Into the Arctic!

Billy says:

Ok, I admit it, I'm obsessed with trains, and I'm obsessed with deals. There's things I want to do only because they're covered by the rail pass, and the more places we go, the better deal the passes become. The initial idea behind the trip to Narvik, Norway was based on this. It's simply the furthest north place you can go by train. We left Lund at 11.30am Tues. and arrived in Narvik at 7.15pm on Weds. Aside from a few hours in Stockholm eating dinner and buying groceries, the rest of the time we were on the train. That's about 1900km covered by train. When we met people on the train who asked us where we were going and why, we could only say "it's the furthest north that the train goes." Honestly, I'd pictured the train being virtually empty most of the way and ending in a tiny town with a few hundred inhabitants, but it turns out there's a university town (Tromsö) with wbout 80,000 inhabitants 240 km north of Narvik. I guess my vision of the world is pretty skewed by "civilization." But along the way, we learned a number of reasons to go to Narvik, after all.


The last seven hours of the train ride are breathtaking, and the scenery alone almost makes the whole trip worth it. I learned that as you move north, past the arctic circle, trees are permanently dwarfed by the constant cold. These dwarf forests are kind of eerily beautiful. (The trees only started having leaves one week before we arrived, and summer ends in August!) Then we passed dozens of small lakes, and one huge one that was so still and clear that it reflected the sky and mountains surrounding it as perfectly as a mirror. It literally looked like you could dive into the sky. Libby loved the scores of waterfalls from the melting snow everywhere. The train winds for the last hour along a cliff, looking down an amazing fjörd, and another mountain across the way. This is such a thrilling and dramatic way to reach a city.




When we arrived in Narvik, we immediately saw that it was a much bigger city than we'd expected and then we saw an almost perfect (double) rainbow! Quite a good omen.


Some noteworthy things to know about Narvik (mostly learned at the Narvik War Museum, and also through conversation):

¤ Narvik is a port town, and principally used for shipping Iron Ore, which is extracted from the earth at Kiruna, Sweden (The city of Kiruna, incidentally, needs to be entirely relocated because mining has made the earth surrounding into a very swampy terrain). The rail line we rode connects the mines with the sea ports at Narvik and Luleå, Sweden.

¤ Due to its importance in iron transport in particular, and the rail connection to Sweden generally, the Germans and British fought bitterly for control of Narvik during WWII. (Striking how we thought we were going so far away from "civilization" and smacked into more history of WWII and the Cold War. What a huge thing WWII was, with ripples everywhere and for generations). The British eventually lost the battles for Narvik, and Norway surrendered to the Nazis who, with the help of the Norse National Socialist Party, controlled the country from 1940-45.



¤ The Germans had a propaganda campaign to convince the Norweigans that they needed to occupy the country because the british wanted to bring war to their "neutral" nation, so the Germans represented "peace" through military occupation.

¤ When the British took control of Narvik, the British bombed the town severely, to try and leave nothing for the Germans to make use of. 90% of the city was destroyed.

¤ A British Naval officer, facing Court Martial for disobeying his superiors, commandeered a few large vessels and successfully evacuated half the city's population.

¤ The Nazis held thousands of Soviet prisoners in the area surrounding Narvik (and throughout Norway). The Museum had dozens of items that the Soviet prisoners made in order to barter for food from the Norwegians, since their rations were so so little, like this chess set. A great many prisoners died from starvation, overwork and straight brutality, as apparently both Hitler and Stalin agreed that Soviet prisoners of war did not deserve human rights. In one instance, a few thousand Serbian prisoners were made to - unwittingly - dig their own mass graves before being wholesale slaughtered.

¤ During the battle for Narvik, women of the town took their children outside and held them high to show the war planes that they were not targets to be bombed.

Far from the rest of the world?


Here are our 11 pm shadows:



Playing in the city at 1 am while the sun glints off this oblisque:




p.s. if you take your own trip to Narvik, we learned that some beautiful places on the way and nearby are: Abisko National Park in Sweden and the Lofoten islands off the coast of Narvik, which one Norweigan woman said was the most beautiful place she'd ever been. We regret not having time to make it to those places...