Lappi

I spent one transit day in luleå, one of the few places where Mac Donald's had to face bankruptcy. the small scale tour around town had the "second ugliest building in Luleå" as its main attraction. from Luleå I took the bus to Pajala and called this man called Bertil, a distant relative who was going to pick me up. When I told him I was going to take the bus to Pajala the next day he said, "I´ll pick you up at quarter past two, I drive a blue Volvo". Simple questions, simple answers.

My travel companion, my grandfather Otto, was also sitting in that blue Volvo when the bus arrived a few minutes behind schedule to Pajala. Quite soon we said goodbye to Bertil and started driving over to Finland. The border, Otto said, is the most peaceful and quiet one on earth, he might have been right, the border control office looked like being abandoned before it was ever even used. Otto was quite nervous about the fact that I insisted to be the driver. He warned me about the reindeer's, and then he warned me about reindeer's and then again about reindeer's. In his shotgun position he was my reindeer lookout, but not only did he warn me for reindeer's on the road but for mail boxes that he kept confusing with them.

We stayed in Tiurajärvi, the little lake that was the location of my grandfathers childhood home. Ottos cabin was damaged by a severe water leakage so Otto slept in the dressing room of the sauna, and i was hospitalised a long stonecast away from, in the house of Hilda, the widow of Otto´s brother.
Hilda is the most sharp 95 year old person i ever met and she lives with her daughter Soile. Hilda loves solving crosswords and Soile loves picking cloud berries. Every mooring me Soile and Hilda woke up by the sound of Otto trying to make morning coffee that he never succeeded making. The regular breakfast conversation followed a few patterns, either Hilda an Otto told us stories from the past or they ended up in discussions about what place was worth showing me. One morning they lively discussed which trail was the best one to do according to Hilda Ottos suggestion was lousy and vice verse. I think Otto knew all along that he wanted to take me on the walk that followed the river, it was a beautiful trail but at the same time a wet one, from feet to knees= not dry.

kragerø

I believe neighbors in Norway have had no lack of topics this year, a cold and rainy summer is indeed an go theme for a chat. Kraerø 2007 is different from last year but the things that make it different are quite intangible. I am happy here. We survive long workdays by all sorts of harassments and bad jokes, and I have discovered guests are nicer on rainy days. Tollboden sells a lot of pizza, rumors say that 70% of all we sell is pizza and there is one guy employed full time for only making the pizza dough.
Kragerø is a place where kids learn how to manage a boat before they even walk or speak and I think there might be more boats than people here. Not only do them kids know to drive boats, some of them also develop extremely odd culinary skills at early age. To mention some examples; the four year old boy drinking a double cappuccino and asking for brown (not white) sugar on the side and another kid around the same age eating a salad and wanting olive oil and freshly molded pepper on top.
On my free days it is usually raining, and since that is predictable I make sure the nights before free days are long since I know the weatrher gives me all excuses in the world to sleep away my days off. I live in a little red wooden house with limited capacity of energy. We can not keep the coffee pan heated at the same time that we shower, not have the lights on when the laundry machine is working and never listen to music hen we cook, etc. I could go along for ages naming all the possible combinations of electricity involving activities we can not perform simultaneously. But we have the sea right outside our doorstep and we probably have around 15 flavors of tea compensating for minor electricity errors. Right at this moment a dog called jack is putting his head on my lap giving me the "please take me for a walk" look. bye bye.

motivation to perform

motivation to perform certain tasks can be as hard to find as needles in a pile of hay. woman, I don´t even know were to start looking, my head is filled with trivial matters and constantly keeps escaping from every thought related to this paper. there is one path of thoughts that my brain is willing to process, the agony part of it, the creeping feeling of obligation whose smell spreads like a nuclear cloud in my head. the smell is penetrating and permanent.

having experienced this process before does not offer any remedy, this feels like I probably felt when I had just departed from the womb of my mother, silently crying because of the unfamiliar environment and the bright light that my eyes are not willing to face. I desperately inject sugar and tee in a belief that they are beholders of a magic password that will alloud a flow of motivation into my brain and to make it co-operate. I wonder whether the end of thees words will indicate the beginning of the paper?

"If on a winters night a traveller"

"I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore and initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with its consequences: so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it: though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions and though I manage to achieve appreciable results in this erasure, enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief, I must, however bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes rain of new events which complicate the situation was than before and which I will then in their turn have to erase. Therefore I must calculate carefully every move so as to achieve the maximum erasure with the minimum of recomplication."

by Italo Calvino "If on a winters night a traveller"

Mullet is the place to be

Possible ways to estimate temperature

One method of temperature estimation is done by looking at the sky and observing the shades of its colours. By the tone of gray or blue that dominates the sky a trained eye will be able to approximately calculate how cold it is outside (persons with laponian origin are famous beholders of this skill). Another way, which only works in civilized conditions, is to watch cars and the amount of steam that rises from their engines (a large amount of steam indicates a low temperature). The same kind of steam watching technique can also be done by looking at people waiting for the bus (follow the same principle as with the cars). The third technique involves not only the visual part, but also the feeling. It requires snow, since it consists in feeling the texture of the snow and on basis of that estimate the temperature (liquid and formable snow indicates that we are near 0 degrees Celsius). Another way is to step out naked for 3 minutes, then go back inside and measure the time it takes for your skin to recover from the blue tone and for your body to stop shivering (a long recovery time from the blue tones and the shivering means that it is indeed very cold outside). A further way, dependent on technical equipment, is listening to a weather broadcast and trusting what Mrs/Miss/Mr meteorology says about the temperature in your hood (this one means you lay the estimation in the hands of professionals analysing information acquired from satellites). Then finally there is an uncommonly used method where one watches this apparatuses called thermometer where a number indicates what temperature it is (the thermometer will give you a different number depending on if it is exposed to sunlight or not) . Are there other ways estimate temperature? I am eager to know.

We run 30 miles a day to get you toothpicks and beer.

On the bus to Umtata we drove past Nelson Mandela’s home village and his highly fenced brick house. The driver pulled over and people started to shoot pictures, except for one people, my mother, who took a piss instead.

A little further along the road we saw the South African way of carwash. It's easy, no problem, you just need a car, a river and a bucket. You drive the car down in the river, you fill the bucket with water and that you pour over the car. Result= shining car, no problem. The concept of African time has been following us. African time means that thing will happen sooner or later, usually later. The moments of waiting that the African time offers, can be wisely used: by reading a book, cutting your nails or talking to another backpacker. There is more or less a scheme of how a conversation between two backpackers goes.

1. Where are you from? = "hopefully not from Sweden"
2. When did you arrive? = "I think I have been here longer"
4. Where have you been? ="did you go to the cool places"
5. What is your next destination? = "maybe we can share a cab/ I will definitely not go there"
6. Do you wanna go and take a swim=”I wanna be your friend"

Yesterday we were very glad about the African time because it had as consequence that we did catch our bus even though we were running late. Of cause running late is a perfect thing to blame on surrounding factors but never yourself, this time we blamed a plastic operated Emmanuelle from the Union Islands who wanted to eat breakfast and powder her nose even though she knew we were in a urgent hurry. But Emmanuelle could not be blamed for the fact that the bus company had a ticket booking system that was crap, a lousy ticket office and was the beholder of the gold medal "worst bus company in South Africa" competition. Another amusing plus with travelling Sa Road link was that the bus driver spoke for several times in the mike of the bus saying "this is your captain speaking, we are now travelling at a speed of 89km/ hour and we are at the moment passing Umtata". The bus ride with Sa Roadlink took us to East London, a spooky coastal town with gangsters in every corner, where we for one night killed time.

Bulungula

We decided to walk the remaining 4 kilometres since the road was tremendously bad and bumpy. The first thing that hit me during that walk was that the countryside smells the same everywhere, cowshit is cowshit wherever you are, both in Bulungula and Äijäla. Green hills, small huts and the scent of butternut and smiling people are some of the memories from that walk.

The Ecovillage of Bulungula was "found" by Dave during a two week hike along the Wild Coast in 2004. The moment he arrived to Bulungula he realized it was the place he wanted to create the Ecovillage he had dreat of starting. So he did. Today Bulungula is , by 40%, owned by the Xhosa community living the land between two rivers that forms the village. All employees are local, and they work in one week shifts so that the lodge is able to employ the double amount of people, besides them Bulungula has a charmy Lizl who takes vare of the confuesed visitors and lovely Penny who teaches english to the villagers. Paraffin showers, solar power, compost toilets, candle lights, psycadellic paintings and free cattle. At Bulungula everybody was on the beach, the cows, the donkeys, the crabs, the goats, the local kids and the dogs, no sun chairs, no ice-cream stands. All the huts were made of the cow shit that my mother was terribly afraid to step on but that she happily agreed to sleep in. The main house is a big house with a kitchen (the second hardest word on earth to spell), sofas and pillows and there was always a mix of hippies reading Tom Robbins novels, Xhosa men smoking pipes or playing cards, Xhosa women chatting, kids playing, and kittens discovering the world in the house. All trips in Bulungula were organized by the locals and they have their own companies and therefore get all profit from their business, which does not seem that common. We chose to do a riding trip along the hills with a lunch stop at the local restaurant; a place that totally changed our concept about what a restaurant can be: the menu had 2 choices of main course and the table was a little mattress on the hill with baby pigs and ducks running all around, the stowe thw kind chef lady used locked like a small version of the fireplaces homeless people in Philadelphia use to warm themselfes.

The second trip was organized by a young man with a torn overall. he took us on a canoe trip along a river with bright yellow birds and transparent fishes playing by the surface. In Bulungula the most memorable time was the time just being; listening to the click sounds of the Xhosa language, playing crocodile chasing games with the children and sitting by the fire with an undetermined look.

what dinasour is the strongest?

We go down to the river, into the river we come, oooh down to the river. I thought Huckleberry Finn and Mississippi river when we arrived at Peet Se Plek, a cottage by the river. No crocodiles in the river but many of them birds. A binocular later we had already seen: Cape Wag tail/ Sacred Ibis\ Hadida Ibis\ Heephoe.

In the farms that surrounded Peet Se Plek they grew nectarines, Sharon fruits and wine grapes that are picked up and taken care of by black and coloured farmers in the burning sun between 7 and 5 every weekday. The Afrikaans (Dutch heritage) farmers are the ones in charge and the only one I ran into was a kaki short, safari hat colonization looking man that was out for some "fresh air". The friends we made were the children of the farm workers. During the tree days we spent at the farm we went for little walks that ended up being hour long play sessions. I don’t know what to say, I feel I should not say anything and just keep the feeling of the memory in my head. I have some beautiful pictures of them but today I feel it is too much of a project.

At the moment I can hear my mother talking to Gunter, a suntanned German cyclist, and soon I will go to sleep in a 10 bunked bedroom.

south africa

Before this journey when I mentioned to some people that I was going to South Africa I was mostly met with positive reactions like; awesome, interesting, cool etc. This meanwhile my mother almost exclusively was met by big scepticism and heard warnings about the danger and extreme violence that was to expect in South Africa. I found it interesting how the reactions could be so entirely different. Was I the one talking to non realistic and naively positive individuals or where it the ones from her conversations that were just neurotic over worriers?
My mother took the wrong brochures from home. Instead of taking the informatics prints about Cape Town she took some papers from a Finnish health page:
-sweat protects your skin from infection
-The smell of peppermint opens up your nose
- counting sheep does not help you fall asleep
-a piercing threatens the tip of your ear
-Regular tea drinking strengthens your bones

Very useful facts...

Yesterday we hiked up the table mountain. It was very warm but we did it much faster than we had expected because an Indian lady had some kind of stereo playing Tony Braxton songs so we speeded all the time to not have to listen to that crap... It should be death penalty if you listen to Tony Braxton on a mountain.

A friend called Gus has been taking us around on a vespa and he has so far been the tour guide we did not expect to have. Today us and an old couple called Mrs. and Mr. Train (people often call them to ask when than train is leaving cause the look it all up wrong in the yellow pages) and their niece Ruth went to the Cape of Good Hope. After watching at the southern edge of the world with all the other beautiful tourists we went for a swim. I somehow managed to convince mom to do it too. It was cold, very cold, but finally even she started liking it and swam like a fish. Suddenly we see Mr Train and some other folks desperately waving us in... We thought there were big waves coming but no. once on shore they said they had seen the fin of a shark in the seaweed area close to where we were swimming. Then, just as we had not had enough already, a family of baboons come running to the parking lot and almost try to steal our bananas. The baboons were all over.

This is all for now. Smirnoff Vodka, is it Swedish or Russian?