeds and high noise levels. Riding was much more stressful and tiring for us in Poland than it had been throughout the scenic and pastoral regions of Scandinavia and the Baltic States.

We learned much on two guided walking tours in Warsaw. Yes, we were supposed to be simply transiting back to the UK. And yes, we vowed to return, making northeastern Europe the theme of a three month trip in the near future but we just couldn’t resist stopping briefly in Poland’s historic Capitol. We were truly shocked regarding the scale of devastation brought to Poland by Nazi Germany. We learned that Hitler ordered, “Take no prisoners” and that Warsaw was razed to the ground as an example to the world after the failed Warsaw uprising of 1944.

Marching on the New Guard

Warsaw

In 1944, Russian troops lay outside Warsaw, poised to liberate it from German occupation. Poles didn’t want liberation on Russia’s terms. They wanted to negotiate from a position of strength. That strength, they thought could be gained through rising up, throwing the Nazis out of Warsaw before the Russians arrived. It didn’t work. The USSR waited out the conflict between the Nazis and Poles, thus letting the two sides thin each other down to make the job of clearing out the Germans less dangerous. The Soviet delay also ensured a weak bargaining position for the Poles regarding Soviet “liberation.” The tragic result of such bravery by the Poles was 200,000 more dead and the city being leveled in reprisal by the still occupying, greatly reinforced Germans.

Poles suffered unimaginably in the war with Germany. Political prisoners were sent to their deaths in concentration camps. Randomly selected civilians were shot in the streets as reprisal against actions by the Resistance. Hundreds of thousands, mostly civilians, were killed during The Uprising and Warsaw had been leveled. Liquidation camps with names like Auschwitz and Treblinka were built inside Poland where, along with millions of others, almost all of Poland’s Jews were exterminated.

Old Town Warsaw was completely reconstructed after the war using Soviet central planning. The undertaking was completed between 1952 and 1955 using original styles of architecture. Nationalization of all properties, economies-of-scale and virtual conscription of labour made the task possible. Many buildings were reconstructed in near perfect imitation of the original ones.

Reconstruction

Warsaw Street Scene Built in 1950's

Near Perfect Imitation of Original Buildings

We rode to a beautiful campsite located 20 kilometers from Auschwitz. It was pleasant and clean. It was also the cheapest lodging of the trip so far at 1/5^th the price we paid in Warsaw. We used it as a base camp for a visit to the concentration camp.

Camp Gate: "Work Will Set You Free"

Inside Auschwitz

Originally a Polish Military Garrison

We visited both Auschwitz and Birkenau, taking a day long guided tour. We learned that the facilities had been built for the express purpose of efficiently killing and disposing of large numbers of humans. The killings began with adults suffering from mental and physical disabilities. The victims grew to include large numbers of Poles, Roma/Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of War and other ethnic groups but mainly it was European Jews who were killed. Auschwitz and Birkenau alone exterminated more than a million Jews. Earlier, German High Command found that soldiers involved in the bloodbath of mass shootings suffered mental shock. Gassing methods developed and used in the camps spared soldiers who were doing the killing from seeing the moment of their victims’ deaths. Inmate slave labour accomplished the tasks of body disposal and other camp services.

Inscription inside garrison jail

Plaque on the tour

Housing for Labourers in Birkenau

Gate into Birkenau

Several more days of riding brought us across Germany and into Luxemburg. During that time, we found ourselves thinking and talking about what we had seen in the Baltics and especially in Poland. Isabelle and I began slow overland travel with the aim of connecting with and learning about people we would meet along the way. We hoped travel would allow us a better understand of humanity. Instead, the depth of our ignorance was slowly exposed. We were left with far more questions than answers. We saw monuments, plaques and sculptures; heard stories and music that told of terrible loss. Cruelty, domination and violence driven by feelings of superiority, expectations of entitlement or just plain greed were the histories of all the regions we visited.

In those days of riding we remained a little stunned by what we had seen. We wondered how it all started. How could a person from a highly developed and sophisticated culture be radicalized to accept and to project extreme hatred and violence? Running a place like Auschwitz required the cooperation of thousands of immediate staff and an accepted ideology of hatred in the larger population. Could any person in the street have become a productive staff member at Auschwitz? Looking at a person walking in the street, at another playing with her children in a campground or chatting with still another in a coffee shop convinces one of that person’s pragmatism and good manners. People appear pleasant and kind. They love their children. What lies beneath? What would it take to radicalize them? Can anyone be radicalized? At what point does hatred become a self-feeding chain reaction?

We heard the air-raid sirens sounding at 5 pm on the first of August. Everywhere Poles stopped what they were doing and stood still to mark the anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Europe’s twentieth century had been filled with collective hatred and brutality, violence on a massive scale. In that moment at the beginning of August, the sirens spoke of remembrance and Polish pride. Ordinary Poles, who lost so much in World War Two, had acted when at their lowest point. It seemed, at least at that instant, resistance to hatred and oppression was actually possible.